Keeping regular updates on completion and competitor strategies is the key to business success. Failing to do so may doom the future of a business, especially small businesses. Here are some tips for knowing your competition and analyzing your competitors.

• For knowing your competitors there are many choices; local phone books, yellow pages, web directories, press media, business info centers, agencies, and your customers.
• You can use many different ways to analyze and evaluate your competitor, by checking their company/office, by being their customer, through their customers, through business information centers, from their ads, from yellow pages, and more.
• Things to be carefully analyzed include their product quality, pricing, marketing strategies, advertising methods, marketing budget, company size and number of employees, financial stability and customer service.
• Compare their websites, and sales, marketing and customer service strategies with yours.
• It is always a good tactics to keep the data you collected for future your, update your data regularly and do comparison of new data with historical one to evaluate their competitive strength.
• It is also a good practice to short-list your top competitors and chase them out.