If you want to beat the competition, you need to do some snooping around in order to find out what advantages their businesses have over yours. Armed with that intelligence, you can modify your business processes to meet their challenges and then surpass them.

Obviously, you’re not expected to hire a digital James Bond or engage in any cloak-and-dagger activities. Instead, infiltrate your competitors’ businesses with free and simple methods by means of open and publicly available data.

Identify your targets.

Before you can start your intelligence gathering, you need to identify who your biggest competitors are. Choose the businesses that are your direct competition and are in your market level. While trying to tackle the biggest fish in the pond might sound feasible, you should grow your business before you take them on.

Select the businesses that are direct threats to you and focus on them. Pick just a handful to start. Once you’ve learned about them and how they operate, you can invest in business practices that will help you surpass their revenue and reach.

So, once you’ve identified your targets, how do you begin sleuthing?

Investigate their backlinks.

You can use free tools to check the number and quality of backlinks your competitors use, which drive their online traffic. You can approach the very same sites with your own proposal to create content for them with the goal of driving more of that traffic your way.

Sign up or subscribe for their services.

Get firsthand information on what they sell and promote by signing up for their newsletters or subscribing to their social media channels. This is perhaps the easiest way you will get fresh information. Visit their websites often to garner any developing news or plans on their products or services. You can also create Google alerts to let you know whenever something is mentioned online about their brands or products.

Analyze this information and see if you can’t come up with a better offer or service.

Approach their clients.

There are many ways you can find out who your competitors’ clients are. For example, visit their testimonial page to find their happy customers or Google negative reviews to find unhappy customers. Contact them directly to ask what it was about the service or product that made them respond that way.

You can also target their social media followers and subscribers by using free tools like this one and contacting them directly.

Armed with first-person experiences about your competitions’ strong points and their shortcomings, you can tweak your own products or services to increase your clients’ satisfaction.

Reach out to suppliers.

This method will be a bit tricky and will depend on how good you are at being subtle. Approach your competitors’ suppliers and ask questions like, “How much product do you ship out? Who are some of your clients?” This might give you a list of your competitors and some of their product offerings. Compare their suppliers with your own. Are their supplies cheaper? Are they higher quality? Are the suppliers more renown? Consider switching to this supplier or finding another if you find your products don’t meet your competitors’ standards.

Buy their products and test them.

Another easy way to find the strengths of your competitors’ products is to buy them and try to break them. In case of digital products, you might even do some reverse engineering to find out how they work. Needless to say, you will need to watch out for copyright infringements.

Once you know how their products work, you can adopt their technology to enhance your own products or services.

Find out who they’re hiring.

A good way to find out if your competitors are looking to implement a new strategy or create a new product is to see what positions they have open. If they are looking for social media or SEO experts, you can rest assured they’re looking to strengthen their online marketing campaigns. Their looking to hire developers and designers could be an indication of a new product in the making.

Bring it all together.

Once you have all this data at your exposure, you’ll be able to draw a concise picture of how your competitors tick under hood. Exploit their best work – adopt their best practices and strengthen your offerings. If you find your product or marketing efforts outperform theirs, then you know you’re doing a good job. You can then investigate the work of a bigger or more prominent company.