What this often means is taking notice of any posters they put up, any postcards they send out, or any flyers you see circulating around. The reason for this is because you have to be sure of what they're doing if you want to try doing it better.
The company who ignores the competition is the company who has the rug swept out from under them when they aren't paying attention. If the other company hits on a particularly successful marketing theme you need to be sure that you're ready to figure out why it was successful and what you can do to offset it so you don't fall behind them.
Now, I think many companies are aware of this for general marketing, but when it comes to less obvious elements of marketing they begin to forget. This is where catalogs come in.
Each time you print catalogs you're engaging in marketing just as much as if you were to print off some postcards. Catalogs are both a means of selling your products and a means of marketing them.
This is why you need to look at what your competition is doing with their catalogs as well. The nice thing about this is that you can quite literally start up a subscription to their catalogs in order to get them free in the mail. Each time they print catalogs they will be sending them right to you so you can see what they're up to and how good their catalogs are.
Things to look for are any changes in their catalogs. Many companies keep using similar designs year after year in their catalogs, which will typically work relatively well to keep their customers happy enough. If this is what your competition is doing than figure out if you might be able to grab more attention by adding a lot more variety to your catalogs.
If you see a unique change in the catalogs that the other companies are doing than maybe you need to look at your own catalogs to see what changes you could make as well.
Of course, to know just how successful their marketing is you'll also need to try to pay attention to their sales as best as you can. After all, they might vary up their catalog only to then see their sales drop rather than rise. You don't want to do something similar and then suffer the same results because you weren't paying close enough attention.
Marketing is almost always about staying ahead of all the others. You have a lot of stiff competition out there to keep your eye on. Might as well let them help you out by getting them to mail their marketing right to your door.
