Unless you’re a marketing wonk, the word “research” might as well be “homework.” But for small business owners, there may be no work more important than your preliminary research on your competitors. Knowing your competitors means learning all about your customers, all about the marketplace, and all about the steps you need to take to go from fledgling enterprise to booming business.

Okay, fine, I admit it: I’m asking you to do your homework. But we’re not in school anymore, either. There are plenty of tools and time-saving tactics you can employ in order to get a lay of your market landscape, discerning whether or not this idea of your really has a chance of standing on its own two feet.

Step #1: Identifying Your Competitors

Napoleon Bonaparte was famous for knowing the lay of the land inside out, even to the point of studying maps late into the night while campaigning.

The bad news: you don’t have any maps, literally or figuratively speaking. You’re going to have to make them yourself.

The good news: it’s not as hard to do as you might think. (And, unlike Napoleon, you won’t have to worry about cannon fire).

This is business, after all, not warfare. Your task is simple: identifying the lay of the land. That begins by finding the companies that will most directly compete with your enterprise. If someone else is gunning for the same customers as you, you need to know about it as soon as you can.

In Entrepreneur’s recommendations for competitive analysis, they want you to find answers to simple questions: who your competitors are, what they sell, what share of the market they hold, and what type of media they use to reach their customers.

If you have trouble identifying your competitors, try to find your customers first, and then figure out which companies are marketing to them.

Put yourself in the mind of a customer and do what they would do if they were looking for a product or service like yours: search the Internet, check the local listings, poke around on social media. Now when you notice companies advertising when you run these searches, you’ll start to notice which ones are working the hardest for your attention.

You’ve found your competitors.

Step #2: Employ Legitimate Researching Tools to Hone in On Your Competitors’ Strategies

There are plenty of ways to find out what your competitors are doing without hacking them or resorting to “black hat” tactics that get you in trouble with the search engines.

Now that you know who your competitors are, it’s time to narrow your focus. What are they doing to reach the customers you’re after, and how might you be able to do it better? Here are a few tools to help you understand your competition’s moves:

• Use Google’s Keyword Tool to identify the most relevant keywords in your niche. This gives you a sense of not only who might be your competitor, but whether or not the market has legs. Don’t forget to run some basic Google searches yourself just to get the lay of the land—you’ll be able to spot whether or not other competitors view your targeted keywords as worth their paid promotions.

• Key in on competitor strategies with SpyFu. SpyFu may sound nefarious, but it’s actually a legitimate and handy way to see what your competitors are up to in their advertising efforts. In short, it’s a way to see what your competitors find most impactful in terms of organic rankings and sponsored keywords.

• Employ Follow.net to pick up more basic statistics on your competitors. You know that old saying “knowledge is power”? In this case, it really is. The more you learn about what your competitors have done to find their way in the world, the more you’ll know which steps you can take to get your company noticed as well.

These three tools alone will show you where your competition thinks the customers are — and there’s a darn good chance that they’re right. Follow the bread crumbs and you’ll get closer to your customers.

Step #3: Find Your Niche

The art of competition isn’t always doing the same thing better. Sometimes, it’s finding a new twist on an old concept and doing it first.

Entrepreneurs have a word for this: your niche. What is it that your company offers customers that none of the other companies in your research thus far have been able to accomplish? How can you move the industry forward, even by just one miniscule step?

If your market is sufficiently large, you should be able to narrow down your niche and still find leads and customers.

What if you’re in a very competitive market and there are no fresh niches in sight? There are always ways to narrow your focus. Neil Patel of QuickSprout explains his strategy for identifying “niche” keywords for which his websites can rank: sometimes, you need to think “sideways.” What two niches can you combine in order to give your customers something unique?

In Neil Patel’s example, you might combine plumbing and home décor to come up with a unique selling prospect: offering your services as a way to add resale value to a home. That’s a fresh way to look at plumbing upgrades while still keeping true to your core business.

In short, you have to take the time to be unique. When you’ve done all of your homework on the competition, you should know them inside and out—the products they offer, the markets they’re after, the way their website works. And when you know your competition, you know what they don’t do.

If you can manage it, find a way to offer something that is unique to your market, whether it’s…

• Building a unique marketing campaign by combining your service with “lateral” niches
• Filling a need that your competitors aren’t yet addressing
• Making your core service simpler and easier to use than your competitors

Conclusion

At the most basic level, researching your competition is finding out what they do well and finding out what they don’t do so well. You want to best them when it comes to finding your customers and completely outshine them when it comes to meeting those customers’ needs.

True, competitor research can feel a heck of a lot like homework. But if you do it right, the rewards will far outweigh the effort.