Texas grocer H-E-B had a brilliant idea back in the 1990s. The company was looking to appeal to selective, high-income shoppers—the kind of people who weren’t biting at the hook of their super-low-cost stores.

They decided to open “a high-end grocery store that would feature hard-to-find ingredients and untold new varieties of wine and cheese,” according to the Austin-American Statesman. They named it Central Market.

This new sub-brand wasn’t just a success; it was a revolution. Central Market’s refined shopping ambience, locally grown fare, and gourmand’s share of international foods became a must-see. It was practically a tourist destination for anyone curious about its elegant selection, which boasted rare finds like twenty different varieties of mushrooms.

Other businesses took notice of Central Market’s immense success; in fact, they admired its innovations and flock of customers so much that they decided to imitate it. One of these companies was Whole Foods.

At the time, Whole Foods was already a successful purveyor of natural health products. But Central Market’s stylish atmosphere and deluxe offerings, like an on-site sushi chef, were too good and too successful not to use. And, as it turned out, polishing the Whole Foods brand with upscale features perfectly suited its healthconscious customers, who were willing to pay top dollar for quality groceries. Eventually, both Central Market and Whole Foods offered a comparable experience and a similar commitment: delivering the pinnacle of food shopping.

But now, almost thirty years later, the gap between these two brands is jaw-dropping. While Central Market has just ten locations in one state, Whole Foods has over five hundred locations across the country and was purchased by Amazon in 2017 for a record-breaking $13.7 billion. Stealing a popular strategy paid off for Whole Foods— and it’s continuing to pay off for Amazon.

Consider this a successful use of competitive intelligence, the act of using business competitors as the ultimate source of inspiration and strategy. This concept isn’t just relevant to grocers either. Your closest adversary could also be a gold mine of customer data, a key source of industry forecasting, and a major tool at your disposal.

Keep an eye on your rivals

Slip on your best suit and invisible earpiece, because it’s time to start sleuthing. Take a close look at companies that offer similar products and services as yours—the kinds of companies that may even be stealing your customers right from under you. Don’t worry: you don’t have to do any mainframe hacking or switch out any briefcases. There is enough public information out there for you to sift through by legal and ethical means. Review their ideas, then bring them home and implement them to perfect your business. In other words, which competitor seems to always be doing something right? (You know the one.) How can you borrow their methods, retool them, and make them your own, just like Whole Foods did? One of the most effective ways to keep tabs on rival organizations is to learn how they market themselves and earn new clients. These are six effective means to uncover how your competitors drive attention to their businesses.

Sift through Meta Ad Library

Meta Ad Library is a free resource through which you can actually inspect the ads your competitors use. It may shock you how much information you can easily and legally access about your competitors in this data center. Check it often to identify your rivals’ active and former Facebook posts, learn when they were published, and evaluate different versions of each ad. This source can answer a whole host of questions about a company: How did it promote itself throughout the year? Did it polish up the copy or images or replace ads that weren’t generating leads? What lead forms is it using to compile visitor data? Yes, this information is completely safe and legal to view. And, no, your competitor will never know that you inspected this ad data.

Spy on their social media

Meta Ad Library won’t show you comments, likes, or other analytics, but there’s a simple way to access similar information: type your competitors’ names into every social media platform you can think of and check out their presence. Look at how many followers they have, how often they post, and what kinds of videos, photos, or clickbait links to their website get the most views. This would certainly require some legwork, but you’ll gain a great deal of valuable information about their audience as a result.

Get retargeted

You can also get intentionally retargeted to a competitor’s ads on social media. This requires following links to its website, typing its name into a web browser, reading items of value like blogs, and following backlinks to see which other sites are guiding traffic to your business adversary. Eventually, the site’s algorithm will detect your interest in their business and show you relevant ads on your feeds organically. Then you can evaluate the social media engagement with these ads and take note of consumer feedback.

Search them on the web

If you don’t know who your competitors are, enter your industry and location into a web browser (“roofers in Chicago,” for example) and see who else comes up. Note the names that appear toward the top of the search results page; these are the businesses with the most successful digital marketing. Google identifies sites with strong customer interaction, rich items of value like blogs and downloadable whitepaper guides, and connections to other sites via tools like backlinks. So if Google is pushing someone to the top of the browser, then this is someone you need to know about— and imitate.

Skim their data on Similarweb Similarweb is a competitive research tool that can help you analyze competitors’ web traffic, bounce rate, average pages per visit, and other data—and it’s 100 percent free. Type a company’s name into this service on a regular basis, and check out the global or industry category rankings to see who’s getting top billing in your business. This info is especially relevant if you represent a large corporation and are inspecting a rival industry titan.

Here’s the ultimate gift that Similarweb offers you: audience data. This information reveals who a competitor is marketing to and who is expressing interest in its products and services. You can even assess trends like audience social traffic so you can trace its activity on other platforms. This is integral data you need to learn about your target audience and use to steal its attention away from anyone else.

Learn from your rivals

Remember that good competitive marketing intelligence doesn’t end when you gather data. You also have to analyze it and take action. When you see ads and social media activity by competitors, grade them on how well they brand themselves to their audience and determine what you could do differently to improve their marketing strategies. For instance, evaluate which segments of the public they are failing to access. If your greatest rival seems to earn traffic only from an older audience, consider filling the gap it’s leaving wide open by marketing to younger crowds in a contemporary voice. Taking this initiative can help you generate more leads.

Conversely, think of how your adversary is succeeding. Take from its example, and copy successful posts like demonstration videos to help potential customers see your products in action. In this way, watching your competitors can ultimately help you capture customers from under their noses.

Go undercover

Besides analyzing its marketing and data, you can also learn exactly how a competitor courts its consumers by becoming one of them.

Fill out a form on its site or social media page, then track its followup methods, whether it’s an email newsletter or phone call. Your team could learn from the competition’s strategies to hook and reel in their own leads. You can also test out your acting chops by calling a business rival to ask about its services directly and see how it treats potential clients. How personable is the staff? How can you instruct your sales or reception staff to do better?

If you really want to take a risk, check out a company in person. Think about what you could learn about your greatest competitors through these strategies:

• Sign up to participate in a focus group about a new/upcoming product.
• Participate in a free trial.
• Attend an open house.
• Observe its booth at a trade show.
• Speak with a team member on its sales floor.
• Engage in a casual chat with its customers to get their opinions and learn about their lifestyles.

Take what you’ve learned back to your home base. Once you identify the strengths in its brand strategy, think of ways to improve your own operations. Right now could be the best time to introduce a new product or service—either to catch up with your rivals to fulfill a consumer need that they aren’t meeting.

Competitive intelligence is also one of your best safeguards against failure, as monitoring businesses can also show you what not to do. If you overhear or read complaints from consumers, work this feedback into your own strategy.

Learn from the best

History is littered with examples of companies taking from the best and profiting from it. Take, for example, when Instagram premiered its “stories” feature. This was a concept it had directly lifted from its competitor, Snapchat. Such a move might seem brutal, but it resulted in 250 million new users flocking to Instagram and caused Snapchat to lose significant stock value.

Just remember, though, that there’s a difference between imitation and downright theft. The distinction lies in how you tweak your rival’s ideas to fit your own brand. It’s a fine line, but leaders who are capable of navigating it can make it profitable. Outright duplicating a patented product or a slogan, for instance, will probably get you in trouble—but developing new products and services that are more effective can attract discerning consumers and ultimately spell success for your organization.