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       Demographics: Obviously, you want to know whether your customer is male or female, where she lives, what her estimated income is, and so on.

       Photo and name: If you give your persona a name and choose a stock photo (or real customer photo), you bring life to it. When someone asks, “What would Alice want?” it makes a greater impact than visualizing a faceless and nameless customer.

       Online places where your customer hangs out: This is important for your SMM efforts. Does he spend time on Facebook or a niche sports site?

       Online places where he looks for product information: You need to know where he reads product reviews and what online bloggers influence him.

       Job level: Is your customer a supervisor with staff to whom she can delegate? It’s helpful to know the amount of responsibility she has at work.

       Children and pets: Clearly, childcare responsibility, family pets, and other home care chores play a factor in his product choices.

       Hobbies and interests: Learning about hobbies and special interests helps you speak to the customer’s desire for specific products.

       Keywords being used by competitors.This is something you have probably heard again and again, but its importance can’t be overemphasized. If you don’t use the right keywords, you won’t be found. Make sure to note which ones your competitors are using. They may not all be “home runs” for you, but evaluating them is important.

       Where their traffic is coming from.Using a host of tools (detailed in the three sections that follow: “Setting up Google Alerts,” “Setting up Twitter alerts,” and “Monitoring social networks”), you can learn more about the traffic to their website and other channels. It’s worth noting that the strongest brands get significant traffic from social referrals (people coming in via Facebook and Twitter) along with the search engines.

       Rankings by important engines.You can do a quick look at major ranking engines such as Alexa (www.alexa.com) to see how their sites compare with yours. For very large competitors, sites like Quantcast (www.quantcast.com) can help you determine how many people are visiting your competitors’ websites and whether they are visiting the desktop or mobile versions. Another important tool to look at is Google webmaster tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools), which lets you see the approximate traffic of a website and the profiles of the people visiting, including the other sites they visit and their various interests.

       Which social media platforms they are on and which distribution channels they use.As we discuss earlier, if you don’t know where your customers spend their time, you won’t be able to market to them where they are most comfortable. You can’t count on their going to your website. Most businesses are now using several channels besides their websites (such as a blog, Twitter, and so on), so be aware of their choices and see what could work for you. And as you look at this data, keep in mind that you may not have the resources to have strong social presences in all the places that your customers are — you’ll have to make strategic choices on where to spend your time and money.

       Who they partner with.This is an often-overlooked source of competitive information. Businesses find synergy and partner with those who have similar audiences. Whom they partner with tells you a lot about how they view their audience. Those partnerships could also include where they advertise, people or organizations with whom they have comarketing agreements, and partners who serve as referral engines for them.

       Loyalty and other programs they employ.Find out what programs are keeping their customers loyal to them, and see how you can tap into the same vein with your own unique program. A recent trend is the creation of Social Loyalty programs, which reward consumers for social actions that they take on behalf of brands. This is something worth paying attention to as well.

       Their online customer service efforts.This one can be a secret weapon for you. If you see that your competitors aren’t offering support through social media channels, you can distinguish your company with a solid effort here. According to Bain & Company, a customer is four times more likely to buy from a competitor if the problem is service related versus price or product related.

       What they do offline to connect with customers.Check out whether your competitors have special training programs or other educational sessions available locally. This might be a way they are increasing their customer base consistently.