Competitive intelligence is an element of your marketing strategy that you really shouldn’t skip. Here are some tools that can help you analyze competitors at scale, across different online channels.
Social Media Competitive Intelligence Tool
Find out what content works best for your competitors and when exactly it generates the highest engagement. Get competitive analytics for Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube – with an all-in-one social media tool.
What is a competitive intelligence tool?
In general, a competitive intelligence tool is usually a software platform that lets you track your competitors around the Internet, including:
- the content they post online, including on social media, blogs, websites, etc.
- the performance of that content, including engagement metrics and reach
- what people say about your competitors – from social media and forums to review sites
- what’s the sentiment of what people are saying
- what’s the share of voice in your industry
- their website traffic, ad performance, social media follower growth numbers, etc.
So, there’s quite a lot you can learn about your competitors from a competitive intelligence tool and a competitive analysis.
The trick is to find the right tool that covers the sources of data that you’re actually interested in and can use to inform your marketing strategy and resulting marketing initiatives.
Whichever you choose, though (and it might be more than one), it will probably help you save lots of time tracking competitors and collecting valuable insights while giving you access to data that might be harder to find, especially at scale.
How to use competitive intelligence tools to…
Identify industry trends
By tracking competitor content that they put out there on their blogs or social media channels, and by analyzing people’s reactions to it, you can identify popular topics to talk about on your blog or social media.
This is key for your content strategy and overall marketing strategy, as both should consider your competitive environment and how you’re positioned within it. And it’s not just helpful for your engagement rates, but also for your search rankings and overall brand visibility.
Compare performance and look for gaps and opportunities
Some competitive intelligence tools will let you see how your competitors’ content performs, including showing you engagement metrics and reach. This makes it easier to prioritize content topics, formats, and new trends that already work for similar audiences and that you can tap into (without reinventing the wheel).
You can also analyze the performance of online advertising campaigns, websites, and even emails to create realistic benchmarks and keep looking for ways to improve your results.
Optimize your marketing strategy
Competitive analysis is one of the key elements of a marketing strategy. By continuously tracking what your competitors are doing, you can keep adjusting your marketing strategies and tactics to better respond to what the market needs.
And it doesn’t mean following your competitors to a T and copying their strategies. What it helps you do is build a data-driven strategy that has many reference points, helps you keep a comprehensive view of your market and industry, and is always relevant as market conditions and expectations change. (And these change constantly.)
Understand your audience better
By analyzing your competitors’ audience, including their demographics and social media behavior, you can create targeted marketing campaigns and reach new people more effectively.
Many competitive intelligence tools will give you in-depth insights into both your audience and the audiences of your competitors, so you can devise more effective strategies to win more customers over and increase your market share.
Respond to threats and opportunities
When you track the online conversations happening around the Internet, you can join them and expose your brand to a new audience that’s already interested in your product or service category.
This also lets you monitor and understand what your competitors’ customers (who are also your potential customers) say and what they complain about. And, maybe most importantly, how you can tap into that in your marketing communications.
For example, you could talk about how your product/service resolves common problems that your competitors’ customers bring up.
Top 10 competitive intelligence tools
Here are some examples of helpful competitive intelligence tools that help you track your competition in different corners of the Internet.
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is a suite of social media management tools that combines two major sides of the social media coin:
- It lets you manage your own social media profiles on different platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook,
- And also follow and track any public social media profile of a competitor on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
So, in one tool, you get a Social Inbox with auto-moderation capabilities and a publishing tool for your social media channels, plus you can follow other accounts and analyze them against your content’s and profiles’ performance.
And here’s what you can do with NapoleonCat’s competitive intelligence tool:
- Track all the important performance metrics like engagement rates, reach, hashtags, follower growth and demographics, best times to post, and much more
- Compare many social media pages side by side, including comparing yours to your competitors’
- Automatically generate customizable social media analytics reports in branded PDF files, with all the data comparisons neatly laid out (see screenshot below for an example.)
- Schedule weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports that will be automatically sent out to whoever needs them, like your CMO or your agency client.
- Compare audience insights and post engagement to back your next marketing move with solid data.
With NapoleonCat, you also get a Social CRM tool in the platform to build your customer profiles and understand your audience even better, making your customer service team’s lives much easier.
All that’s included in one subscription that’s based on the number of users and the number of social media profiles you want to monitor and/or manage. You can check out the pricing details on NapoleonCat’s website and take the platform for a free 14-day spin.
Social Media Competitive Intelligence Tool
Track your competitors on social media. Compare multiple accounts side by side and generate in-depth reports within seconds – with an all-in-one social media tool.
Similarweb
Similarweb lets you analyze any website or app in the following areas:
- Competitor audiences, including behavioral data
- Industry leaders
- Traffic share and traffic numbers
- PPC campaigns
- Affiliates
- And much more
So it gives you a pretty comprehensive look at how your competitors are performing online and how you stack up against them.
The pricing depends on the number of users and website and keyword results per month, and you can find out more on their website.
Semrush
Semrush includes a number of different marketing tools, including competitive analysis tools to let you analyze and compare:
- traffic data, including website audience insights
- organic search results
- paid search results
- social media performance
Semrush’s suite of tools also offers competitor PR monitoring tools and SEO analysis tools for a more complete picture. It has several pricing tiers with many features paid extra as add-ons that you can check out on their website.
G2.com
You might know G2 mostly as a review site. But did you know that it’s also a great source of competitor intelligence, market intelligence, and insights into the competitive landscape in your industry?
Well, now you do.
Apart from being able to browse customer reviews, which are a valuable source of voice of customer data that you can use in your messaging, G2 also ranks your competitors in individual market categories, provides a competitive matrix, market shares, and software comparison for customers.
So, for example, here’s a G2 Grid for competitive intelligence software:
You can check out most of the features on their website for free, with or without creating an account.
Owletter
Owletter is a nifty little tool for analyzing your competitors’ email marketing campaigns. It captures, stores, and analyzes your competitors’ emails, letting you look into their:
- sender reputation
- send frequency
- send times
- seasonal trends
- and more
It definitely helps free marketers’ inboxes from competitors’ emails that keep getting piled up and eventually lost in them and analyze the emails in a more structured way.
There are three simple and affordable pricing plans depending on the number of websites that you want to monitor emails from.
Visualping
Visualping detects changes on your competitors’ websites and notifies you about them. It allows you to monitor entire websites or just selected elements of a website. So you can keep your finger on the pulse and know when a competitor’s value proposition changes, when they’re testing a new headline, or have added a new product.
The tool has both a business and a personal plan and is a smart way to monitor changes in your competitors’ messaging and communications in real time without having to visit their websites yourself.
Adclarity
Adclarity is an enterprise-grade competitive ad intelligence tool letting businesses benchmark competitor marketing activities in display, video, social, mobile apps and ecommerce websites.
It will analyze and interpret your competitors’:
- ad expenditure estimates
- programmatic buying insights
- campaign landing pages
- ad platforms used
- and, of course, online ads – from video to social media to in-app ads and display advertising
For pricing information, you need to schedule a demo on their website.
Kompyte
Kompyte is Semrush’s competitive intelligence automation software. It tracks your competitors’ updates across multiple sources, including websites, reviews, content, social media, ads, and job postings.
Then it uses AI to identify actionable competitive insights and recommendations designed to help you close more deals.
There’s even an ROI calculator on their website to give you an idea of how helpful the tool can actually be for your sales teams. The pricing’s not available on their website, though, so you need to contact them directly.
Contify
Contify is a comprehensive market and competitive analysis tool analyzing the internet and your competitors’ online presence against things like:
- Business and financial performance
- New products and services released
- GTM initiatives
- Leadership quotes and LinkedIn posts
- Thought leadership content including blogs and case studies
- Job postings analysis
- And more.
It also lets you look into market trends, monitor regulatory changes, and a whole lot more. You can test it for free on their website.
Reputation
Reputation is an online reputation management tool that includes competitive intelligence, particularly regarding online ratings and reviews.
It lets you analyze and compare reviews for many brands side-by-side, collect insights, generate reports, and carry out an AI-powered SWOT analysis based on review sentiments.
All that is tied to the main offer of the tool which is protecting brand reputation across the Internet.
Things to consider when choosing a competitive intelligence tool
When looking for competitive analysis software, take a closer look at:
- The channels it covers. Do you need to focus on social media specifically, or are you mostly interested in analyzing paid ad campaigns, or maybe content marketing initiatives?
- The pricing, obviously. The competitive intelligence tool landscape has both super comprehensive (and expensive), enterprise-grade tools and simple and affordable ones focused on, for example, one channel, with some mid-sized ones in between. (And your business will benefit from competitive intelligence regardless of its size.)
- The number of users. This is true for any SaaS software – so make sure that what the tool offers makes sense for your team setup and size.
Hope this helps!
Social Media Competitive Intelligence Tool
Find out what content works best for your competitors and when exactly it generates the highest engagement. Get competitive analytics for Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube – with an all-in-one social media tool.
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