Category: Competitive Research

The Ultimate Guide to Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence refers to the monitoring, gathering, and analyzing of information related to your competitors, marketplace, and industry. Data alone is never enough, and such intelligence enables strategic decision-making while taking into account competitors’ activities.

Without timely and adequate insights, you will be losing the competitive advantage of your database. According to the Crayon 2018 State of Market Intelligence Report, 77% of businesses reported that intelligence is crucial to every business function in order to gain a competitive advantage over rivals.

Besides, competitive intelligence significantly relies on the digital footprint of businesses. Ranging from huge multinational corporations to small and medium-sized enterprises, every business in today’s era needs competitive intelligence to analyze the competitive market and identify market gaps.

Competitive intelligence not only helps raise the effectiveness of your marketing strategies but also saves costs as your strategies become more targeted. It is a more in-depth form of competitor analysis, and it enables actionable insights to improve your existing marketing tactics. Needless to say, information is turned into intelligence when information is analyzed to derive insights that help drive decisions and actions.

Moreover, competitive intelligence not only deals with industry factors like – technologies, distributors, customers, and competitors but also macroeconomic factors such as – unemployment, economic growth, and inflation. It involves the following steps: Planning, Collecting, Processing, Analyzing, and Intelligence Sharing. The last bit, ‘intelligence sharing’, means that you need to share whatever inferences you pull from your research with the entirety of your organization for informed and integrated decision-making.

Benefits of Competitive Intelligence

Today’s world is no doubt filled with heaps of data. A systematic competitive intelligence program must be in place to handle this information overload effectively. Let’s take a look into how competitive intelligence helps your organization:

• Identify new market segments
• Foresee rival attacks
• Predict technological advances
• Improve customer interactions
• Create a distinct brand identity

Therefore, competitive intelligence lets you be on top of trends by scrutinizing every competitors’ digital actions and share of voice. It involves extensive and intensive mining of insights from different sources, including websites, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, blogs, forums, reviews, and so on.

Furthermore, competitive intelligence helps us set benchmarks and standards against which we can compare our current marketing strategies. While conventional market research is mostly focused on consumers, competitive intelligence focuses more on industry and competitor actions. This particularly helps because you are not the only one operating in the market. Your competitors have done their share of research, and hence, your next move must take into account your rivals’ moves.

But needless to say, competitive intelligence and competitor benchmarking are not the same as industrial espionage. Rather, it’s an ethical approach to making the most of the data already available to the public. Websites, blog posts, social media channels, and so on are the key sources of digital competitive intelligence.

But you need to know how to use it.

Steps to Competitive Intelligence

Unless you are operating in a cave, you know data is important. Everyone does. But the real question lies in how you can utilize and make the most out of data that is already widely available. Here are a few steps:

Identify your competitors

While we bet you already know who and how many rivals you have, you need to check regularly. Are there new entrants? Did any already leave? Is there one you missed? Consequently, understand the distinction between direct and indirect competition. Considering you are an online book store, is it alright to consider Amazon your competition? Side by side, some days, you have to consider competition from a different industry just because you are fighting for the same keywords in search engine rankings.

Set your standards

You must establish first hand which channels and performance metrics matter to you first. Keep your list simple, initially. Make it easier to track and monitor. Depending on your industry, establish which channels matter to you most and progress accordingly. Some metrics you may want to look into include:

• Website Traffic
• Social Media Engagement
• Keyword Rankings
• Conversion Rate

Sort and visualize your data

Categorize all the collected information and organize them in charts, graphs, and figures. You can’t see until you actually see it. Visualization of data will help you pull inferences more easily. Prepare dashboards to aid your decision-making like never before.

Share findings with the team

All this data wrangling will go in vain if they do not leave your desk. An integrated understanding of rivals will help you benchmark all your business functions against those of competitors. It will aid not only your present plans but also those of past and future. Insights derived from competitive intelligence will help fuel sales pitches, marketing copies, and product development.

Monitor and evaluate

Now that the ground is ready, time to take off for real action. Monitor how your derived insights and inferences are incorporated into your marketing strategies. You must understand whether and how your competitive intelligence is affecting your sales performance. Collect feedback and identify solutions to be implemented.

Figure out whether all the efforts actually worked? If not, why not?

Too many steps to follow, right? No real-time update means by the time you reach the end, the market has already evolved 360 degrees. The collection and organization of data, though important, take up a lot of time and effort when done manually. The accuracy of your competitive intelligence is also affected if you are not using the right kind of competitor software tools.

Then, where is the magic wand? How can you spend more time analyzing data while ensuring that the data sources and data themselves are relevant, accurate, and up to date?

Some Competitor Software Tools

There are widely available SaaS competitor benchmarking tools available online. That makes not only competitive intelligence accessible but also affordable. Some of them are as follow:

Similar Web

Similar Web is a great tool for website analysis and data mining. It enables you with a very detailed and comprehensive overview of any website, including those of your competitors. It provides data on a website's:

• Estimated monthly visitors
• Average time visitors spend
• Bounce rate
• Average page views per visitor
• Top referring websites
• Percentage of traffic from different social networks
• Display ads banners
• Organic search keywords
• Paid search keywords
• Audience interests
• Other websites visitors view

All you have to do is install its Chrome Extension and click on it every time you visit a website. However, its free version provides very limited data, meaning you only get five results for each website metric that you’re analyzing. Subsequently, its premium plan's pricing is modular and will vary widely according to your unique needs and usages.

SpyFu

This tool helps you identify your competitors’ most profitable keywords. Plus, it provides you with both the paid and organic search keywords competitors are targeting. Handily, it is a great tool to identify keywords you might have previously missed out on.

Point: SpyFu offers a free version of its service, which you can check out if you’re dipping your toes initially. Moreover, the Basic plan charges $39/month while the Professional plan costs $78 /month. Consequently, the Agency plan costs $299/month.

Buzzsumo

It enables you to discover the top-performing and trending contents relevant to your brand and industry. It helps you identify potentially hot and trending topics on the web and social media to explore yourself.

If you are looking for your competitors' most popular content, Buzzsumo provides you with exactly that. Its paid packages may widely vary in prices ranging from $99/month to $499+/month.

MailCharts

MailCharts gathers emails from competing campaigns enabling you with subject lines, timing, frequency, length, and so on of your competitors to fine-tune yours. Additionally, it helps you draw inspiration pulling from some of the biggest campaigns out there. It educates you on how top-performing emails look like.

MailCharts has a free version to search for content by keyword or entering a competitor’s URL. It entails more data and tools with its paid version at $99+/month.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s social media competitor analysis tool gathers competitors’ data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Besides, it allows you to compare key performance metrics and discover which kind of content trends and converts most.📷

Moreover, this tool offers competitor reports that list fundamental metrics like audience growth, engagement, and post volume for each social medium. It enables real-time and multi-channel tracking of engagement, influencer, and post schedules.

The good news is it has a 14-day free trial version, and its pricing ranges widely from $99/month to $249/month across various packages.

Competitors App

All the above tools are good ways to unravel your competitors' moves. They have amazing features each to tackle a specific category of your competitors’ activities.

But what's great?

A tool that encompasses all the features within one software – in other words, Competitors App.

Competitors App is an extraordinary competitor benchmarking tool that gathers competitive intelligence from multiple sources under one station. It helps you analyze the website, SEO, online ads, social media, emails, and newsletters of competitors under one package. Over the past 3 years, Competitors App has monitored around 13497 competitors for its clients worldwide. There are two plans that you can choose from:📷

• Flexible: Priced at $9.90 per month for each competitor, this plan is more suited for small and medium businesses with a few domains and a couple of competitors.
• Agency: Priced at $14.90 per month for each competitor, this package is more relevant for agencies with multiple users.

Great news: A 15-day free trial option is also available for the ease of users!

How To Use Competitors’ App

You can always schedule a demo in case you want to get first-hand training on how to optimize your use of the tool. After you are signed up and enrolled, the first step is to add competitors you want to learn more about. But beware of choosing competitors that you are ready to take a hit on. This provides you with a very user-friendly interface.

Firstly, the timeline panel allows you to get a snapshot of your competitors' most critical promotional items. Your timeline lets you have some final insights on the rivals’ actions on different channels based on your needs. Its advanced filter and checklist mechanism helps you select your competitors, data type, and time.

Plus, you can mark the most important items received on your timeline. You'll be saving the items as more accessible by pressing star. If you want to see specific data gathered or saved during a certain period, then you can use the calendar for this.

Secondly, the dashboard panel enables you with a well-curated board consisting of self-explanatory, real-time graphs and charts. These charts will reflect social activity posts, social activity engagement, most popular posts, and Google rankings summary, follower count, and follower growth of your competitors.

The visualizations are updated in real-time and prepared automatically. All these mean now you have only one task left- analysis! The app is like a virtual assistant that automatically prepares competitor reports, which you can also export as PDF anytime you want.

Finally, the keywords panel will help you to track and monitor the keyword performance of your rivals. Comprehensive analysis of keywords means you are in a better position for SEO.

Additional Competitive Features

Slack in a Snap

The app's monitoring tool gets you notified each time when a competitor makes a move in your preferred Slack channel. All you have to do is enable Slack notifications – you can then access updates easier and faster.

Scale the ratings

Going through your competitors’ reviews can give a full-fledged awareness of competitors' online reputation and brand image and consumer perception in the market.

Adapt to your needs

The app offers full white-label features available only for Agency Plan, with a custom domain and client login. Meaning? You can now access your clients to see their own dashboards and reports on your very own custom domain with reports personalized according to your brand.

What More Does Competitors App Offer?

The app keeps you informed based on the set alert frequency. It thus helps you with the following updates on your competitors.

Fast Access to Trial Emails and Newsletters

While account emails involve engagement with direct users through alerts on accounts and account-related activities, newsletters help you engage with prospects through information on companies’ news, deals, and special offers. You can send emails to retarget inactive users, celebrate user achievements, provide personalized recommendations, and so on.

The best part of the app is that it lets you be the first to know about your competitor's new actions, bonuses, and updates – even before their own subscribers and customers. Consequently, it helps you analyze the arrival time and frequency, email subject line, email body, promotional material design, and Call To Actions (CTAs) of your rivals through the app.

You can also identify key customer triggers and touchpoints. Add to that – analyzing your competition newsletters will give you insights into their creative style, tone, so you’ll know better what your gaps are and what you could improve on. The app will also enable you to see things from the perspective of a customer within your industry.

Understand What’s Trending on Blogs and Social Media

The app also helps you analyze the most popular social media channels, posting frequency, and engagement rate of your rivals can be a useful tool to discover uncharted and unprecedented opportunities.

Subsequently, your competitors’ online mentions, backlinks, and content marketing strategies can be wonderful factors to analyze while identifying your rival brands’ personalities. Throughout competitor benchmarking, some things to keep in mind are:

• Do not try to follow and be on every social networking site – reign one network at a time.
• Identify how your competitors position themselves and design your distinct brand identity to be communicated in elevator pitches. Remember: You need to be unlike your rivals to be liked by your target audience.
• Keep tabs on when your competitors receive negative comments and see how they react to the brand image crisis. Learn from their strengths and weaknesses.
• Take notes on online mentions and trending industry topics. There is a lot of takeaway on your way to market share takeaway.
• Get inspiration and insights from the sentiment, voice, query management, sponsorship, affiliations, and reach of your rivals’ social media and blog strategies.

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Easy Review of Online Ads and Keywords

Picking the right keywords is vital to any great search marketing campaign. Start with following the leading websites in your field or industry. Analyze the keywords bids, the average paid traffic, and historical performance to spot opportunities and market gaps. You can take a better look at competitor advertisements to capture all the pay-per-click campaigns, main keywords used, and their rankings for each ad.

Unravel fast and monitor all of your competitors' PPC campaigns to hoard all the insights you need to create better Google Ad campaigns. Any new keyword to look into? Any old one to drop? Look no further than your own market competitors. Keeping tabs on competitors' keyword activities will help you to focus your SEO and backlink building efforts where you need them the most.

Understand Website Structure and SEO Rankings

New website pages, page content changes, new product arrivals, seasonal influences, revamps in pricing strategies, fresh keywords, tweaks in value propositions, a brand refresh, and boilerplate updates- you name it, we show it! Analyzing your competitors’ website traffic, site structure updates, and pricing strategy can help you track and evaluate the extent and effectiveness of their web presence.

You can also receive data insights for your location-specific campaigns through Competitors App. Furthermore, UI/UX or online ad design changes due to a brand refresh can help you get insights into the direction of competitors’ plans. Whether they are dedicated features pages or FAQ- you can be the first to know everything!

Besides, studying the SEO ranking, organic search visibility, best-selling keywords, and page traffic might help you tweak and master the SEO strategies of your valued business. Whenever your competitors make SEO changes such as changing a blog post title and focusing on another keyword – Competitors App will be the first to notify you.

With time, the competitive landscape is evolving to be more dynamic. Companies must capture real-time data and derive fast and accurate insights. Ultimately, competitive intelligence provides your business with useful insights on current and emerging competitors plus their activities, target customer profiles, pricing strategies, and so on. Such knowledge advantage can hence be leveraged to ensure competitor benchmarking and derive the highest sales and profitability.

A deeper dive into your rivals' moves will require more exhaustive data mining and analysis efforts.

Deal-breaker: Data collection crowding too many resources from data analysis. This hints at the increasing need for efficient competitive intelligence solutions so that your competitor benchmarking efforts run fast and smooth!

Delivering actionable intelligence is necessary when analyzing data becomes the only task left- once you have an efficient tool like Competitors App on board. This helps you to ensure the applicability and validity of collected data due to its extraordinary Ai mechanisms.

Clearly, you must be able to understand the distinction between consistent patterns and outliers. Narrowed down data into valuable insights is intelligence. Make sure your findings uncover competitor strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies while identifying overall industry opportunities and threats.

Remember: Long are gone the days of guessing and “gut feeling” assumptions. Usually, markets become echo chambers for commonly misinterpreted information. Insightful data on your competitors' digital moves may enable you with tested solutions that have simple implementations.

Don’t forget to sign in now for a 15 days free trial period and take off your own flight to success through leveraging competitive intelligence!

Why you should NOT ignore your competitors

To ignore or not to ignore your competitors?

That’s the big question that can change the whole game, especially in business. Investigating what your competitors are doing or not, figuring out what they plan, what will be their next move, and analyzing their strategies could give you valuable insights to use for your good.

Of course, researching behind competitors’ moves can be a struggle and a waste of time. Watching all your competitors’ channels can take hours, plus there are tons of different things to look at (Website, Social Media channels, Emails, Keywords, Reviews and more) and you might think that it’s quite impossible to gather all this data in a single place, right?

Don’t worry, monitoring tools and software can make things easier for you, so you’ll be able to track automatically all your competitors’ marketing activities with very little time investment and almost no effort. That means you have no excuse to start monitoring your competitors you need to know who you’re up against, right?

How to identify your competitors?

Don’t want to make it sound like a cliché, but let’s make it clear from the beginning: you DO have competitors, and competition exists in every single field and domain, no matter the business. The question is: when it comes to your brand, who are you considering?

Correctly identifying your competitors can be a challenge, especially if you did not discover them from an initial phase of your business. Still, it shouldn’t be a hard task to spot them if you follow simple steps.

Defining your relevant competitors, it’s the first objective in your competitive research. To identity competitions that count for your business, you should start by understanding which types of competitors you should include in your investigation:

What are the two main types of competitors?

1. Direct competitors

A direct competitor is the one who offers the same product/service as you do, the one that suddenly pops up in our mind when you think of “competition.” Also, it’s the one that comes in your customers mind before choosing to make a purchase or converting to your service, the one that is targeting the same audience as you, with the same goal of profit – so ignoring him might not be a good idea, if you care about your business’ future. 🙂

Burger King and McDonald’s are direct competitors. Intercom and Zendesk are direct competitors, and so are Nike and Adidas – brands offering similar services and products.

To identify your direct competitors, you have to take a closer look around your business environment and to stay relevant by knowing your business-level and your position on the market.

To stay relevant and pick those competitors that count, you’ll need to have a clear overview of your business, products/services, and marketing strategies so that you can compare it with your direct competitors. Understanding “who you are?” will help you to discover “who your competitors are?”.

       2. Indirect competitors

Call “Indirect competitors” those businesses that don’t necessarily sell similar or related products, but target the same group of customers as you do, to satisfy the same need.  Nearly every business has indirect competition, so try to keep your eyes on those too, even if your focus is mainly on your direct ones.

Your indirect competitors may not have similar products or services, but they are direct competition with your business digitally. They may focus on the same marketing strategies, deliver the same type of content as you, competing for the same keywords, and wanting the same things as you, which is your customer’s/user’s attention.

Domino’s Pizza is an indirect competitor for Burger King – a hamburger fast food restaurant and a fast-food pizza restaurant – two companies that make slightly different products but target the same customers (hungry people).

Your competitors’ actions, whether direct or indirect competitors, can affect your business’ success, so it’s essential to take into account both types of competition when planning your business or your marketing strategies.

Moving forward, let’s see some ways to start our competitive research and how to start searching for competitors:

How do I find my key competitors?

1. Market Research

Take a closer look at your industry and product’s market, and analyze which other brands are offering a service or product that would compete with yours. I advise you to can start your competitive research at a local level, and once you’ve discovered which key competitors are around you, search for your national competition.

Also, take into account that there may be a business in another country that offers the most similar product to your own. Even if you don’t feel “attacked” by their presence, it’s better to know that they exist so that you can be aware of their marketing efforts.

Search on Google for your product/service, add your location to be more precise, and write down the results.

If you decide to use a competitive intelligence tool, on Competitors App you can automatically find your competitors’ based on your brands’ keywords. Once you add your details, domain, and keywords, you’ll receive a list of competitors.

2. Ask Customers Feedback

Your customers can help you to get straight to your key competitors. Once they’re on your side (they decided to subscribe, or they’ve bought your product), you can ask them which other brands/products they were evaluating before taking the final decision.

Leads can also bring you valuable information regarding your direct competitors. During the sale process, ask your potential user/customer which options they are taking into account or send a survey to find out more information. Try to understand customers’ logic behind choosing your product or service in one situation and competitors’ in another.

3. Check Social Media groups, Community Forums

Nowadays, people tend to seek out advice and recommendations online, on Social Media groups, community forums like Reddit, Quora, Slack groups. Join relevant groups for your industry and keep an eye on the conversations to find out your potential customers preferences, what are people’s options when it comes to choosing a service/product as yours and what influences on their buying decisions. Gather insights and take action!

After you have identified your competitors and made a list of your key competitors (the ones that are relevant for your business), you can start creating a competitor analysis plan or better say  … start digging into your competitors’ businesses. You must keep an eye on their products, marketing strategies, sales efforts to stay competitive in your industry.

As mentioned before, you can start monitoring your competitors’ activities using a monitoring tool, so you’ll automatically gather competitors’ data and get notified each time when a competitor makes a move. Here’s a detailed article on how to conduct a competitive analysis effectively.

Why is it important to know who your competitors are?

Researching your competition its, for sure, an excellent idea, especially when it’s done automatically, with a monitoring tool. You’ll get valuable details on your competitors’ actions without wasting time and resources. Still, you’re asking yourself if investigating your competitors should be a priority for you?

Here are the top four reasons why you should identify your competitors and start tracking their moves:

Why should you NOT ignore your competitors?

1. Competitors help you to develop your content strategies

Monitoring your competitors’ content will give you insights on what you should post on your channels. Track your competitors’ Social Media channels; see what type of content are they sharing, how often, and what feedback are they receiving from the audience.

By analyzing how the public interacts with your competition’s content and marketing efforts, you can understand what you can do differently to improve your content strategies.

      2. Competitors help you to spot new market opportunities

Identifying your competitors can open your eyes to new consumer demands and preferences. Also, finding out what people think about your competitors’ products or services will give you valuable hints on what you can improve to overcome your competition and to attract the attention of unsatisfied clients/users.

      3. Competitors help you to deliver an outstanding customer experience

See how competitors are treating their customers/users and pay attention to each detail that can make a difference between your business and your competitors’ brands.

Are your competitors sending promotions and offers frequently? Are they friendly with their users? What’s the users’ experience on competitors’ websites?

      4. Competitors help you to differentiate and develop your brand

By identifying your competitors, tracking, and analyzing their moves, you can grow your business and strategically position your products & services in the marketplace. The simple fact of being aware of what your competitors are doing and what strategies are crafting can give you clear directions on how to differentiate yourself from them and how to transform your business into a profitable one.

Identifying your competitors and investigating their actions, what they do/don’t, and how they build their brands can help you to make your services and strategies stand out. Gathering competitors’ data will help you to improve your business performance and to position your service/product on the market strategically. So the questions are: To ignore or not to ignore your competitors? I’m sure by now you have an answer. 🙂

Stay up to date with your competitors’ marketing activities and gather valuable insights on how you can improve your strategies. Sign in for a free trial period on Competitors App and start tracking your competitors’ moves.