Based on the logic of having the right tools to do business so as to reach a targeted audience, it is important to note that competitive intelligence is necessary for a variety of reasons. You need those tools to make the best decisions for your business in order to meet your customer’s needs and to stay ahead of the competition. No business has the luxury of smooth sailing. It takes more than business decisions to be an industry leader.
Key Information
Your competitors can also provide key information that could greatly impact your business performance. There is no other way to operate a business in a competitive world, if you don’t take the steps to remain relevant and to stand out. For this reason, it is crucial to learn as much as you can about the competition. It is important to observe what they do, evaluate their specific strategies and spy on them to know what they are doing to be successful. In this way, it saves you from the failures that come with making mistakes while running a business without experience. Thankfully, you have access to competitive intelligence tools that will make your business life much easier.
What Are Competitive Intelligence Tools?
As it relates to competitive intelligence, it affords you the luxury of being able to monitor specific competitors in your industry or niche. It helps you to gather the necessary data to make important business decisions. These tools come in different forms such as apps, software applications and other tools from membership subscriptions. With the data collected, you will be able to develop strategies to further advance your business goals.
Is It Ethical?
You can gather data using software tools, which allow you to view your competitor’s websites and ads. With the right software application, you get to go through their material easily rather than painstakingly. When the information is gathered, you can use it to discover potential opportunities and risks that the business may be facing. In so doing, you will be able to react or respond in kind to administer the same strategies. Competitive intelligence is ethical and is just another way to conduct in-depth research. Once the information is public, it can be accessed by any means or using any tool.
The Most Utilized Tools
Below is a list of the most utilized competitive intelligence tools. From this list, we are going to discuss the three that are considered more popular.
- SEMrush
- SimilarWeb
- Crayon
- Alexa
- Moat
- SpyFu
- BuzzSumo
Crayon
This tool is a software application, which allows your business to watch every move the competition makes. You will have access to data related to your competition; tracking what they do in real time. The software provides insights into the competitor’s marketing campaigns so you can use this information to develop successful strategies. The software features web tracking, channel acquisition, data reporting and a centralized platform.
SpyFu
SpyFu is a relatively innovative monitoring and SEO tracking tool to spy on your competition. It is widely used among digital marketers. The platform provides users with PPC tools for researching ad campaigns. It has features to show the top performing keywords of your competitors; alerting you of click through rates and cost per clicks. Some of the other features include site auditing, SERP tracking and data visualization.
SEMrush
This particular tool provides the users with extensive features for online marketing with traffic analysis for researching your competition. You will be able to compare your competitor’s business actions so you can create targeted benchmarks. With this tool, you can monitor the landing pages of your competitors as well as their sources of traffic by visitor specification and by location. You can use this tool to gauge bounce back rates, keyword ranking and paid ad campaigns.
Conclusion
According to NetBase Quid, most of these tools and platforms are membership based subscriptions and they all have extensive research capabilities; easy to use and very analytically impressive. With any business, it is important to invest in the appropriate tools that will give you an edge over the competition.