Specialized Guide
Master Competitive Tracking: Tips & Tools To Beat Your Competitors
Topics covered in this guide:
- The Indispensable Role of Competitive Tracking in Business
- Proven Competitive Tracking Techniques
- Top 8 Competitor Tracking Tools to Empower Your Business
- Conducting a complete competitive analysis
- How to leverage Competitive Intelligence to boost your Company’s Strategy?
- 3 Competitive Tracking success stories
- Staying ahead in a competitive landscape
Get the most out of data. Beat your competition, understand the market, identify new business opportunities, and solve complex problems.
Competitive tracking involves examining, observing, and comparing your competitors’ strategies to extract valuable insights into their tactics, strengths, and weaknesses.
Companies can enrich their market research, sharpen their business strategies, and ultimately overtake their competition by performing competitor analysis and capitalizing on competitive intelligence.
The indispensable role of Competitive Tracking in business
Competitive Intelligence tracking is crucial for businesses across all sizes and sectors. It empowers organizations to pinpoint emerging trends, discover new opportunities, and counteract risks in an ever-changing market.
By staying informed about your competitors’ moves, you can make data-driven decisions, enhance your strategic monitoring, and strengthen your marketing and commercial results.
Proven competitive tracking techniques
With groundbreaking developments in real-time data processing, explainable AI, data privacy and security, edge computing, and cloud-based AI solutions, the future holds endless possibilities for companies eager to ride the wave of change.
Monitoring your competitors' digital activity
Evaluating your competitors’ digital activity is an excellent start to comprehending their current marketing and sales strategies. Also, it helps you understand their product portfolio, organizational changes, and unique selling points (USPs).
For example, when analyzing other comapany’s website and SEO strategies, observe their brand approach, user experience, and conversion optimization methods. This will help you determine what is working for them and what is not.
Additionally, conducting competitor backlink analysis can disclose valuable link-building prospects for your brand.
Understand their "social" interaction with their consumers and audiences
It does not matter if your competitors are B2B or B2C companies. Keep an eye on their social media channels.
Social media analysis is a perfect way to understand your competitors’ content strategies, customer engagement, and brand sentiment. Monitor their social media presence, follower growth, and engagement rates to uncover effective tactics and pinpoint areas where your brand can distinguish itself.
Time to go beyond digital analysis
It is curious how most guides about competitive tracking only focus on the digital side. When measuring and analyzing a competitor and its relation with the market, it is essential always to consider “real user behavior.”
For example, what happens if you want to follow your market response to a competitor’s new marketing strategy in physical stores? How to keep track of your competitors’ logistics? How to spot their production weaknesses? Competitive tracking goes beyond digital marketing monitoring.
By investing in cutting-edge security measures and embracing strict regulations, brands can safeguard their users’ privacy while facilitating ethical data handling practices.
We also recommend you reading: Understanding Competitive Data: Benefits, Uses and Sources
Using AI to uncover the DNA of your competitors' business facilities
Traditional customer segmentation tools (And even regular digital tools) have a problem: They use limited data.
What happens when you combine Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and 6,500 data variables? You get a detailed understanding of what is happening inside each of your competitors’ facilities.
Top Competitor Tracking and Competitive Intelligence Tools to empower your business
We live in a groundbreaking era of developments in real-time data, Big Data analysis, and AI. This has led to the emergence of powerful Competitive Intelligence Tools.
These are our top recommendations:
Competitive Intelligence Solution by PREDIK Data-Driven
With a unique AI and Big Data approach, we have developed a Competitive Intelligence Solution focused on providing you with a deep understanding of your competitors, as well as your suppliers and customers.
Crunchbase
Crunchbase is an influential resource for gathering insights on competitors’ funding, investments, and acquisitions, assisting you in understanding their financial situation and potential growth trajectory.
Attest
Attest is a market research platform that offers comprehensive competitor tracking tools, enabling you to examine and benchmark your competitors’ performance across various metrics.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides competitive analysis features that allow you to monitor your competitors’ website traffic, audience demographics, and engagement metrics, offering a transparent understanding of their online presence.
Semrush
Semrush is a powerful digital marketing suite that delivers all-encompassing competitor monitoring features, including SEO, PPC, and social media analysis.
Moz
Moz offers various SEO tools, including competitor research capabilities, allowing you to examine and benchmark your competitors’ search engine performance.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content research and monitoring tool that helps you track your competitors’ content performance, social media presence, and influencer partnerships.
Mention
Mention is a robust media monitoring and social listening tool that enables you to track your competitors’ brand mentions, sentiment, and engagement across various online channels.
Conducting a complete competitive analysis
To conduct a successful competitive analysis, we recommend you follow the steps:
- Identify your top competitors
- Evaluate your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
- Analyze your competitors’ product offerings and pricing
- Assess your competitors’ Marketing Strategies
Identifying your top competitors
Start by determining your top competitors, considering both direct and indirect in your industry.
It is helpful to use tools like Google search, industry reports, and customer feedback to compile a list of your main competitors.
Evaluating your competitors' strengths and weaknesses
Evaluate your competitors’ key strengths and weaknesses by examining their product offerings, pricing, customer service, and overall market positioning.
As mentioned, using our Competitive Intelligence tool lets you understand your competitors’ complete business environment (From third-tier suppliers to leading investors).
This analysis will help you pinpoint potential opportunities to differentiate your company and stay ahead of the competition.
Analyzing your competitors' product offerings and pricing
A comprehensive analysis of your competitors’ products, services, and pricing structures will help you know their value proposition and identify potential gaps in the market that your business can use.
Assessing your competitors' marketing strategies
Review your competitors’ marketing campaigns. This includes their digital strategies like SEO, content marketing, social media, email, and digital advertising.
Also, do not forget about their offline strategies like cross-promotions, events, community engagement, mass media presence, and in-store promotions.
A 360-view will help you tailor your marketing efforts to outperform them in the digital landscape.
How to leverage Competitive Intelligence to boost your Company's Strategy?
There are several strategies and approaches a company can follow to leverage its competitive intelligence. In our experience working with different business profiles, you should follow at least these three strategies:
- Adapt your marketing approach.
- Innovate your product offering.
- Elevate your customer experience.
Adapting your marketing approach
Use the insights gained from competitive tracking to improve your marketing strategy. Modify your marketing approach, brand experience, customer service, processes, and advertising tactics based on your competitors’ successes and shortcomings to drive better results.
Innovating your product offering
Stay ahead by continually enhancing and expanding your product offerings. Use competitive intelligence to identify emerging trends and customer needs and develop innovative solutions to address those demands.
Elevating your customer experience
Leverage competitor analysis to identify best practices for customer service and user experience (Regardless of your industry).
By understanding what your competitors are doing right (And wrong), you can improve your customer experience and drive increased satisfaction and loyalty.
3 Competitive Tracking success stories
Would you like to understand how companies are using a new approach to competitive intelligence approach? Here are three real case studies:
How a packaging company used their main competitor's client list to identify new business opportunities
As part of its expansion strategy, our client (A packaging company) analyzed one of its strongest competitors on the East Coast to examine all its clients.
The result? The company was able to identify unattended companies on their strategic states and new business opportunities with specific clients of their main competitor.
How a large multinational used CI tracking data to identify new potential customers
A leading brand provider of specialized materials was looking to map their market to identify and monitor all potential competitors to understand whom they are doing business with and selling to.
The result? The company enhanced its competitive intelligence. They developed a strategy to help them identify and focus on significant business opportunities.
How has a top sportswear brand identified unserved markets in key South American cities?
Our client identified several underserved markets in South America and therefore needed to understand the consumers’ and competitors’ profiles in specific cities.
The result? Using a competitive intelligence approach, the brand identified key cities worth expanding and investing in.
Staying ahead in a competitive landscape
Competitive tracking is vital to a successful business in today’s business landscape. You can analyze, monitor, and outperform your competition using the proper methods, tools, and insights.
Adapt your business strategy based on the valuable intelligence gained through competitor analysis and monitoring. Embrace innovation, enhance your customer experience, and consistently refine your company’s processes and methods to secure your position as a leader in your industry.