Over the past few years, some online marketing intelligence software tools and techniques have become marketer’s best friends forfinding new opportunities and improving the overall business strategy.
There is a list of competitive intelligence tools thatallowyou tracking and monitoring many aspects of your competition. These aspects might include your competitor’s website traffic and keywords, social media mentions, reviews, web rankings, backlinks, content, posts, site changes, email strategy, technology, traffic sources, and etc.
On this page, we collected some of the best free and premium marketing intelligence toolsand programs you can start using right now.
1.Crayon Intel Free – monitor competitors content and design changes
Crayon is a comprehensive market intelligence platform that helps businesses track and analyze competitor’s activities. Crayon Intel Free allows you to get a sample of competitive intelligence on companies, including their blog posts and video content. You receive daily email digests.
Moreover, this software toolallows you to assemble a collection of your toughest competitors or favorite brands. You can track any number of companies.
Price:Crayon Intel Free is completely free to use. The company also offers Crayon Intel Pro that is a paid option but it is one of the greatest market and competitive intelligence tools with powerful analysis.
2.Follow – competitor monitoring
Follow allows you to get insights on any website you want. Over 30000 people use it to gain valuable competitive insights which help them make better business decisions.
Follow lets you see a high-level overview of any site including traffic estimates, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, display advertising, affiliate marketing, demographics, and etc.
They combine multiple sources to bring you a very comprehensive and high-level overview of any site’s marketing data.
Price: Free Plan and 3 Premium Monthly SubscriptionPlans
3. SimilarWeb.com– competitor traffic
SimilarWeb.com is one of the top marketing intelligence tools when it comes to monitoring competitors website traffic.
With this tool, you can: benchmark against your competitors and industry; reveal your competition’s analytics and online strategy; discover new partners, leads or affiliates; identify trends; understand consumer intent and journey.
SimilarWeb is very easy to use software solution. It gains insight into any website’s statistics with the click of a button.
Price: Free and Premium Package
4.Quantcast Measure – competitor traffic
Quantcast software platform is one of the biggest players in the world of marketing intelligence and data mining.Quantcast provides a full audience demographic and geographic profiles for your website as well as your competition’s.
It gives you details such interests, shopping habits, brand preferences and more. You can see the audience gender, number of children, age, education, and etc.
Quantcast is a powerful software engine for brand marketers, publishers, and business owners to make smarter data-driven decisions.
Price:Quantcast Measure is free. Quantcast Measure Enterprise is a premium solution.
5.SiteAlerts – competitor traffic
This tool gives you instant insights on any website you want. It answers questions such as “How much traffic do they get?”, “Where does it come from?” “What tools do they use?” and many others.
You can easily track things like marketing stats, traffic sources, social media stats, funding rounds, press mentions.
And SiteAlerts also let you see which technologies your competitors use (particularly SaaS products).
Price: Free and premium monthly subscription.
6.Fanpage Karma – social media intelligence
With Fanpage Karma, you not only analyze your profiles and those of the competition but also you are able to manage all your customer conversations in one tool.
Fanpage Karma can analyze your and your competitors’ presence on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and even Pinterest.The social monitoring is always on alert for you – keeping you up to date with what is happening on Twitter and Google+ while also keeping an eye on the competition.
Their free plan provides you with detailed analysis for 1 fan page, basic dashboard, weekly reports and alerts for 90 day analysis period.
Price: free and paid plans.
7. Klear –influencer-identification and analytics dashboard
Klear provides a comprehensive influencer-identification and an analytics dashboard software platform.With 500 million profiles, 60k categories and 5 years worth of historical data, Klear is one of the most sophisticated influencer search engines and competitive intelligence tools out there.
Klear allows you to build, manage and measure your influencer program, with a user-friendly CRM system that was designed for influencer marketing.
Furthermore, you can see a performance report for real-time tracking for mentions, engagements, true reach, and $ ROI.
Price: Free and premium plans.
8. SocialRank –social media intelligence
SocialRank is one of the greatest marketing intelligence tools that provide you with an easy way to identify, organize, and manage your audience on Twitter and Instagram.
Once you log into SocialRank, you can segment the audience by various sorting,and filtering options.
Once you find people with SocialRank, you can create custom lists, export the data to CSV/PDF, and run campaigns.After using SocialRank to find the right people, you can take action by Direct Messaging, Exporting to CSV, Exporting to PDF, Building Lists, Saving Searches and more.
Price: Free and premium
9. Visualping – monitoring competitors’ changes
Visualping is a very easy-to-use and convenient tool to monitor website changes. All you need to do is select the area you want to track and it notifies you when a change happens.
This tool allows you to monitor changes on your competitor’s home page, pricing, product descriptions or images, promos, and new content. You can also track changes in their social media profiles and new posts, career announcements, or any other important information you want to keep an eye on.
What differentiates this marketing intelligence software from the others is that it detects visual and text changes and sends you an email alert every time there is a change that is important for you. So you don’t need to check your competitors’ websites manually, and it keeps you always in the know.
Price: Free and paid plans.
10.Custodee – tracking competitor site changes
Custodee offers individual website monitoring and competitor tracking.You can use this tool to get notifications about availability, prices and content changes of competitors and their products.
This tool helps you to increase AdWords conversions, perform SEO tracking with screenshots, increase sales when competitors raise prices, and to analyze web content.
Price: Paid plans starting at 10 dollars per month.
11.Pagescreen–website monitoring andscreenshot automation
Pagescreen is a very simple platform to capture and archive visual copies of different web pages.
With its screenshot automation and change detection technologies, it is a piece of cake to monitor your competitors’ websites, to build and collect intelligence.
Pagescreen facilitates the monitoring of any website.
Price: Free and Pro.
12. Competitor.email–competitors email analysis
If you want to uncover your competitor email marketing strategy, Competitor.email can be your solution. It is an email marketing intelligence tool that allows you to view, track, analyze, and report on your competitors’ email marketing communications.
Competitor.email is a software platform that lets you gain invaluable insight into your competitors’ eCRM strategy.
With several clicks, you’re able to discover, compare and understand your rivals email marketing efforts.
Finally, Mailody lets you compare your email data vs your competitors.
Price: 2 levels of pricing, depending on your priorities and needs.
13.Datanyze Insider –reveals the competitor’s technology
Datanyze Insider instantly reveals high-level information about the website you’re browsing and the company that powers it. It let you see data points like employees, revenue, and current technology providers. You also can visit the company’s social pages right from the window.
Moreover, the tool list builder allows you to add new contacts to Salesforce or a Datanyze list in one click.
In addition, it allows you to export the contacts to a CRM, spreadsheet or other sales automation tool to fastly turn them into a targeted outbound campaign.And more importantly, you can identify the technology choices your competitors use.
Price: Free
14.Whatruns –reveals the competitor’s technology
This is a free but powerful browser extension that helps you identify technologies used on any website. One of the most simple competitive intelligence tools.
WhatRuns shows you everything that powers a website. Are you wondering, what web apps your competitors pay for? Which CDN they’re hosted on? How they track their visitors? WhatRuns is one of those competitive intelligence tools that answers all of these questions and even much more.
Also, this app keeps you updated with the pace by letting you know when a website starts or stop using technology.
Price: Free
15. Mediatoolkit – competitors mentions
This is a powerful tool for monitoring online mentions of your brand or your competitor’s brand in real-time.Mediatoolkit makes sure you know about every article, hashtag, and comment relevant to the name you want to track.
Be it profiles on Facebook, Twitter,and Instagram, or updates from websites, blogs, and forums, you can find mentions from any source in the world.
With Mediatoolkit, you also can compare with competitors, track current industry topics, find social media influencers, identify engaging posts and analyze brand sentiment.
Price: Free and premium plans.
16.Social Mention –competitors mentions
Social Mention is a popular free social media search and analysis platform. It aggregates user-generated content from across the world into a single stream of information.
This competitive intelligence tool allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you or your competitor, about a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape.
Social Mention works in real-time and monitors 100+ social media properties including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google and etc.
Price: Free
17.Octoparse – web scraping
Octoparse goes further than a competitive intelligence tool. It is one of the best web crawlersthatquickly scrape web data.You can extract all website data with a simple point and click and then download extracted data as CSV, Excel, API or save it to databases.
Anyone can do it and no programming is needed at all.You just need to open the webpage of your choice in Octoparse’s built-in browser, then click around to select the data you need to capture – that’s how easy it is.
Octoparse is a great crawler to turn any competitor’s web page unstructured data into structured data instantly.
Price: Free and premium plans.
18.Rank Signals – competitor’s backlinks andtraffic sources
Rank Signals is a backlink checker tool and SEO software to easily uncover SEO backlinks and traffic sources of your competitors.
Findingand identifying your competitors best links is one of the most effective link building strategies you can use.Rank Signals builds a solid foundation for your link building strategy.
In addition,the tool shows social media metrics across major social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.
Price: Free
19.iSpionage –uncovering competitors conversion strategy
iSpionage is a marketing intelligence tool that allows you to easily steal your competitors’ traffic and uncover their conversion strategy.
iSpionage is a quite valuable tool because it lets you find profitable keywords faster with competitors PPC keyword list, find out how much your competitor spends per month on Adwords, download competitor’s SEO keywords list, and more.
This a software solution that helps you to increase conversion rates, generate more leads and drive targeted traffic.
Price: Premium plans
20.Moat – competitors ad creative
Moat is one of the top digital-ad search engines. Itdisplays ads used by companies across the web.
MOAT is a great free tool that allows you to view not only the ad unit but also many other details such as what website it appeared on, what are the dimensions of the ad, file size and file type and etc.
Simply type in the company name and see the ads that they’ve used in the past.
Price: Free and premium plans
Conclusion:
We all operate in a highly competitive business world.
Monitoring and analyzing your competitors’ behavior aren’t just a good choice. It is an absolutely crucial part of your overall marketing and business growth strategy.
Nowadays, there is a good range of free and paid marketing and competitive intelligence tools that make it easy to spy your competitors on a daily basis.
They are able to provide a comprehensive and deep understanding of where you and your competitors stand.
Using marketing intelligence tools in this post can give you a unique advantage. But don’t just pick one of them. Get multiple data sources to see the big picture.
What are your favorite competitive intelligence tools? Share your thoughts in the field below.
FAQs
What is a marketing intelligence tool? ›
Market intelligence tools (also called marketing intelligence software) helps businesses collect and aggregate needed information about companies and individuals in their marketplace. This can include: firmographic information. financials and funding rounds. competitive information and analysis.
What are the 4 types of Market Intelligence? ›The four cornerstones of Market Intelligence are Competitor Intelligence, Product Intelligence, Market Understanding, and Customer Understanding.
What is the importance of competitive intelligence and how is it used in marketing information system? ›Competitive intelligence is important because it helps businesses understand their competitive environment and the opportunities and challenges it presents. Businesses analyze the information to create effective and efficient business practices.
What is competitive intelligence example? ›- Positioning/messaging changes. ...
- Pricing/packaging changes. ...
- Leadership changes. ...
- 4. News coverage. ...
- Website A/B tests. ...
- Customer reviews. ...
- Employee reviews. ...
- Job postings.
Competitive Intelligence involves collecting and analyzing information about your key competitors. This can help you to understand more about the market you're operating in and enable you to make informed strategic decisions so that you can improve your market position and gain a competitive edge.
What is an example of marketing intelligence? ›For example, A mobile company wants to understand the competitor's position in the market to launch its own product in the same segment. A competitor analysis survey can be conducted to understand the competitor's position in the market, their product features, and their market share.
How do you collect marketing intelligence? ›- Enlist the Sales Team. ...
- Set Up a Customer Advisory Board. ...
- Focus on Quality Data. ...
- Utilize an Appropriate Marketing Analytics Platform. ...
- Collect Customer Feedback.
Importance of Market Intelligence
Market intelligence enables you to become more customer-centric, gain a better understanding of market demands and consumer views, gather real-time relevant data, increase upselling chances, minimize risks, increase market share, and gain a competitive edge.
The longetivity of the business increases when you gain the complete knowledge of the external business environment which can influence your marketing strategy. Competitive Intelligence helps in predicting the competitor's next action plan which can be used against them to exploit their weakness.
What benefits can competitive intelligence provide for your small business? ›- Glean Competitive Insights. ...
- Track Industry Trends and Predict Future Moves. ...
- Improves Decision-Making ROI. ...
- Boost Product and Service Speeds-to-Market. ...
- Predict Competitions' Behaviors.
How does competitor intelligence help inform your business strategy? ›
- Uncover market trends and position yourself for the future.
- Predict your competitors' next moves and prepare to counteract.
- Spot emerging threats in your industry.
- Discover opportunities for business growth.
- Keep your sales reps informed and develop winning pitches.
Product test: It is used as a resource by receiving feedback from first users of the products. Customers: Existing and potential customers can provide information on their needs, concerns and issues. Competitors: Competitors themselves are an important source of intelligence.
What are the elements of market intelligence? ›- Competitor Analysis. ...
- Product Evaluation. ...
- Market Analysis. ...
- Customer Understanding.
- Put your sales team to use. ...
- Channel partners can help. ...
- Competitors and their channel partners will be of great help. ...
- Catch hold of a good market research agency. ...
- The in a way – the social media marketing. ...
- Create an advisory panel for your customers.
Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of collecting, processing and analyzing information from and about the internal and external or competitive environment in order to help decision-makers in decision-making and to provide a competitive advantage to the enterprise.
How can I improve my competitive intelligence? ›Competitive intelligence can be gathered by going through business ads or visiting the competitor's website. A company can learn which business practices consumers like best by searching through business reviews. None of these information-gathering techniques carry direct financial costs.
How do you develop a competitive intelligence strategy? ›- Identify your competitors. ...
- Set objectives. ...
- Determine data collection strategies. ...
- Gather and analyze your data. ...
- Relay insights to key stakeholders. ...
- Stay within legal limits. ...
- Be ethical. ...
- Share insights often.
- Identify Your Competitors. ...
- Identify Areas of Interest to Track in Your Competitors' Digital Footprints. ...
- Gather Your Intel. ...
- Create a Competitive Analysis. ...
- Communicate Intel.
- Collect all relevant data.
- Monitor data sources, such as social media feeds.
- Organize and label data for future analysis and retrieval at a later time.
- Identify important trends within the data.
- Analyze those trends to develop meaningful intelligence.
“Competitive Intelligence for the pharma and biotech industry is a systematic process for the legal and ethical collection, objective analysis, and controlled dissemination of actionable intelligence to decision-makers about their competitors' objectives, strategies, assumptions, and capabilities.” ~ Two Labs.
What is the best technique for revealing the different market or competitive? ›
Strategic group mapping is a visual technique for displaying: the different market or competitive positions that rival firms occupy in an industry and for identifying each rival's closest competitors.
What type of information can be gathered using market intelligence? ›Marketing intelligence is everyday data that is relevant to the marketing efforts of an organization. Once collected, this data can be analyzed and used to make informed decisions regarding competitor behaviors, products, consumer trends, and market opportunities.
How can I improve my competitive intelligence? ›- Identify your competitors. ...
- Set objectives. ...
- Determine data collection strategies. ...
- Gather and analyze your data. ...
- Relay insights to key stakeholders. ...
- Stay within legal limits. ...
- Be ethical. ...
- Share insights often.
Competitive intelligence can be gathered by going through business ads or visiting the competitor's website. A company can learn which business practices consumers like best by searching through business reviews. None of these information-gathering techniques carry direct financial costs.
What is competitive intelligence in healthcare? ›Competitive intelligence (CI) is a discipline that encourages gathering, analyzing, and sharing information throughout a firm in order to develop and sustain competitive advantage. CI could be considered a precursor in establishing a learning organization (LO).
How can I improve my competitive position? ›- Create a Corporate Culture that Attracts the Best Talent. ...
- Define Niches that are Under-serviced. ...
- Understand the DNA Footprint of Your Ideal Customer. ...
- Clarify Your Strengths. ...
- Establish Your Unique Value Proposition. ...
- Reward Behaviors that Support Corporate Mission and Value.
Two of the most commonly used measures of concentration are concentration ratios (CR) and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI). The concentration ratio (CR) requires information on the number of firms and the market shares of the largest firms.
What are the types of competitive analysis? ›Types of competitor analysis include SWOT analysis, the customer journey map, and growth-share matrix. The customer journey is the story your customer creates with your branding, digital footprint, and products. A growth-share matrix is a visual tool to determine where to focus business activities.