Small businesses don’t have the luxury of a bottomless pocket to fund product development, marketing, and customer service like big brands in the same market. Still, they must fight for their customers or risk being pushed out of the market by the competition.
This situation creates a degree of uncertainty for small companies, forcing them to make decisions on their feet.
The startups that excel in the face of stiff competition leverage technology to optimize their workforce, identify key actions, and gain competitive intelligence to grow and stay ahead of the competition.
Recently, competitive intelligence has become a buzzword in the business landscape.
So, what is “competitive intelligence”?
Competitive intelligence is the outcome of innovative practices used to gather information about the business environment, competitors, and audience to improve organizational performance.
In James Bond lingo, competitive intelligence is a reconnaissance mission on the competition to learn how they operate and extract valuable data to raise your game and beat them.
Competitive intelligence has a huge cost saving and optimization benefit for small businesses. It takes the guesswork out of marketing, product development, and customer service.
There is only so much a small business can achieve with a limited budget. However, knowing what is in demand, obtainable, and strategies used by the competition can save time and financial resources that could’ve been spent on guesswork.
According to Crayon’s 2020 State of Competitive Intelligence Report, the average company has up to 29 competitors. And companies with precisely defined competition intelligence KPIs have a higher chance of achieving revenue growth than companies without defined KPIs.
In other words, there is no substitute for Competitive Intelligence. It is not a “nice-to-have” but a mission-critical for businesses that want to gain a healthy market share, grow year-on-year and beat the competition.
To gain competitive intelligence, you need competitive intelligence tools. These tools are built to help businesses gather and analyze specific information about a competitor. Also, they provide insights into your target audience and their demands. All that information helps you make strategic business decisions confidently.
Competitive intelligence tools like Quid, SEMrush, and Crayon can help you succeed if you have a strategy in place.
An excellent competitive intelligence software can help you achieve any of the following;
Your company can benefit from one or more of the following types of competitive intelligence tools. In the next section, we’ll walk through some of the most valuable products on the market; read on.
When performing competitor analysis, sometimes you need insights from various sources to understand your competition in-depth. In this case, you will need to collate information from different sources to build tailored competitor profiles with relevant data.
This is where Battleplan comes in.
Battleplan makes it easy to centralize intelligence and build tailored profiles on your competition. You can enter text and attach digital files (images, pdf, video) to a profile on Battleplan. For example, if you find a competitor’s pitch deck or sales brochure, you can attach the document to their profile. This is an effective and easy way to store and access information compared to using different platforms.
Features:
Battleplan is super intuitive and easy to use. You can use it along with other market intelligence tools seamlessly.
Pricing: Free trial.
Do you want to know how your competitors generate revenue through email marketing? Owletter can help you answer that. This powerful competitive intelligence tool allows users to track competitor email marketing efforts.
Once step-up, Owletter captures the emails from a competitor’s website and uses AI to analyze the letters and share insights valuable to your business. For example, you can learn about your competitor’s audience demography, sales trend, conversion periods (month, day, time, hour), etc.
Owletter can also provide information on your competitor’s reputation – whether or not they have a good spamming reputation.
With the insights provided, you can tweak your email marketing effort to match and beat your competitors.
That said, Owletter also provides email marketing tools. You can launch and keep track of your email marketing activities from a single dashboard.
Features:
In the end, Owletter offers you a clear picture of what is and isn’t working in the email marketing of your competitors. As a result, you’ll be able to build email campaigns that are both effective and sustainable.
Pricing: Considering the available features, Owletter is reasonably priced. Prices range from $19 to $79 a month, with a 14-day free trial included. However, the real deal saver is the annual subscription. If you pay annually, you get 2 months free.
When it comes to content development (blog posts, articles), lead generation, and inbound marketing, BuzzSumo is an excellent resource for finding out what your audience really wants from you.
It doesn’t stop there. BuzzSumo also provides insights into your competitor’s content marketing so that you can learn about their strategy.
BuzzSumo is a valuable competitive intelligence tool for any business focused on growing its search and social media dominance.
There is no one right way to use BuzzSumo. The platform has several features to cater to your marketing needs.
If you’re looking for content ideas, explore the “discovery” feature to find out what is trending, top questions by your target audience, and relevant topics.
BuzzSumo’s monitoring feature is its primary competitive analysis tool. With the monitoring feature, you can track mentions of your competitors and assess the context and relevance. You can also track your competitor’s backlinks to identify areas to improve your content SEO and outrank your competitors.
Features:
In summary, BuzzSumo is a great competitive intelligence tool for those who want to learn more about their competition. This tool is vital since content is the foundation of today’s digital world.
Pricing: Free trial for the first seven days; then $99 per month.
Alexa gives you access to Amazon’s 26 years+ data on consumer search, web traffic, global rankings, and other information on over 30 million websites.
Depending on your preference, you can use the website and extension or use Amazon Alexa to access the information you need.
One of Alexa’s most appealing features is its ability to gather information about your target audience in seconds. It’s fast and easy to use and will show you results for all of your site searches and how they measure up to industry standards.
Alexa provides detailed information on a website’s traffic, bounce rate, linking, and ranking. The platform has an audience overlap feature that helps you discover new rivals who could have slipped by your notice.
In addition to giving a wealth of keyword data, Alexa can also help you brainstorm fresh content ideas. You can devise new content strategies since you know which keywords are driving traffic to websites.
Features:
There aren’t many tools that can provide Alexa’s content and traffic insight. This competitive intelligence tool allows in-depth competition study, and that is all you need to set up structures to outrank your competition.
Pricing: A monthly fee of $149 is available, with a 14-day risk-free trial period included.
SEMrush is an all-in-one SaaS platform for managing online visibility. For a business seeking competitive intelligence, the main draw of this tool is its competition research features. You can monitor a competitor’s traffic sources and identify high converting keywords with the SEMrush Traffic Analytics feature.
Besides showing competitor traffic sources, SEMrush also shows the cost of ranking for a keyword, the top websites, and their domain ranking.
According to SEMrush, the platform is best suited for SEO, content marketing, competitive research, social media, PPC, and digital agencies.
You’d be hard-pressed to find another SaaS platform that is feature-packed, like SEMrush.
Compared to other tools of similar scale, its competition analysis function is matchless.
Features:
With Semrush Competitive research feature, you can monitor your competitors’ activities, gain actionable insights, study consumer search behavior, and more. The information is delivered in simple formats.
Pricing: SEMrush monthly subscriptions start at $99.9, $199, or $399, each with a seven-day risk-free trial.
According to the company’s website, Crayon is a competitive intelligence platform that helps businesses identify and explore opportunities to create a sustainable business advantage.
In other words, Crayon gives you comprehensive and actionable competitive insights by tracking the web activity of your competitors.
With Crayon, you can see what competitors are doing on and off their websites. This CI tool can show you pages that have been added and removed on your competitor’s website.
Crayon captures and classifies data in categories, keywords, and dates for easy understanding. It allows businesses to share relevant insights with specific company departments to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
Using artificial intelligence to select relevant information, Crayon helps you collect and evaluate data from more than 7 million sources.
When you subscribe to Crayon’s Competitive intelligence service, you get a consultant (competitive intelligence analyst) who will sieve through data to identify relevant insights for your business.
With this brief review, you can tell that Crayon is a capable, competitive intelligence software for marketing. The company has a Product Marketing Alliance badge for its excellent work in 2021.
Features:
Pricing: Crayon offers a free competitor report for businesses who want to try the service before committing. It would be best if you used this offer before subscribing to the service.
Interestingly, unlike the other tools we’ve reviewed so far, Crayon offers bespoke pricing.
When it comes to keeping tabs on your competition’s website, Visualping is an easy-to-use SaaS app that does just that.
Visualping is highly-rated and has a long list of users - more than 1.5 million people, including Fortune 500 firms, utilize it.
You can start tracking a competitor by providing their website URL and entering your email address. Visualping allows you to narrow tracking to specific pages on the website.
You will get insights on the traffic, audience demography, keywords, and overall modifications to the website or page. You can then choose how often you want to be notified of new activities.
Features:
If you’re looking to keep tabs on your competitors’ websites, Visualping is among the best solution out there.
You can use Visualping with other tools for monitoring your competitors, such as Moat, SimilarWeb, or Alexa. In this case, you harvest data using these tools and keep track of changes with Visualping.
Pricing: Starts from $13, $24, $58, or $97 per month. There is a free plan, which offers 65 checks per month.
This list would be incomplete without mentioning Google Trends. It is just as powerful as the other competitive tools mentioned, but it is suited for broad research on keywords and trends.
The platform shares information on keyword search frequency per time, related phrases, and demographics.
The best thing about Google Trends is that it is free to use; however, there is a tradeoff.
Unlike SEMrush and other paid competitive analysis tools, Google Trends does not provide personalized analytics on competitors. The information on keyword search volume and trend is anonymous.
In that case, you may have to use Google Trends for broad research rather than specific research.
Features:
Pricing: Free to use.
Have you visited a competitor’s website and wished you could replicate the UX and marketing tools? With Wappalyzer, you can see what technologies your competitors use on their sites and how they’re using them.
Wappalyzer can identify content management systems, e-commerce platforms, and web frameworks. It also identifies a wide range of software and services, such as analytics tools, advertising networks, caching tools, CRMs, dev tools, CDNs, and more.
It’s critical to know what technologies your competitors are using on their websites to get a competitive edge. When you know what your rivals are working with, you’ll be able to compete better.
Wappalyzer would be valuable to software product companies. Wappalyzer can identify websites that use your competitor’s software and how they use it.
Features:
Pricing: Free (no Pro features), $149/month (starter pack), $249/month (Team), and $449/month (business).
NetBase Quid is a competitive intelligence SaaS platform for businesses to monitor trends, gain competitive insight, manage their brand reputation, develop and launch products. The platform is super intuitive and offers several ways to filter, visualize, and use data.
NetBase uses AI to process data from millions of sources to answer vital questions on brand reputation, competition, audience, product perception, and more.
Some of the best use cases of Quid include;
Netbase has many AI-powered solutions for businesses looking for consumer and marketing intelligence. You have to look through the options on offer to identify the best option.
Pricing: Pricing information is not public. Like Crayon, you have to contact support to get a custom quote.
Moat Pro is a great tool for the modern advertiser who wants to maximize ROI on Ad spend. It goes way beyond notifying you about your Ad performance – clickthrough rates, conversion, and impression. Moat also helps brands understand their market, audience, and competition.
Moat Pro can uncover insights on your competitor’s current and past Ad campaigns.
Moat provides over 50 data points for display and video ads. The Media Rating Council (MRC) independently verified these data points.
MRC is a non-profit focused on verifying the authenticity of Ad measurements. With the Media Rating Councils’ approval, Moat shares reliable metrics you can trust.
Moat Pro streams data from major Ad networks and platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snap, LinkedIn, and YouTube. So users get real-time and accurate data from all the platforms they could use to run Ads.
Features:
In summary, Moat Pro is one part of four core solutions offered by Moat – Moat Analytics, Moat Reach, Moat Outcomes, and Moat Pro. For those who don’t know, Moat is part of the Oracle Data Cloud tools.
Pricing: There is no information on Moat Pro’s pricing on the website. You can get a quote after requesting a demo of the tool.
Again, competitive intelligence is a must-have, not a nice-have. If you’re serious about getting ahead of the competition, then you need to have your competitor’s information at your fingertips. In the business world, competitive intelligence is an advantage.
As with most things, technology has made the concept of competition analysis relatively easy. Gaining competitive intelligence to edge the competition is as easy as subscribing to one of the tools mentioned above.
If you want an all-in-one competitive intelligence software, consider Crayon.
For businesses focused on content development and search ranking, SEMrush and Google trends will provide good value for money.
On the other hand, you should use Moat Pro if your firm is focused on Adverts and you want to create powerful Ads inspired by your competitors’ previous work.
Before choosing a competitive intelligence tool, be sure to assess your business’s goals, product quality, growth outlook, audience, and revenue potential. It would be pointless to invest in Competitive Intelligence tools when you have a defective or subpar product compared to the competition.
On a final note, competitive intelligence isn’t a set-and-forget activity. Consistent effort is required. With the correct tools and dedication to monitoring and changing your strategy over time, you can stay ahead of the competition, attract your target audience and gain loyal consumers.