When conducting a marketing strategy analysis, it is important to consider two perspectives: one of them is the impact that the strategy has had on your community. We measure this by evaluating leads, traffic, and engagement and in general, all the metrics discussed on a regular basis. On the other hand, it is important to measure how that strategy develops within your competitive environment. This is known as competitive intelligence.

The First Indicators

On the web, there are hundreds of tools to measure the first indicators to make better business decisions. It is much more difficult to find some that serve to evaluate the impact of your strategies on the competition. In a context, as changing and complex as the current one, continuing to base your business decisions on intuition is a capital mistake. Competitive intelligence is a concept increasingly used in the corporate environment, but how can it be used to improve the sales of a company?

Data Management

While it is true that business competitiveness is increasing, so is information. Artificial Intelligence and Big Data are here to stay, and the technological revolution has made a huge amount of tools for data management. Years ago, the term competitive intelligence seemed like a phenomenon assigned to surveillance and espionage. However, today, it is a completely legal, legitimate, and necessary activity. Most successful companies implement competitive intelligence strategies to identify what competitors are doing and find out, as soon as possible, what consumers are asking for and what is trending.

In this article, we will tell you what competitive intelligence is, and which are the most used resources so that you can start doing competitive intelligence now. Competitive intelligence tools tend to be more expensive and complex, although there are also some free ones. Next, we will develop a list with several tools that can be useful when evaluating competitive strategy in the online environment.

Competitive Intelligence Tools

Competitive intelligence, in general terms, is a procedure that has to be carried out ethically and with criteria. It is about always maintaining a fair game. In this list, we will present tools to strategically analyze the impact of your actions on the business environment and on the competition that will allow you to make decisions based on facts and not on intuitions.

Alexa

Alexa is one of the most widely used competitive intelligence and web analytics tools. This tool provides a wide variety of information:

• The number of visits to a web page. Not only with data, but also incorporating graphs so that you can see if the web traffic of a page is growing or decreasing
• The time that a user stays on a web page
• The bounce rate or abandonment percentage of a web page, which indicates the number of users who leave a web page without interacting with it

Feed.ly

Feed.ly is a very useful tool to find out what your competitors are doing at the last minute. What this resource does is send notifications every time your competition creates new content about a specific area of topic. Through Feed.ly, you can create categories and include the domains of your competitors. Thus, you can analyze many web pages at the same time without having to visit them one at a time.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo will allow you to discover which is the best content regarding a specific topic. In this way, you will have a reference when carrying out your digital marketing strategy. The payment option offers many more options, such as knowing which social network your competitors manage to generate more engagement. The platform is also very focused on finding influencers, one of the keys to the success of many brands. In fact, it has a specific option called ‘Influencers Guide’ that allows you to analyze what type of content an influencer advertises, or to generate a list of influencers who are talking about your specific areas of interest.

SEMRush and Ahrefs

Perhaps, these platforms are the most reputable in the world of web analytics. Although Ahrefs only has one payment option, in SEMRush, you can find a free version. Both pages are very complete and allow you to have a panoramic view of a URL. Both platforms allow you to thoroughly analyze a specific URL, or an entire domain. They also offer multiple keyword search options, classifying keywords by the level of difficulty, which will guide you to find the market niches that best suit you.

Google Tools

As in almost everything, Google always has its free option. For competitive intelligence, Google Alerts and Google Keyword Planner stand out. The first, Google Alerts, is free and allows the monitoring of your competitors’ social networks. This tool will send a notification each time the competition has received a mention, or a backlink. Regarding the second, it is necessary to have a Google Adwords account to be able to use it. This resource is very useful for searching for keywords, and for identifying which keywords rank on a specific website.

The Benefits

What are the benefits of competitive intelligence? It allows you to anticipate the competition. One of the main benefits of competitive intelligence is that you can use it to keep an eye on the latest trends. This will make it easier for you to be attentive and faster than the competition.

Decision-making efficiency. If something characterizes the current, completely globalized, and changing environment, it is speed. This phenomenon often forces us to act without being very clear about what we are doing. However, when we base our decisions on data, which is what competitive intelligence is based on, the probability of failure decreases.

Another element that characterizes globalization, in addition to speed, is complexity. This can cause great uncertainty. Against this, competitive intelligence, by allowing you to base your actions on specific data, eliminates cognitive biases, and increases your security.

Conclusion

With competitive intelligence, you can improve communication within the company itself. As we have mentioned, the transversal nature of competitive intelligence will make the company have to increase its communication channels, something that always brings positive points in strategizing and decision-making.