Marketing to get a competitive advantage often needs a lot of spend. One cost-effective tactic however is to monitor your competition’s efforts online. By understanding the playing field, you’ll have insights into their strategies & achievements, enabling you to devise strategies to compete and/or out-perform their marketing efforts.
To help you with your investigations, here’s 5 tools BEAM uses when assisting our clients with their Marketing. Each program provides differing data to build a telling perspective.
Easiest of all to use – good old’ Google Alerts is a must! All you have to do is enter the names of the competitors you want to monitor, and Google Alerts does the rest. You can set up the tool to track various online mentions, links and keywords.
You’ll soon receive emails reporting information on your rivals!
Not everyone is aware of how to leverage Google Ads (previously Adwords) for competitor analysis. //ads.google.com
There’s a lot of great data you can find on your competitors in this free tool. Start by typing in their website address in the landing page field – you’ll then retrieve the keywords they’re using and the average traffic they’re earning!
You can also research their ad campaigns which you can then leverage yourself.
Another very handy tool when conducting competitor research is SimilarWeb. It helps you keep an eye on your competitors’ online market position, strategies and analytics.
While you can subscribe to the full model, the free version is fantastic to get a good read on the market place. Just type in the website or mobile app and click “search.” Compare statistics from multiple competitors for overall visits, time on site, bounce rate and page views per visit.
Get insights on what channels drive the most traffic to your website as well as advice on how to improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) – including a list of errors and advice on how to improve your SEO. Also check out the performance of your competitors; of special interest is the marketing mix of how traffic is driven and where their media spend is being channelled.
This graph shows which sites are most visible on search engine result pages for the specified keywords. The more keywords with top positions on search engine results pages, the higher the traffic score for a site. Sites with a high traffic score get the most traffic from search results.
This is our favourite for an all-in-one competitive analysis tool. It covers various digital marketing aspects like PPC, SEO, content, and more.
So easy, all you need to do is type in the website you want to research, and the tool gives you a graphic report with great data, including traffic, rank, ads and keywords.
Knowledge is power or at least one of the major keys to success. If you want to stay ahead of your competition, you need to know what they’re up to. These tools will help you help you monitor your competitors as well as improve your own marketing efforts.
If this all sounds too hard or you don’t have time, BEAM has just the package to help. Our Competitive Advantage reveals competitor’s digital results as well as information on their brand, USP, key messages, calls to actions and more!