Your Competition Counts: 5 Tools for Releasing Your Inner Business Spy

There are plenty of unique and highly effective marketing channels available today. And while this has been great for businesses’ digital marketing efforts, it’s also produced increasingly fierce levels of competition. Businesses are out there every day spending time and resources competing for ad placement, followers, leads, sales and web traffic—and you’ll undoubtedly want your own piece of the pie.

The hard truth is that while conducting competitive analysis is usually less than fun, it’s absolutely necessary. If you want to gain the edge over your competition that your enterprise desperately needs, you need to do the legwork.

Knowing how your rivals operate, how they target their own audiences and how they capture the attention of your leads is critical for formulating strategic marketing campaigns that can boost your revenues in the long run.

How competitive analysis tools can help

The age of technology has produced dozens of highly effective competitor analysis tools and programs designed to rapidly assess how you compare to your leading competitors in your industry.

By using the right tools, you can spend less time competing against your rivals and more time marketing in a way that does this work for you. This will streamline your operations, give your marketing campaigns valuable structure and direction, and help you to maintain a leading market position without having to spend thousands of dollars and many hours spying on your peers.

We’ve created a comprehensive list of the 5 best competitor analysis tools you need to help you achieve exactly this.

Your 5 must-have competitor analysis tools

1. Sprout Social

Social media is currently the best way to connect with your customers—which means that it’s the perfect place to start launching competitive analysis, too. Sprout Social enables you to assess competitor performance on social media channels from multiple perspectives and data points.

This service includes a suite of competitive reporting tools you can use to analyze and optimize your social media strategies. It features strong data points you can track across Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and more. All of this data is stored for easy access. You can use it whenever you need to check out what your competitors are posting and gauge your growth against the profiles you’re comparing your business against.

Sprout also offers a Premium Analytics tool. This tool offers deep insights into your social media profiles, campaigns and content, along with interactive graphs and charts that you can customize to align with your marketing goals. Use Sprout Social to tap into social media conversations, discover how consumers feel about your competitors and their offerings and find out how you weigh up.

2. SEMRush

SEMRush is one of the most renowned and widely used SEO and competitor analysis tools on the market. Its analysis tools enable you to pull your competitors’ backlinks and traffic sources and monitor changes in their search rankings over time. SEMRush can tell you exactly who else is competing for your traffic using the keywords that best relate to your services, which will help you to precisely pinpoint your closest rivals.

This is an excellent tool for understanding who your competitors are from an SEO perspective rather than a social media metric angle. Being able to highlight the keywords that your competitors target will directly inform your own content strategy and allow you to target the right audiences with your marketing messages.

3. Phlanx

Phlanx is an Instagram-specific engagement calculator that provides data on exactly how active your business account’s followers are at any given time. This is a great resource to use to analyze your competitors’ presences on social media platforms. It helps you to determine which platforms are the most commonly used by Millennials and Gen Zers—two huge markets that most brands want to tap into. The tool doubles as a platform through which to assess whether or not influencers have legitimate followings of users.

Phlanx calculates its engagement ratios based on the number of followers an account has, and the rate that those followers interact with its content. It takes into account likes, shares, views, comments and tags to give you solid data on how effectively you’re engaging your audience.

This data can be very important, as it’s difficult to gauge a page’s marketing success through numbers of followers alone. Some brands enjoy excellent engagement with their followers, but these rates could actually be quite low when put into perspective with the size of their followings. This is why engagement metrics like those provided by Phlanx are a better, more accurate indicator of overall engagement rates.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo enables you to view the top-performing content for topics that are relevant to your brand and specific competitors in your industry. The analysis tool assesses the individual engagement rates for content on social sites, along with their total numbers of shares across the internet, to provide you with the data you need.

This tool highlights the best performing content in your industry. This tells you exactly who you need to watch out for when it comes to content creation. Plus, it helps you to identify buzzing topics that you can weigh in on to increase your own web traffic and content view and share rates.

5. Mailcharts

Any seasoned marketer knows that email marketing is a particularly tricky channel to perform a competitive analysis on. Mailcharts simplifies the process by aggregating emails from competing campaigns to assist you in streamlining your own. The service grabs subject lines and extracts data like send frequency, comparing it with your business’s campaigns so that you can see where your strategy needs work.

The tool will even compare your email marketing campaigns to its own library of marketing emails. This ensures that you’re in line with best practices for frequency, timing, subject line length and more.

Mailcharts is a very powerful analysis tool, and its website boasts a range of marketing email examples to base your own mail on. If you’re familiar with using templates for other business purposes, you’ll find Mailchart provides excellent directives. The mail templates are based on some of the largest and most successful campaigns, and will give you a great idea of what today’s best-performing emails look like.

Turn data into dollars

Competitive analysis can yield powerful and actionable data for any business. However, you can only enact real change and progress if you translate that data into tangible action. The ultimate goal of analysis is to improve and streamline your marketing strategies in any way you can.

The more information you can obtain about your competitors, the better you’re equipped to develop marketing strategies that truly allow your business to shine.