Knowing our positioning in the market and the place we occupy for the competition is a fundamental starting point for proposing our marketing strategies. We may have thousands of ideas and opportunities to exploit. Still, if we don’t know what the competition is doing, our market share may suffer despite our efforts to expand it. The key is to spy on the market, to use the tools to analyze the competition that we talk about below and to do a complete follow-up, for which, at the end of this post, you will find an accessible template.
HOW TO SPY ON THE COMPETITION?
There are many Competitor Analysis Toolsand spy on it (in the next point, we show you a complete list). But the important thing, beyond knowing how to obtain the information, is to prioritize the data that interests us most to calculate the positioning each one has in the market.
Remember that given the large market that the Internet allows, we must avoid collapsing with an exhaustive analysis of all the potential competitors. We must focus on the most essential things: Current competitors and relevant information. Of course, without ceasing to closely follow other agents in the sector that may become direct future competitors, especially the Internet giants, such as Amazon, Google, Facebook…
To spy on your competition, we recommend asking yourself these three questions:
Who are my current competitors?
They will only be the companies or brands that offer a product or service that satisfies the exact needs or solves the same problems but also addresses your buyer persona. Therefore, you must especially consider the market segment you are targeting and its geographic reach.
For example, if you sell electric toothbrushes, you should be OK with those selling toothbrushes made of ecological wood; both companies focus on a specific market segment or niche.
What is the relevant information?
On the Internet, we can find as much information as we want; it is only necessary to find the tools to analyze the competition and suitable sources of information. Therefore, before launching into an intensive search, it will be vital that we are clear about which data is most relevant depending on our business and objectives.
For example, followers on social networks, investment in advertising, types of advertising carried out, web visits, SEO positioning, keywords used, annual sales…
Where do I get that information?
Now, the time has come to select the tools to analyze the competition. To do this, below, we give you many ideas and the data you can extract from each of them.
Remember to start with the primary and most straightforward, with the open information your competitors offer their clients through their websites, social networks, newsletters, and blogs.
For example, Alexa, Google, social networks, newsletter, Similarweb, SEMrush…
TOOLS TO ANALYZE THE COMPETITION
Spyfu
A tool to spy on the competition’s Google Adwords keywords and campaigns, as well as much more traffic information, competing websites, backlinks, etc.
Webceo
Earn backlinks, brand mentions or citations similar to your competitors through this SEO analysis tool for their websites.
Moz
One of our favourite web analysis, SEO and keyword tools, which will also help you analyze those of your competitors.
SEMrush
Follow, monitor, and analyze your competitors in an automated way and in real time, extracting data from web traffic, SEM, display ads, SEO, social networks, and brand reputation.
Adbeat
Enter your competitors’ websites and discover their online advertising strategies.
Moat
Allows you to see the creatives of the latest competitor ads. It’s too bad I only monitor certain well-known brands.
Keywordspy
Simple and practical website where you can search for domains, keywords, destination URLs or Ads and filter by country.
Thesearchmonitor
Intelligent competition analysis with personalized benchmarks and industry detail, frequent tracking,
SERP performance tracking across devices, market visibility scoring… It allows you to monitor your situation and data on your sector or market thoroughly.
Ahrefs
Tool to increase your search traffic, research competitors and monitor your niche with data on backlinks, referring domains, anchor texts, directing IPs, organic traffic, keywords, websites and competitor domains…
Majestic
Offers a free general report and more detailed paid information on referring domains, anchor texts, backlinks…
Similarweb
Enter your website, and they will automatically indicate other similar ones with notable data such as traffic sources, top content, social mentions, etc.
Alexa
Here, you will find the famous world ranking of websites and some other data.
Google Alerts
Put an alert with the name of your competition to find out about all their news every time they are mentioned in a blog or media, etc.
Mention
Real-time social alerts and content monitoring on websites, news sites and forums.
Socialmention
Explore Socialmention to uncover real-time discussions about a brand across various platforms, including blogs, microblogs, images, videos, questions, and bookmarking sites.
Talkwalker
Get to know your competition, compare their performance on top social channels, and identify the best practices for them.
Commun. It
Analysis of the social perception of the brand and its competitors in real time. You can see the positive or negative comments that are being made.
Fanpagekarma
Analyze your social media profiles and competitors with fan growth comparisons and other interesting data.
Followerwonk
Analyze and compare Twitter users.
SocialBuzz
Find out the mentions, users, and sentiments aroused by each competing brand.
Builtwith
Find out what your competitors’ websites are built with. This will be especially useful for purchasing e-commerce platforms and thus seeing the scalability of each project at the web infrastructure level.
Website Grader
Analyze websites in terms of blogging, social networks, SEO, lead generation and mobile to give them a rating you can have as a reference to compare them all.
Wayback Machine
If you want to analyze the history of a company, you can do so through the evolution of its website. On this page, you have to enter the URL and then select the dates on which you want to see what the website was like to view it.
Tool to track your competition’s emailing campaigns: Who’s mailing what?
Metricool
Analyze your competition on social networks, seeing their evolution on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Turbo Ad Finder
Chrome extension that will allow you to spy on your competition’s ads on Facebook.
Woohoo! 🤩More than 25 tools to analyze websites, social networks, SEO, SEM, advertising, email and other details of the competition
OTHER WAYS TO ANALYZE THE COMPETITION
There is no doubt that there are many tools to analyze the competition with which we can extract meaningful data and information. However, other especially relevant data, such as the sales or profits obtained, are more complicated to locate, although possible.
One of the ways to analyze the competition’s sales process is to become their client as a spy, using the famous mystery shopper technique. It is about putting yourself in the flesh of your client by purchasing a product while analyzing the entire purchasing process.
If you offer a service, or if it is a physical store, the ideal will be that the person who represents the mystery customer is not a person who can be directly related to your company.
Super Trick: Discover the monthly sales of your competition’s e-commerce!
- Make an online purchase on the 1st of the month (Purchase 1).
- Review the assigned order number when you receive the confirmation email for Purchase 1.
- Make an online purchase on the last day of the month (Purchase 2).
- When you receive the confirmation email for Purchase 2, check the assigned order number.
- Check the difference between the order numbers of Purchase 1 and Purchase 2; you will have the total orders received that month.
If you have the option, choose payment by transfer. In this way, you can cancel orders shortly after placing them without any problem.
Remember that by law, you have 15 days to return your purchases. Still, we recommend doing so as soon as possible so as not to cause prejudice to the competing company. We may be considered an activity outside of professional ethics. Likewise, we only recommend using it occasionally, except in specific cases where we want to make a general assessment of the number of sales of our primary competitors.
Suppose you want to analyze your competition’s innovation level, and you are in a sector that moves through patents. In that case, it is effortless for you. You will only have to follow up on new patents through EPO, WIPO or the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office.
(if your market is limited to this territory).
To obtain tax information about your competition, you can go to websites such as Einforma, where you can search for information about any company in the world and extract data such as its company name, number of shareholders, legal form…, and most importantly, the annual balance sheets of accounts. You can also obtain this information from the European Business Registry and each US country’s national commercial registries or similar institutions.
