8 Competitor Analysis Tools for your Brand

If you have been following this space you know we have been laying emphasis on how important competitive analysis and benchmarking are. It is not just us, there’s a very similar saying attributed to Petrarch (as well as Sun Tzu) which goes “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. Competitor analysis is essential for brand survival and the ready availability of digital data makes the process easier.

In this blog post, we try to put forth our top picks for competitor analysis tools and explain why it must be tried.

Qualities to Look for in Competitor Analysis Tools

Competitor analysis tools are available by the dozens. The best pick would be one that serves your defined goals and needs. Here are some important features we considered while picking out our favorites.

Metrics

A superficial comparison of likes, shares, and comments is not enough to truly judge the performance of a brand. An enterprise tool can offer you deeper insights into demographics and psychographics. These insights tell you what consumers are interested in, and highlight the content with which they are actively engaging and so on. Also, sentiment analysis tells you if your focus is in the correct direction.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis can guide your way to win your customers’ hearts. Take the data and apply sentiment analysis to it to find the strongest reactions. The extreme points in positive and negative sentiments will give you a wholesome idea of how to solve your customer’s problems.

Content Analysis

Just like you, your competitors are also on social media. What content are they posting? How are they performing online? What channels are they on? Be sure to look at every aspect of your competitors’ online marketing efforts. Benchmarking against the top brands with maximum reach online can help you understand the improvements you could make to your approach.

Top Competitor Analysis Tools

Which tool to finally invest in? What are your needs? Rest assured there is a tool for every purpose and you will find one that caters to your needs. Here are some top picks.

Auris

Auris is a complete package for social listening with specially tailored features to make competitor analysis smoother. Simply feed in the names of competitors, their facebook URLs, Twitter handles and so on. And you are all set. Auris fetches you the data from across the channels all on the same dashboard. The tool features two tabs for deeper analysis. A comparison dashboard and one which displays the activities of your rivals.

The comparison dashboard brings you elaborate charts explaining the reach, engagement rates, and estimated media spends for posts made by your rivals. Auris also allows you to calculate your share of voice and share of mind against your competitors’. This information tool is available free for a test run.

Phlanx

Phlanx is an influencer auditing tool specially designed for Instagram. It is a useful tool for brands that depend most on Instagram. Phlanx helps you audit influencer accounts by tracking the genuineness of the accounts. Checks whether their follower base consists mostly of fake followers and bots. Tracks their active followers and engagement rate to check if they are the right influencers for your brand. The tool also provides a detailed account of engagement rates from across an array of other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Twitch.

Rival IQ

In their own words, Rival IQ focuses on making social and SEO data easier to analyze and act upon. Rival IQ lets you compare your brand to competitors with respect to social channels, audience growth, rankings, activities et cetera. Rival IQ allows you to look at key insights like top-performing posts, activities, and engagement metrics.

Social Blade

Social blade ranks you and your competitors based on social media statistics gained from platforms like Youtube, Instagram, Twitch, Dailymotion, Mixer, and Twitter. You can view a summary of metrics like subscriber rank, monetization estimates, and an overall rank based on the number of views and rate of new subscribers. This platform also allows you to search based on specific locations and categories. If you want to know about the top YouTubers in Australia, Social blade can help set up the search.

Owletter

Owletter makes spying on your competitor’s email strategies easier. Most marketers have subscribed to the newsletters from competitor brands. This effort is to catch a glimpse of your competitor’s strategies and yet they miss out on so much data. With Owletter, brands can understand when their competitors are sending out promotional emails, seasonal changes in emailing strategies, the reputation of a brand email for SPAM et cetera. The longer you use Owletter, the more historical data is available and the more robust your reports are going to be.

Competeshark

Competeshark allows brands to monitor their rivals in real-time and play copycats if they choose to. Without needing to physically visit a competitor’s website and comparing changes. With Competeshark, the process has been automated. They visit your competitor’s websites, reports and so on and study the changes. You can stay updated on price changes, layout changes, design changes or any new trends your competitor is following.

Datanyze

Datanyze specializes in “technographics” which is where they analyze data to your advantage and tell you where to seel what and to whom. The analysis they provide includes email marketing, advertising, and eCommerce capabilities. Unlike other tools that use demographic data, Datanyze uses technographic data to capture buying signals.

Wappalyzer

This is one of the tools many marketers are using these days. Wappalyzer goes beyond the realm of social media to analyze competitive data for you. This tool looks into specifics like web frameworks, content management systems, server software and so on. If you wish to know how your rivals are managing their data stream Wappalyzer may be able to help you.

Depending on your requirements and budget you might have gained a fair idea about your ideal tool by now. If you are thinking about whether or not to invest, you have to keep an eye on your competitor. It has to be done either manually or you can choose to opt for an automated tool. Most of these tools can be customized with bespoke filters and options to cater to your needs whether you want to track influencer or monitor brand mentions on the same platform.

Steps to Analyze your Competition on Social Media

Competitive analysis is the process where you categorize and test your rival brands. It involves using a collection of metrics to understand their strengths and weaknesses. This is also called competitive benchmarking. You look to define the best practices and compare your own brand’s performance.

The benefits are undeniable. The better you know your rivals, the better is your chance to surpass them as market leaders. The concept is simple, the process is a little more complicated. Competitive analysis ranges over many areas, metrics, and orders. The more extensive your research the more effective your competitive analysis.

Here we attempt to discuss the steps to competitive analysis in detail.

How to Perform a Competitive Analysis?

Competitive analysis can be as exhaustive as you wish it to be. It is important to have an organized view of which metrics would be the most useful for you. Competitive analysis will allow you to know when your competitor is doing well or losing. Both these times are a good time for you to check your standing against theirs.

Choosing the Right KPIs

The first step is to know which metrics you should be focusing on. Think about your business and what KPIs could be an indicator of bigger outcomes. Say you notice a drop in your share of voice/engagement rate. Check if you are doing something wrong or your competitor is trying something better. Keep comparing your performance to your past performance and to your competitor’s results.

Consult all other departments to know what metrics are useful to them. This is how you put together a wholesome list of KPIs. You can track them and share them with most of the departments in the company.

Identify your Primary Competitors

You will already have a list of your competitors but is it comprehensive? Have you considered all the criteria? You have two types of competitors – direct (primary) and indirect (secondary). Your direct competitors are the ones that are selling the same product as you. And to the same audience and even the same geographic location. An indirect competitor may be selling the same or similar products but targeting a different audience. Your relation with your competitors differs hence whom to include depends on what you wish to get out of it.

You can start benchmarking against your closest competitors. These are the companies closest to you in size, success, and structure. Benchmark yourself against them to get a fair sense of the companies you are up against. This qualifies as your near or mid-future planning.

You might have bigger ambitions than winning against your closest competitors. Its time to look at the best players in the industry. Competitive analysis can put forth an analysis of how well they are doing and how you can reach them. It isn’t going to be easy to follow the best in one day. The competitive analysis gives you a foundation on which you can build further.

Metrics To Consider

Before delving into the absolute nitty-gritty of competitive analysis, learn about the basic stats. First, get a general overview that tells you about the competitor, their size, followers, activity, reach et cetera. This helps you establish a preliminary comparison between you and your rival.

With time you can delve deeper and research further data points. The most commonly available data covers their revenue, the number of clients, fields of operations etcetera. If the company publicly listed, you can access their annual reports to track their financial records and performance.

As for their marketing messages, track them across the channels they use and identify the audience they target. Use social media monitoring to measure their brand mentions and to gauge their reach, their share of voice, and their share of mind and engagement rates.

SEO and Keywords

Google offers the most successful way to gain organic traffic. You will need to check your competitor’s SEO. In other words, how well do they rank on Google? Next, check the keywords they are ranking for. Lots of SEO and social listening tools will give you an overview of the domain/top keywords used.

Once you have a general idea of the ranking of all your competitors, you can start chalking out your strategy. SEO is the greatest way to earn organic traffic and revenue. Hence ranking high on google can never go wrong and actually goes on to show you’re doing well.

In conclusion, we would say that competitive analysis does take a lot of hard work but the fruits are worth it. The insights will help you know how to differentiate yourself and compete against your competitors.