A Complete Guide to Competitor Monitoring Tools

One of the essential things that any business should do is to keep track of their competitors. Whether it is their progress or their downfall, if they are your competitors, you would have to know it all.

You can monitor their social presence, their marketing strategies, how they deal with their influencers, etc. This will help you stay on top of your game and ahead of your competitors. This can be done with the help of competitor monitoring tools.

Several such tools in the market can help you access the performance and movement of your competitors without much effort.

Which Competitors Should You Analyze?

This must be a confusing question for you as you already know who your competitors are. However, most businesses only try to keep track of their direct competitors. However, there are other sections of competitors that you need to pay attention to.

If you want to establish your business in the market, you would have to focus on three different categories of competitors.

Direct Competitors

These are the competitors that every business focuses on. These businesses belong to the same line of product that you do and also in the same price range.

For example, if you are a business who deals in women garments, then your direct competitor would be another business that has the same products within your price range.

Indirect Competitors

Indirect competitors are those who have alternate products or services but focus on the same goal. These businesses would mostly belong to the same industry but will have different products from that of yours.

For example, if you are a pizza shop, then your indirect competitor would be a burger joint. Both of your businesses have the same goal, which is to feed people. However, the products you offer to the customer are different and may also have a comparative price structure.

Replacement Competitors

These competitors are the ones that have a different product but provide the same solution at the same price range. They are your biggest obstacle when it comes to market analysis since these competitors tend to be unpredictable.

For example, businesses dealing with smartphones and cameras are replacement competitors for each other. With the emergence of new technology, smartphones have been equipped with high-end camera features. This means that customers may replace their demand for a digital camera with a smartphone of the same budget.

Understand and monitoring all these three categories of competitors will help you get a clearer idea about their strategies.

What Will You Monitor?

After you have shortlisted your competitors, the next question that arises is what you need to monitor. On a broader aspect, you know that you would have to focus on their social media presence and strategies.

However, you do have to know which areas you have to focus specifically on are. This is necessary to decide competitor monitoring tools that you will require for the same. Once you set the required parameters, the tool will do its job and provide you with the necessary insights.

Marketing Campaigns

This should be the first thing to monitor on your list. It goes without saying that getting a detailed analysis of your competitor’s campaigns would help you manage your campaigns. Whenever they launch a new campaign or product, you should get all details about it.

Through the analysis, you will be able to know if they are successful in their approach. Using the right monitoring tool, you will get insights on the reach of your competitor’s campaign. You will also understand how many people have reacted to this.

Moreover, you will also be able to see how the public is responding to their campaign. You could either focus on the individual reactions of the people or go for an overall analysis.

 Social Media Presence

The next thing that you would have to monitor is the social media presence of your competitor. Social media presence means the media channels where your competitors are highly active. This would also include the social media marketing strategies that the business adopts.

This would be the easiest thing to monitor as you will have to focus on the common social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Check the kinds of images or posts that they upload in their social media accounts.

Moreover, you would have to check the kind of engagement that they have with their customers. If they are successful in their approach, then you could follow on the same lines. Furthermore, certain businesses put in a lot of focus on sites such as Reddit, which can turn into a huge success.

Customer Service

The kind of customer service that your competitor provides on social media would receive a lot of attraction. Here, if a business can take the right approach, then they would be able to grab the interest of several customers.

There are certain businesses whose customer service responses have gone viral. This is either due to their amazing approach or their failure in satisfying the customer’s needs. You would have to know both so that you can decide on the tone that you would take up to reach your customers.

If you have a dedicated customer support team, make sure you share these insights with them. This way, you will be able to establish the same tone with the responses done with the customers online.

Competitor Content

Your competitors’ content would include their website content, blogs, articles, etc. If they have an official website, make sure you keep an eye on that for any structural or design changes.

You would also have to see the kinds of blogs or articles that they post on their website or any other platform. This would help you form your content marketing strategy successfully. Moreover, by using competitor monitoring tools, you will be able to check where they are sharing their content and the approaches that they have adopted.

Influencers

Influencers play a very important role in promoting brand image. They are individuals who promote the product or the service of a particular brand through their personal social media channels.

If an influencer is promoting your brand, then their followers will most likely become your potential customers. Influencers have the power to both increase or decrease your brand image. An influencer can also give a bad review of your product. In such cases, there are chances that you may lose certain customers who follow that influencer.

This is why you need to monitor their influencer marketing strategy to see what the impact it is creating on their business. Remember that all influencers will not be paid or hired by the company to promote their brand. Some individuals would just be fans who will talk good about your competitors’ brand.

Furthermore, check out if any unhappy customers are giving a bad review of the business. This would enable you to learn from your competitors’ mistakes and build a solid influencer marketing strategy.

Benefits of Monitoring Your Competitors

If you are still unsure about why you should monitor your competitor, then there is just one word that you should focus on – awareness. You know all about your business, your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. But do you know the same about your competitors?

If you don’t, then it is time to start being aware of these aspects. Not only will it help you realize how strong your competitor is, but it will also help you strengthen your business. To make this clearer, below are certain benefits that you would get from using competitor monitoring tools.

Create Your PR List

The hardest thing that you will face if you are a new or growing business is to build an established PR media list. It is undeniable that you need the help of media channels to help spread the word around about your brand.

Even if you are focusing on online media marketing, you will need a strong press connection to help increase your brand reputation. Tracking the PR coverage of your competitor would help you build this list.

You will know the journalists or the media channels that your competitor has a connection with. Some press channels regularly focus on your industry, and these are the ones that would work in your favor.

Know Their Content Marketing Strategy

Every business has a content marketing strategy that they follow. If you have established your strategy and want to check the success rate, then you can compare it to the strategies of your competitors.

Moreover, you can follow the steps that they have taken to establish the strategy. See the areas that they have covered, such as their official website, blogs, classifieds, etc. Check the regularity of these posts.

See the level of engagement that they have with their customers. Also, check out for any popular hashtags or keywords that are doing the rounds in association with your competitors’ brand.

These steps will help you understand if you should follow the marketing structure of your competitor, or you can build a better strategy than them. No matter what you do, make sure that the strategy you build is in line with your business idea.

Check Their Backlinks

Knowing which of the contents are getting backlinks is essential for a better-formed SEO strategy. There might be some blogs or posts that people are finding useful. These users can then link the content and spread it around.

You can check out these links to see the keywords or the theme that is garnering the attention of the people. Once you have done that, you can form a stronger SEO marketing strategy to focus on your customer base.

Generate New Leads

Monitoring your competitor will not only help you in understanding their strategy but would also be profitable for you in terms of actual sales. You will be able to figure out what the public is talking about them in social media platforms.

Just like every other business, your competitor would also have certain unhappy customers. With the right marketing strategy, you could turn these unhappy customers into leads for your business.

To do this, you have to see the reason which has made the customer offended with the brand. If you can provide a solution to the problem, then you can approach the customer. However, make sure that you can provide a satisfactory solution to make the customer happy.

If not, this unhappy customer would do more harm to your brand name than good. Hence when you are targeting an unhappy and frustrated customer, ensure that you have the right solutions.

Collect Product Feedback

Getting product feedback from your customers is essential to see how your product is being perceived by them. However, you must do the same for your competitor to check their approach towards their customers.

This is essential mostly for direct competitors where the products, as well as the budget, are the same. By doing this, you will be able to know the gaps in your competitors’ products and check for the same on your own.

Additionally, you can avoid any missteps related to your product and establish better features that will be liked by the customers. This can be done by monitoring the social media handles of the competitor. Keep a special eye on any dedicated customer support account that your competitor may have for customer complaints and feedback.

You can avoid many marketing mishaps that occur with the help of many different monitoring tools. By monitoring your competitors, you will be able to stay one step ahead of them. Either you will able they take a leaf out of their books if they are doing good, or be aware of their mistakes and not do those yourself.

Moreover, it will broaden your idea about the different marketing strategies that you could adopt. If there are certain interesting strategies that you have not thought about, then you can try those to see their effectiveness for your business.

Using Keyword Monitoring Software

Keyword monitoring is one of the most common and important ways to check the social media presence of your competitor. Keywords are certain words that are related to your competitors’ business.

These keywords can be the name of their brand, their product or service name, their business idea, their tagline, or any campaign that they are involved in. Keywords are essential to know the search ranking of a particular brand.

The public uses keywords to search the brand or even talk about the brand. You may see that customers are using hashtags or mentions using a certain keyword to talk positive or negative about a brand.

Getting Insights Using a Keyword Monitoring Tool

You can get much useful information by using the right keyword monitoring tool. The tool would help you track down the necessary details from every social media site that has mentioned the competitors’ names.

You can set certain keywords that you want insights on. Make sure that you also include any common misspellings that are used for these keywords. If your competitor is engaging in some new marketing campaigns, then you can search for keywords related to this campaign. This will help you know the involvement of the customers and how successful the campaign is.

Importance of Keyword Monitoring

Keyword monitoring has become an essential part of any brand monitoring system. If you want to know about the overall customer reaction towards a brand, then keyword monitoring is the right step.

Through this, you can judge the performance level of the brand and also the different steps that they take to make their customers happy. Even if they fail in some of their strategies, you can use this failure for your betterment.

Setting up alerts related to keyword results will keep you updated regarding any new development of your competitor. You will instantly know that the brand is being tagged or mentioned in any post.

Brand Tracking Software for Competitor Monitoring

Brand tracking is the process of quantifying a marketing strategy or campaign and turning it into a sale. Businesses nowadays are focusing more and more on brand tracking instead of just on their products.

Through brand tracking, a business will be able to get in touch with their core customers and retain them through successful marketing strategies. These strategies or campaigns come with a positive and empowering message through their products or services.

Benefits of Competitor Brand Tracking

Successfully indulging in competitor’s brand tracking would help you understand their brand message. You can see the ways that they use to connect with their customers on an emotional level.

For successful brand tracking, you would have to use the best brand tracking tools. These tools will give you insights on consumer behavior, purchase patterns, and interest concerning your competitors.

Depending on the collected data, you can form the brand messages that will help you build a connection with your customers. Furthermore, through brand tracking your competitors, you will be able to elevate your brand through positive measures.

Measuring Internet Reputation of Competitors

If you think that internet reputation is a qualitative factor and cannot be measured, think again. Like every other aspect of a business, even an internet brand reputation can be measured by using certain metrics.

You can do it for yourself, and you can even measure the internet reputation of your competitors. Even though there is no fixed formula to measure the same, you can do so with the help of certain tools.

Metrics for Measuring Internet Reputation

Three main metrics are used through which you can measure the internet reputation of your competitor.

Social Media Reach

This includes the people that your competitor has reached through the use of different social media channels. The measurement for this is done by calculating the number of followers and likes that the brand has on their social media accounts.

You can determine the popularity of your competitors’ brand by knowing the number of people they have reached.

Share of Voice

This is a very popular metric that is used by PR professionals and can help calculate the reputation of the brand. For this, you would have to divide the number of statements about the brand by the number of statements about the industry.

Through this, you will be able to understand the awareness level of your competitors’ brand among the public.

Sentiment Analysis

This metric helps in determining both the negative and positive sentiments related to your competitors’ brand. You can find out the weaknesses as well as the strength of the particular brand.

By using these metrics, you will be able to measure the current status of any brand. Remember that reputation can change frequently. Hence, keep your records updated so that you can keep up with the changes of the competitor.

Internet Reputation Monitoring Tools

The metrics alone would not be enough for you to calculate the internet reputation of your competitors’. You will need a good tool that will help you get the desired results. There are several internet reputation monitoring tools in the market that are made for this job.

You will find many other features or metrics that are present in different tools that will help you determine the internet reputation. For a successful approach, make sure that you invest only in a good monitoring tool.

To Sum Up

Knowing about your competitor through the use of a competitor monitoring tool is necessary to build your brand. The details and results that you receive from this analysis will help you in your brand growth.

While choosing the monitoring tool for your business, ensure that it has all the necessary features and options for calculating the brand reputation and performance. Once you have your monitoring tool and your plan, it is time to start acting on it.

Choose brands from different competitor categories to have a widespread analysis structure. Set up alerts to get an instant notification if there is any new information regarding your competitor.

Keep your plans flexible to adjust it according to the information that you derive by monitoring your competitor. Adapt to the changes so that you can build an updated marketing strategy for your brand.

Grow your brand reputation by monitoring your competitor using the right competitor monitoring tool!