Business

Top 18 Competitive Intelligence Tools for Advanced Market Research

Published

12 months ago

July 7, 2021

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Competitive intelligence tools can turn the luxury of custom market research into a regular practice for many small and medium businesses.

Hiring a separate analyst or ordering a ‘state of a report could be a heavy burden for such businesses, so the very best competitor research solutions can end up being a good alternative.

This post has compiled a set of the top tools for high-level market research and online competitor analysis. They can help you gain insight into your competition, collect marketing growth ideas in several clicks, and ultimately achieve your organization’s goals.

Tools for Top-Level Market Research

Competitive Landscape

Your target market is more than just individuals you want to reach. The key players in the competitive landscape (those other established businesses, in addition to newcomers) play a crucial role in shaping your success.

As a result, you shouldn’t only research the market size or customer segments and understand every business that desires to outperform you.

Three competitive intelligence tools can help you conduct this research quickly and effectively:

Crunchbase

Crunchbase lets you access information regarding private and public companies, review market and industry trends, and spot hot newcomers entering your space.

With Crunchbase, you can evaluate the data about competitors you already know about.

Also, you can explore beyond your familiar landscape using various filters to find more competitors in your industry and region.

Craft

With Craft, you can unlock historical insights about companies. From growth as time passes, social presence, and brand trends to promote positioning, and latest news, Craft enables you to preview how a particular competitor of yours has been growing and gaining market share.

What’s more, all data in this market research tool is reported in real-time, providing you an up-to-date snapshot of the company.

Semrush Market Explorer

The market analysis tool from Semrush only requires a company’s website to start researching the whole market. When you enter the domain, Market Explorer sets the corresponding industry players and organic competitors.

Suggested rivals are split into four categories in the Growth Quadrant, based on their website’s audience size and growth rate.

Semrush Market Explorer offers more in-depth precisely competitors’ traffic statistics, market trends, and audience characteristics.

Market Trends

In business, timing is everything. Staying along with market seasonality, new trends, and emerging audience interests is beyond critical to communicating with the market effectively.

You must continuously measure and monitor shifts in user preferences to plan strategies that deliver the best message to the best people at the best time. Luckily, you can spot those by analyzing what other brands publish on topics highly relevant to your offering. You can research market trends with these tools::

Google Alerts

The search engine’s tool lets you monitor the web for new content on any topic — from your business’s section of expertise to entertainment and general interests. You can also use Google Alerts to monitor what’s being said about your exact product category, brand, or competitors.

Talkwalker Alerts

Talkwalker Alerts works similarly to Google’s tool. Its results also include tweets, further expanding the insights you can glean.

The tool has in-built analytics that could filter the most crucial mentions and send them to you by email to prevent an alert overload.

As a more complex step, you could consider extending your subscription to the whole Talkwalker platform to improve your market research by increasing social listening data and insights.

Market and Competitor News

Every day and every hour, your competitors create new content. While some of it ends on their blogs, other pieces might appear in top industry publications and other outlets.

Wherever the publication took place, you can stay updated on the brand new content with a competitive analysis tool.

Feedly

Feedly is straightforward to use, and yet it is a versatile news and RSS reader. It lets you follow blogs and publications and get regular updates of any new content they publish. You can group by channel, rendering it simple to track specific competitors.

You can also get keyword alerts for the competitor’s brand, products, industry, or other topics you care about. Feedly has a robust mobile app, too, meaning that there isn’t to be glued to your personal computer to track the competitor’s content and news.

Tools for Competitive Marketing Intelligence

Competitor’s Digital Marketing Strategies and Tactics

What’s the shortest path to understanding your web visitors, their needs, preferences, or buying behavior? It is simple — look at what your competitors are doing and which strategies generate the most significant results.

Like, you know which channels drive the most traffic to your competitor’s website will reveal where you should focus your efforts. Understanding which countries their highest traffic comes from can help you plan international marketing campaigns. What tool could give you competitive Intelligence of this kind?

Semrush Traffic Analytics

Traffic Analytics is just a competitive intelligence tool from Semrush that allows you to check website traffic and analyze any company’s marketing efforts. This way, you’ll find out where they invest the absolute most resources and use that insight to power your online strategy.

All you want to accomplish is enter anyone to five domains in the tool. You are sure to get reports on the absolute most critical website traffic metrics — several visitors, user engagement, audience overlap, traffic sources, top landing pages, geo-distribution, destination sites, and subdomains. This data can help you reveal other companies’ strategies and tactics at length and detect their business partners, affiliate programs, backlinks providers, and more.

For more insights on competitors marketing campaigns and activities on specific channels, use more tools from the Semrush Competitive Research solution. Specifically, it can highlight other companies advertising expenses, SEO and social media marketing performance, and content gaps.

Email Strategies

Email is just a critical channel for customer communication, engagement, and sales. Your competitors could be taking full benefit of it. They may be sending irresistible offers, promotions, announcing services, and many other strategies to interact and convert more of their subscribers.

Unfortunately, unless you know what they do, there’s little chance that you could match or outdo their efforts.

The newsletter is just a fantastic competitive intelligence tool in the sense that it captures all emails of a specified website, analyzes them, and alerts you of anything important to you.

You can deep dive into your competitor’s offers, promotions, product announcements, and some other communications with their list with the tool. And you can do it at scale and never having to be actively subscribed to their newsletters.

Based on all this data, you can discover what engages the audience — from subject lines that make them open those emails to this content that entices them to do something — and use this insight to drive better results yourself.

Video Marketing

This goes without saying; if done right, video can boost engagement, brand recognition, conversions, and generate revenue, but that is provided that you get it done right. The issue for most people is determining whether their video marketing strategies are working well enough or not. One way would be to benchmark your performance contrary to the competition.

Tubular

Tubular Intelligence, a part of the Tubular platform, delivers the info you’ll need to understand your video performance in the context of your competition and helps identify new approaches to grow your audience.

Tubular continuously analyzes 14 million video publishers across an entire array of industries. With all the platforms, you obtain access to dozens of insights and unravel your audience’s content preferences centered on top-performing videos. Demographics data enables you to discover your audience and even show your potential audience overlap with other publishers.

Website Stack

Technology will give a company a significant competitive advantage. The proper content management system can help deliver content to users faster. With better marketing research tools, a company can gain more in-depth insights into its user’s behavior and hone its initiatives.

A number of the web technologies are easy to spot, needless to say (mainly if you are using an identical stack already). Others require expert knowledge to identify on a website.

Overall, it is recommended to know what technologies your competitors use on the website. And here’s one excellent tool that allows you to get it done in a jiffy.

Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is just a simple browser extension that analyzes and reports on what technologies are utilized on a site. The tool can detect this content management system or an e-commerce platform used, web frameworks, server software, analytics tools, advertising networks, cache tools, CRMs, dev tools, CDNs, and quite a bit more. The complete set of supported technologies is impressive.

With Wappalyzer, you will never wonder how your competitors make their website and how they gain insights about users to improve it even further.

Changes to a Website

The critical role a website plays in conversions and business growth is irrefutable. With it, you attract the target market and convey your message to the source. It’s where you present your offers and convinces them to convert, be it purchase directly or by having an inquiry.

And also ensures that you (and competitors) will probably test and try new ways to improve the internet site to attain your conversion goals. Naturally, monitoring a competitor’s website manually will be too time-consuming. Luckily, several competitive intelligence tools may get it done for you.

Visualizing

Visualizing is a simple tool that lets you select a location on a webpage and get notified when that section changes. You may also choose at what frequency you intend to receive updates – out of every 5 minutes to once a week. Visualizing will check that area at that predefined interval and email you when it detects changes to the selected location.

Deep Dive Duck

Deep Dive Duck is just a more technical tool, explicitly designed to monitor overall changes on competitor websites. It tracks up to 10 competitor websites at once and tracks 100 pages on each competitor’s website. The tool will report on an entire array of changes, including new workers added location changes, pricing changes, new service ranges, and many more.

The tool will then give you a weekly email highlighting any changes detected, providing you an overview of what’s been happening on your competitor’s websites.

Competeshark

Competeshark differs from both competitive intelligence tools above by allowing you to monitor changes to a competitor’s website in real-time. The device will visit your designated competitor’s websites and notify you of changes like content updates, layout changes, or new promotions.

The truly unique feature is the capacity to begin to see the before and after of every change. Utilizing a visual slider, you can preview the new version and usually the one before it to gauge the depth of the change in detail.

Cloud Infrastructure

Knowing how much money your competitors spend money on cloud infrastructure and digital products can highlight their strategies. For example, knowing what email platform your competitors use and the precise price plan they’re on can suggest the extent of the email strategy. A company employing a primary email platform on the free program will utilize the channel differently than the one with a comprehensive platform; these details can help give you a competitive edge.

Intricately

Intricately is exclusive in so it analyzes cloud infrastructure and reports on metrics like the products used, spend Intelligence, renewals, and usage details.

Furthermore, Intricately may also analyze the competitor’s product usage and notify you where they gain market share and growth globally.

App Performance Analysis

If you give you a mobile app, then gaining mobile market intelligence is beyond critical. You must know which markets generate the absolute most downloads and app revenue and which of your competitors gain market share and experience growth of downloads, revenue, usage, and engagement.

Additionally, you need to keep track of any newcomers that may threaten your app’s position on the market. Listed here are two apps that enable you to do it all effortlessly.

AppAnnie

AppAnnie delivers mobile market data you need to use to operate a vehicle, more downloads, revenue, and gain a competitive edge in the industry. It contains several products with Intelligence delivering the market data to uncover growth opportunities from competitive insights.

AppMagic

AppMagic is another mobile market intelligence tool. It enables you to compare the performance of apps and publishers to spot the trends and patterns to operate a vehicle for your growth strategies.

With AppMagic, you can investigate your competitor’s revenue, downloads, and other metrics, correlate the information and analytics to locate ideas and opportunities for future development.

E-Сommerce Pricing and Product Intelligence

E-сommerce has turned into a crowded market. Unfortunately, with so many internet vendors selling the same products, you face harsh price competition. Consequently, you have to alter fees frequently to always offer the absolute most compelling prices in the market.

The thing is that monitoring all your competitor’s prices daily can be an impossible task. How can you do it and keep track of 1000s of products across so many stores? Well, you can find tools for that too.

Prisync

Prisync is just a pricing software for e-commerce stores. It monitors simply how much your competitors sell the same products as you for, as well as their stock availability, reports on that by way of a beautiful dashboard, and gives you email alerts.

With Prisync, you can track prices across all your competitors and for every product you sell and act immediately on any promotions or price changes they make.

BlueBoard

BlueBoard not only offers price tracking for e-commerce but expands those insights with additional data — assortment tracking.

With BlueBoard, an e-commerce store can monitor their competitors’ prices, track competing products, and their very own to know the way the competition structures their product range and identify new distribution opportunities based on the competitor’s strategies.

Any Competitive Analysis Tools Missing?

Exist other competitive intelligence solutions you recommend for market research? We’d love to learn which tools you utilize and how they subscribe to your brand’s success.

Business

SpaceX has reportedly fired employees who were critical of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The report.

Published

7 days ago

June 18, 2022

Kainat Mughal

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SpaceX, the rocket ship business controlled by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has fired several employees involved with an unsigned letter that condemned the flamboyant billionaire for his behavior. According to reports in the media,

SpaceX, The rocket ship business managed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has fired several employees who were involved with an unsigned letter that condemned the billionaire’s colorful personality for his conduct, According to reports in the media.

The news reports released on Friday reported an email sent by Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s chief executive, claiming that the company had dismissed employees who had written and distributed the letter. The letter’s authors criticized Musk for his actions, which they claimed are a “frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks.”

The New York Times was the first newspaper to publish a report on the purge based on details from three employees who knew about the incident. The employees were not identified.

It’s unclear how many SpaceX employees were fired; however, Shotwell did not conceal the fact that the company thought they had crossed an unacceptable threshold.

“The letter, solicitations, and general process made employees feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views,” Shotwell wrote in her email, as reported by the Times. “We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism.”

The dismissals took place on Thursday. The exact day Musk spoke to Twitter users for the first time regarding the USD44 billion deal that he had signed to bring the social media platform to his empire of business. The agreement is still in doubt as Musk investigates whether Twitter hides the number of fake accounts on its platform.

While the Twitter drama unfolded, there was a report the following day that Musk was able to pay USD250,000 for a female flight attendant to stop a possible sexual harassment suit against Musk. Musk has denied the accusations of sexual harassment, and in the last month, Shotwell sent an email message to SpaceX employees stating that she believed the allegations were false.

In the past few weeks, Musk has also crudely mocked the appearance of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on Twitter and posted an emoji with poop during a discussion online in which he was joined by Twitter the CEO Parag Agrawal.

The open letter written by SpaceX employees that criticized Musk said that Musk’s tweets to his followers of 98 million painted SpaceX in a bad image.

“As our CEO and most prominent spokesperson, Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX. Every tweet that Elon sends is a de facto public statement by the company,” the letter reads. “It is essential to communicate to our employees and the potential employees that Elon’s messages do not reflect our mission as a company, our mission, or our beliefs.

Business

10 Legal Steps Every Small Business Should Take.

Published

1 week ago

June 18, 2022

Kainat Mughal

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Are you thinking of opening the first mortgage broker of your own? If you’re an entrepreneur, you are an exceptional breed. Do not be afraid to dream big and risk-taking chances. You know that common sense is the way to the top job: running your own company.

Before transforming your idea into reality, ensure that you are on track by following these simple steps to begin your small-scale business, increase your profits and minimize the risk you take.

1. Decide on a Business Type

The kind of entity you select for your business — whether you’re a sole proprietorship or partnership, a limited liability corporation, or an s-corporation will determine how you file your taxes and provides legal safeguards, and, most importantly, restricts your liability. You also record your details with the federal government when you incorporate your business.

2. Protect Yourself With a Business Prenup

Are you launching with a partner? Buy-sell agreements protect everyone from situations that may complicate ownership. If one of the partners wants to leave divorced, divorced, or dies, The buy-sell understanding could help avoid difficult conditions in which ownership shares are transferred to the wrong party.

3. Map Out a Corporate Blueprint

Corporate bylaws outline the organization of your small-scale business. Are you a member of an executive board and shareholders or any other corporate officers? Corporate bylaws put all the ducks in a row and define the meeting rules and timetable. This is the blueprint of your business.

4. Draft a Solid Business Plan

Business plans serve two purposes. They provide an outline that will help you remain focused on your small-business goals and strategies. They can also be used to pitch to investors and banks if you require some money.

5. Protect Your Secrets

As you begin to hire individuals and create collaborations with other businesses or contractors, a non-disclosure contract protects your private information from being misused. It also defines the information that is acceptable to disclose.

6. Stay Compliant With Corporate Minutes

States have a requirement that some document is kept of the discussions and decisions made during official meetings of shareholders and boards. Corporate minutes documents can record all the details to be registered so that your business complies with all regulations.

7. Manage Expectations With an Employment Agreement

Small businesses need people to prosper, and an employment contract safeguards all parties by putting expectations into writing. The claims of discrimination and injuries are rising. Even though employment agreements aren’t able to prevent the possibility of lawsuits, they do minimize risk by defining the rules, obligations, and expectations of everyone.

8. Expand Your Abilities With Independent Contractors

Certain circumstances require special assistance, such as the design of graphics or PR. If you employ someone who isn’t an employee for some help, such as an independent contractor agreement, it can ensure everyone is on the same page moving forward.

9. Settle on a Location

The saying goes that it’s all about location, especially in the case of businesses that have clients, sell products, or offers services on-site. Commercial real estate leasing can help ensure that the rental contract is sturdy and that the relationship between the landlord and tenant is secure.

10. Plan Ahead

Your small-scale business can be a significant asset and a source of personal income. If something happens, you need to make a testamentary will to protect your family and business from unnecessary costs, taxation, estate taxes, and possible disputes.

If you are on the road toward entrepreneurship, you may encounter situations where you may need some advice from an expert. Find a SCORE mentor who will guide you in the proper direction.

Business

5 Ways to Grow Your MSP Business.

Published

1 week ago

June 16, 2022

Kainat Mughal

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As companies look for new ways to boost profit and revenue, They are increasingly turning towards managed service companies (MSPs) to manage the essential IT tasks. In the end, MSPs are expected to grow in the MSP market is predicted to grow to more than $300 billion over five years.

Naturally, when the market expands and competition increases between MSP firms. How can an MSP company stand out and make the most of the growing demand for these services?

Here are some suggestions for MSPs seeking to ensure that their MSP business grows with the market’s demand.

1. Know your customers.

Although businesses that sell goods benefit from loyal customers who come back repeatedly, the customer relationship is more important for MSPs. Clients entrust the continuous health of their business to the services you offer, and therefore you must know your customers’ objectives and requirements thoroughly. If your customers know they are genuinely concerned about their success, they’ll take care of your marketing.

A thorough understanding of your customers ‘ needs does more than help you deliver superior service. It helps you know your ideal customers and allows you to better identify your value proposition to future customers- a process that is notoriously difficult for many companies.

Utilize your existing relationships to construct perfect customer profiles. This will allow you to focus your marketing budget on clients with whom the likelihood of closing the deal is high, thereby increasing the return on investment from the marketing. Scattershot marketing campaigns can bring you new customers; however, they’re generally more costly and less effective than targeted marketing campaigns targeting potential customers who are already primed to be listened to.

Knowing who your clients are is essential when you are developing your offerings. Based on the lessons you have learned from your relationships with clients and interactions, you can enhance your services and focus on the ones that your clients (and likely future customers) are most interested in, the ones which make them want to choose to work with you instead of another MSP.

2. Align values.

ESG (environmental, social, societal, and governance) aspects are becoming increasingly important for shareholders and clients in the present business climate. Organizations that can show potential customers that they share objectives in this area can get an advantage in concluding a deal.

One of the most critical aspects of understanding your customers is their preferences and how your company fits those values. For many clients, it is vital to demonstrate an interest in the diversity of your customers. For some, it’s crucial to consider reducing your business’s carbon footprint. In the case of others, it’s a commitment to your local community.

Consider whether your ESG initiatives can be a practical element in your proposition of value and branding. If you think yes, it is, then you must promote common values when marketing if you don’t consider whether you should rethink how your business handles ESG.

3. Always reinforce your client relations.

Maintaining the satisfaction of your current customers is as crucial as bringing on new customers. Reducing the number of clients who leave your company reduces stress on your finances and your employees’ time (and probably the time you spend). Happy clients will help introduce you to or promote your business to potential buyers.

Building solid relationships with your clients involves more than simply calling your clients whenever you need to or when there’s an issue. Finding “authentic reasons” to contact your clients is much easier than you imagine. There are plenty of ways to keep in constant contact with your customers without feeling like you’re intrusive.

For instance:

Offer them relevant information: Customers love content, provided it’s not general. In reality, they are open to information that will assist their business or is pertinent to their interests. Therefore, consider ways to create specific content for your clients.
Maybe you could create a blog to optimize MSP clients’ work and minimize expenses. Perhaps you could send your client an article that outlines an innovative solution to an issue they’re experiencing or a whitepaper on developments in the field of their services.
Be sure to take care when using personal contact. While it’s not much effort to communicate with others via Facebook, there could be a hazard when using your accounts rather than one for your business. Use your discretion!
Find out about events that allow you to have a personal meeting. Don’t think about the value of a personal touch. Face-to-face meetings are one of the most effective methods of building long-lasting customer relationships.
There’s no have to go long to locate an opportunity. Invite your customers to attend an MSP event or conference within their industry. Plan a client gathering within your business or, if the event is within your budget, attend an event for the community (such as a concert, sports event, or fundraising event). Please invite them for breakfast or coffee so that it is possible to introduce them to a friend who can assist them in an aspect of their work.

4. Sell for the value you are paying, not at low prices.

If you are focused on always providing the lowest price, you’re doing your business wrong. There will be clients, but they’ll typically be customers who are challenging and difficult to deal with. If an opponent lowers its price and clients leave, they will abandon your business.

Low-cost work also causes tension within the company, forcing them to discover other methods to increase profits. Employees’ morale suffers, as do owners and managers who will always be concerned about reducing costs. If, instead, you insist on the benefit you can offer to your clients; pricing is no longer a concern. It doesn’t mean your clients will never be able to question your pricing. If you demonstrate to your customers that you offer an unbeatable value proposition, you’ll be able to charge more for it.

5. Make sure you provide the best user experience.

Your business may be most advanced in technology and efficient for all your customers. However, if it’s not easy to navigate and use your customers, they will move to cheaper options.

Be sure that your customers have easy, attractive, and enjoyable ways to interact with your offerings, in addition to simple and effective methods for contacting your company if your business provides data. Design easily-to-use, custom-built dashboards for displaying data. Incorporate highly efficient collaborative tools in your service.

The user experience is equally crucial internal. Automate every phase of your process to improve your employees’ user experience. Automation improves your effectiveness and allows you to create a continuous contact with your customers. Using pre-made documents, such as statements of profit and loss templates, or using automated email marketing, you and your business can significantly benefit from automation.

Find a Partner who will help grow your MSP. Your Business

It’s a fantastic moment to start or work as an MSP, especially in this time of hybrid and remote work. There are endless growth opportunities and just an effort to make the most of these.

But, having an expert partner can aid. A cloud solution provider that has won awards, such as Sherweb, has the resources and experience that can assist MSPs benefit from the abovementioned strategies. Visit our Partner Guide for more details, or join our Partner Network to start.