However, beyond research, there’s the crucial task of distilling those insights into actionable strategies that’ll give your business an advantage. This is where competitive analysis reports become critical, providing you a roadmap for translating raw data into strategic direction.

In this guide, we’ll explore how competitive analysis reports benefit your business, how you can build effective reports, the areas to focus on and competitive reporting tools.

What is a competitive analysis report?

A competitive analysis report is a strategic document that examines the position and performance of your competitors in your business. The report synthesizes your competitive intelligence research data and provides conclusions for better decision-making. It helps you understand the competitive landscape, identify areas for innovation or improvement and formulate strategies to outperform competitors.

A competitive analysis report typically contains information on marketing tactics, target audience demographics, product comparison and industry trends.

Benefits of a competitive analysis report

A competitive analysis report serves as a tool for competitor benchmarking. You can use it as a standard for realistic goal setting, accessing your business performance and measuring growth.

Let’s dive into some more key benefits.

Know where your business stands in the market

A good competitive analysis provides a realistic understanding of your business’ position in the market. Rather than make assumptions, use your report to make data-driven calculations of how your business compares in terms of market share, customers, messaging and differentiation.

For example, if you’re selling video editing software, you might use a competitive analysis report to learn how easy or difficult it is for novices to use your tool compared to your competitors’ tools. With this insight, you can define your unique selling proposition, understand customer preferences, identify gaps and decide on a positioning strategy that aligns your business goals with customer needs.

Understand your strengths and weaknesses vs. your competitors

Digging into competitor data doesn’t just uncover their strengths and weaknesses, it also exposes yours. Done properly, competitive reporting removes bias and shows you raw data on the areas where your business excels and lags.

A competitive analysis report also sheds light on the mistakes, failures and successes of your business rivals. So, you can build on those successes, avoid making the same mistakes and better position your business for growth.

Identify untapped opportunities and threats

A comprehensive competitive report uncovers growth opportunities such as underserved markets, emerging customer segments and areas where your competitors are underperforming. It also highlights potential threats like new market entrants or changes in customer behaviors. With this knowledge, you can create strategies to bridge those gaps.

Enhance marketing effectiveness

Reporting on your competitors’ marketing strategies is an opportunity to review and refine your own. For example, if you notice gaps in your competitor’s offering, messaging or positioning, you can devise strategies to differentiate yourself by marketing and selling your unique value more effectively.

Inform stronger business decisions

The insights in a competitive analysis report can inform stronger business decisions across departments such as product, marketing, procurement and others. By anchoring your strategies on data-driven insights, you can better defend your market and meet customer needs.

How to create a competitive analysis report

A competitor analysis report should your teams a clear picture of what the business is up against and the necessary strategies to get ahead.

Follow these steps to create an effective competitive analysis report:

Have a clear objective for your report

Since competitive analysis serves every aspect of your business, it can quickly become overwhelming. Outline it at the beginning of your document to clarify your goals and objectives. This will keep you and your report from getting lost in the vast amount of data you’ll uncover.

Do you want to investigate every aspect of your competitors and create an all-encompassing report? Or are you interested in specific areas like their sales and marketing strategies? Your objective will guide your research and direct the format for the report.

Identify your main competitors

Once you’re clear on the “why”, outline the competitors you must outperform to gain the upper hand in the market.

You can identify these competitors by speaking to your sales team or leaning into customer feedback. Alternatively, you can use competitive monitoring and social listening to learn what other companies your audience is interested in.

It’s also important to identify your SEO competitors as they can sometimes differ from your business competitors. You can find SEO competitors by using keyword research tools to check who’s ranking for your target keywords.

Conduct in-depth market research

The next step is market research to gather and organize information about your competitors, customers and industry.

Deep dive into particular customer segments with detailed customer profiles that will guide your marketing decisions later on. A social analytics tool like Sprout Social helps you conduct market research on social channels using advanced social media listening. Build sophisticated Listening queries to track millions of conversions happening around key topics and get a complete scope of your data to analyze insights by adjusting key filters as well without changing queries.

Keep track of your competitors’ social strategies, find out what’s working in your market and learn how well customer needs are being met.

Compare your product offerings

Compare your product to your competitors for quality, price, customer service and other areas to reveal your differentiators. Use social listening to gather information as well as scout forums like G2, Capterra and TrustPilot for unbiased opinions on your product and the competition.

It’s not compulsory to compare every feature you and your competitors offer. Instead, focus on only those relevant to the objectives of your analysis.

Compare your marketing strategies

Research the marketing and sales strategies of each competitor to understand how they conduct business. The goal is to analyze the factors behind their success and use those insights to inform your strategy. Investigate details such as their content marketing plans, influencer collaborations and sales channels. Look at the channels they use to communicate and engage with customers, promote their business and drive the most visibility.

The report should show how each competitor tells their brand story and the value they deliver to customers. These insights will help with clarifying your position and messaging to differentiate your brand and stand out among competitors.

Run a SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis helps you evaluate your competitive position by laying out your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats based on all the data you’ve gathered. For instance, competitor analysis can help you collect key information through strategic social listening using filters like keywords, content type, social networks, common themes in Listening data and so on, so you can synthesize key areas the business needs to focus on across the competitive landscape. It’s also a great way to visualize all your research in an easy-to-understand and shareable format.

Show your position in the competitive landscape

Finally, a competitive analysis report must show where your business and every important competitor stands in the competitive landscape. This can be achieved by pinpointing the two most important dimensions for competitiveness in your market and mapping them on a matrix alongside your company and its competitors.

With that, you’ll get a clear idea of your position based on the SWOT analysis you created earlier. Conclude the report by making recommendations that serve the original purpose of the competitive analysis.

Examples of competitive analysis reports

Here are some sample scenarios showing the details a competitive analysis report should focus on.

1. Increasing market share

To create a competitive analysis report focused on increasing market share, you must first start with a thorough product analysis. Identify and compare the core features and functionality of your competitors’ products against yours. Consider how their products meet the pressing needs of customers and look for areas of dissatisfaction you can capitalize on.

Evaluate the overall target market, including the customer segments your competitors focus on and their marketing strategies. By studying their positioning, messaging and marketing channels, you’ll discover underserved customer segments or areas of overlap in the market. The report should outline the opportunities gleaned from the analysis and recommend possible ways to address the needs and preferences of the untapped market segment.

2. New product launch

For a competitive report on a new product launch, start with a marketing competitive analysis to identify your direct and indirect competitors. Analyze their market share, product offerings and pricing strategies to determine the best ways to position your product, establish a strong presence and win customers early.

Consider the quality of each competing product, including its user experience and technological capabilities. Look for areas where your product can leverage emerging technology to gain a competitive edge. Also evaluate your competitors’ customer service and support offerings, including their return policies to identify how you can use superior customer service to build trust and loyalty quickly.

3. SEO campaigns

A competitive analysis report for an SEO campaign should focus on evaluating the content marketing, social media presence and SEO strategies of competitors. Analyze the keywords, content types and promotional strategies that drive the most organic traffic and customers for their business. On social channels, monitor their engagement levels, posting frequency, top-performing content and audience growth. These insights are useful for comparing and benchmarking your performance.

The report should also cover local search optimization and online advertising efforts for a comprehensive view of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

Top competitive analysis reporting tools

Competitive monitoring tools help optimize the research process, analyze multiple data points and deliver data-driven insights you can use immediately.

Check out these three tools that help streamline the process of creating competitive analysis reports.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social provides powerful tools to help you monitor your competitors’ performance across social platforms like Instagram, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter).

It allows you to benchmark your social performance against your top competitors so you can truly understand your brand’s social health. Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool helps you tap into conversations about you, your industry and competitors across social channels, review sites and communities.

With its powerful AI technology, you can sift through millions of conversations to uncover insights about key topics, your audience and industry in seconds. Those insights help you measure your share of voice (SOV), develop crisis management strategies and identify new market opportunities.

With access to tools like Premium Analytics and Sprout’s suite of competitive reports, you can easily visualize and show the impact of in-depth competitive analysis research. Your report can include:

• Customized metrics based on your business goals and team’s priorities
• Interactive charts and graphs that illuminate critical social data
• Custom date range comparisons for performance benchmarking.

And with Sprout’s dynamic shareable link, you can quickly share the report with your team and external shareholders outside Sprout.

Kompyte

Kompyte gathers competitive intelligence from millions of data points, including social, website, content, ads, reviews, job postings and more. The platform uses artificial intelligence to filter through the noise and deliver actionable insights on your competitors.

It automatically organizes competitive data into battle cards highlighting differentiators, market feedback, revenue and everything else your sales teams need to win deals.

Crayon

Crayon uses artificial intelligence to track your competitors and also gives you alerts based on your requirements. It analyzes social content, reviews, press releases, pricing updates and other information to collect and provide insights into top competitors to keep your teams informed with relevant data.

Crayon allows you to create customizable reports and use battle cards, newsletters and announcements to share competitive intelligence data with your team.

Use competitive analysis reporting to grow your business

A competitive report is a compilation of data and statistics that empowers your company to make informed decisions and develop effective strategies. Once you compile the information from your competitive intelligence, you’ll be able to follow up on your findings with a clear action plan to boost your business.

Sprout can help streamline your competitive research process, benchmark your performance against the competition and create comprehensive reports that highlight your most critical data in an engaging way. Sign up for a free trial to try it for yourself.

The post How to build a competitive analysis report with examples and tools appeared first on Sprout Social.

This is the power of business intelligence (BI) reporting.

The right BI tools turn mountains of data from various sources into actionable, easily analyzed documents or dashboards. Instead of guessing or sifting through piles of data, BI reporting does the heavy lifting for you, saving you time and headaches.

Bringing social media insights into the mix adds a whole new dimension to your reporting as well because you get real-time feedback from your social media audience, competitors and campaigns. This gives you the most up-to-date insight into how people perceive you and engage with your brand.

Read on to find out all you need to know about business intelligence reporting, why you need it, the best reporting tools and business intelligence best practices.

Table of Contents

• What is business intelligence reporting?
• What is the importance of business intelligence reporting?
• Business intelligence reporting challenges
• Top business intelligence reporting tools
• Business intelligence reporting best practices

What is business intelligence reporting?

Business intelligence reporting is the process of collecting data from various sources, such as customer databases, financial information systems and digital marketing channels, and presenting it in a digestible and actionable format.

Business intelligence reports help organizations understand what’s happening with their business, and make sense of critical data in order to make more informed decisions and predictions. The result? Often more growth and a bigger bottom line. According to a McKinsey report, data-driven organizations experience above-market growth and earnings increases of 15 to 25 percent.

Business intelligence reports can also be tailored for specific departments and stakeholders. For example, marketing business intelligence helps organizations contextualize marketing data and connect marketing metrics like social media engagements and follower growth to broader business goals. It also helps businesses predict the future by spotting trends and identifying potential problems before they get out of hand.

What is the importance of business intelligence reporting?

The biggest benefit of business intelligence reporting is that it reduces guesswork. Instead of relying on gut feelings or hunches, data provides concrete evidence to guide decisions.

Here are a few other key advantages of business intelligence reporting.

Faster decision-making

According to research from Oracle, 74% of people say the number of decisions they make every day has increased tenfold over the last three years. Business intelligence reporting addresses this decision fatigue by providing instant access to critical insights. Whether you’re analyzing budgets, planning a marketing campaign or optimizing internal processes, BI helps you make quick, intelligent decisions on the spot.

Customer insights

Customers today are pickier about where they spend their money and which brands they trust. They like brands that understand how they think and feel. Business intelligence reports help you tap into your customers’ needs and even predict their wants by uncovering in-depth behavior and trend data.

Competitive analysis

Analyzing business intelligence data on competitive analysis insights like competitor engagement, follower growth and content strategies helps businesses understand what’s going well for their competitors and identify opportunities to refine their social media strategies. For example, if a BI competitive report shows you that a competitor’s video content has been doing exceptionally well lately, you might consider incorporating more video content into your social media strategy.

Cost optimization

BI reporting also uncovers operational inefficiencies, such as production bottlenecks, slashing unnecessary expenses. You can also proactively monitor key performance indicators like cost per unit produced or cost per sale, to address them and be on target. Lastly, combining historical data and predictive analytics helps companies forecast future costs more accurately, leading to better resource allocation and budgeting.

Streamlined process

Have you ever wondered when you should publish a social media post or what types of content resonate most with your audience? BI reporting tools analyze data from social media platforms to give you data-driven content strategy recommendations. The result? Less time experimenting and more time producing more of what your audience enjoys at the right time.

Reliable data quality

Business intelligence tools consolidate data from various sources into a single platform, reducing the chances of errors due to manual data entry or siloed information. They also often have data cleaning features that catch inconsistencies and duplicate entries. Many BI tools also offer real-time or near-real-time data updates, so you always have the most current information at hand.

Data-driven culture

With customizable and personalizable dashboards, BI tools empower your employees to make more data-informed decisions, ultimately benefiting the whole organization. When everyone can access, analyze, share and act on relevant data it fosters a more data-driven culture.

Business intelligence reporting challenges

Business intelligence tools make it easier but synthesizing data from different sources into one accessible dashboard or report isn’t so simple. Understanding all that information and ensuring the data is accurate, relevant and helpful is also tough.

Whether you’re already using business intelligence tools in your organization or getting ready to implement a solution, here are some common challenges you might encounter.

Technological advancements

Technology advancements make business intelligence reporting tools more impactful, but have certain challenges. Take cloud-based solutions, for instance. They handle vast amounts of data but also need tight security to keep that data safe. Rapid advancements also mean frequent software and system updates, leading to higher maintenance costs and additional training required to keep users up-to-date.

Data governance

Business intelligence reports contain sensitive information, so you need clear rules and processes around access to keep your data safe and accurate. Think of data governance as the rulebook for how a company handles its data. It involves deciding who’s responsible for what, ensuring the data is clean and reliable, and keeping it safe from hackers or unauthorized access using encryption or other safeguards. Controlling who sees what data is critical.

Linguistic challenges

Business intelligence reports often have technical terms and complicated data that might leave non-experts scratching their heads. Also, if the report’s language isn’t consistent with the terms your employees already use, they’ll struggle to understand it and become overwhelmed. Sprout understands this. That’s why our social media intelligence reports, for example, include topic summaries so report viewers can quickly view the top performance metrics they care about.

User adoption

Some people in your organization might resist using business intelligence software because they’re used to other methods or feel overwhelmed by new technology. Plus, some BI tools are pretty complex, even for the tech-literate. Getting everyone on board with BI reporting means providing the right support and showing them how it will make their jobs easier.

Top business intelligence reporting tools

Business intelligence can be a game changer for your company. However, with so many platforms on the market, it’s tough to know which business intelligence tools would best fit your organization.

Here are a few of the most popular choices on the market and their capabilities.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social makes spotting business trends and opportunities a breeze. Sprout has plenty of built-in reporting tools and templates, like our Social Listening and Sentiment Analysis features, that will show you how your company stacks up to competitors and how your audience feels about your brand. Sprout also integrates with Salesforce and Tableau, allowing you to see your social data alongside other business intelligence insights and get a 360-degree, unsiloed view of your business data.

Need more customization? Use our reporting features to build custom reports from scratch or personalize existing templates with widgets to hone in on key data—like the sample Go-To-Market Product Launch report below. Our digestible and user-friendly social media reports are also easy to understand and share with teams.

With Sprout, you’ll be able to contextualize social media insights by seeing which interactions and campaigns attract leads and drive revenue growth.

Databox

Databox is an analytics platform that simplifies data management for growing businesses. It centralizes your data for better decision-making and performance improvement. With Databox, you get a centralized source of truth, quick access to insights and better decision-making informed by data. As a result, you’ll spend less time creating reports and more time focusing on strategy.

HubSpot

HubSpot simplifies business intelligence, providing a comprehensive platform for all your customers’ needs. The all-in-one platform connects your marketing, sales, customer service, content management, operations and commerce processes, providing deep insights into every customer interaction. From marketing automation to sales tools, HubSpot helps organizations connect with and better understand their customers.

Business intelligence reporting best practices

Using business intelligence tools without following best practices is like taking a road trip with a broken GPS. You’d probably get lost and make some wrong turns. Similarly, misusing BI tools could lead to inaccurate conclusions, poor strategic decisions, wasted resources and missed growth opportunities.

Here are a few best practices to get the most out of your business intelligence tool.

Define your stakeholders

Who will be accessing your business intelligence reports? Marketers? Customer service representatives? Product developers? Executive leadership? All of the above? Before generating a report or creating a dashboard, identify who will be using those reports. Then, based on their needs, technical skills and knowledge, include only the most relevant information.

Choose the right metrics

When picking metrics to include in your reports, consider the following three questions:

• Your business goals. Are you focusing on long-term or short-term objectives?
• Your audience. How do they impact decisions?
• The bigger picture. What metrics will paint the most comprehensive story and guide your next steps?

Use data visualizations

Let’s face it—numbers and spreadsheets are a little boring to review and challenging to understand on their own. That’s why visuals are super helpful for data reporting and storytelling. Just don’t overdo it. Don’t cram too many graphs and charts into your reports. Leave some white space between your visuals for clarity.

Drop-downs and filters also help users focus on the most relevant insights. For example, in the Sprout Social Profile Perfomance report pictured below, the filter button (in the top right corner) enables users to select the profiles they want to view data for throughout the report.

Ensure data reliability

If your data isn’t reliable, it’s unusable. To ensure your business intelligence reports present trustworthy data, regularly check your data sources and verify that they’re pulling the most accurate and up-to-date data. You should also double-check your data for errors or inconsistencies. Lastly, secure your data using multi-factor authentication, encryption or other measures.

Leverage AI

AI is a powerful tool for interpreting business intelligence data. AI can review historical data to predict future trends, which could help you manage inventory or project sales. It also assists in abnormality detection, notifying you of unusual data patterns like sudden drops in website traffic.

The future of BI reporting with AI

Business intelligence is a powerful tool in its own right. However, adding AI brings a whole new level of capability. For example, if AI handles most of your data analysis, trend spotting and report creation task, you’ll have more time to focus on strategy while making faster decisions and predictions.

We’re already incorporating AI into Sprout’s social business intelligence features. For example, our Smart Categories tool automatically identifies, classifies and groups data in your Listening Topic (i.e., specific keywords, hashtags, brands, or industries you follow). The Sentiment in Listening feature also uses AI to classify messages as positive, negative or neutral.

Ready to see what AI-powered business intelligence can do for your organization? Request a personalized Sprout Social demo today.

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Competitor mapping is the cornerstone of competitive analysis. By visualizing opportunities, businesses can make strategic decisions when launching a new product/service or new social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll walk through some of the benefits of competitor mapping and how to create your map.

What is competitor mapping?

Competitor mapping is the process of identifying competitors and analyzing their market position to visualize the overall competitive landscape. Competitor mapping involves using competitive benchmark data to help you make decisions about the business, and gain intelligence about your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

To help visualize your competitive analysis, competitor maps contextualize your research and competitive data, enabling you to make informed business decisions. For example, monitoring competitive benchmark data can help you set realistic goals and metrics.

The benefits of competitor mapping

There are many competitor analysis tools out there—which is a testament to the benefits of competitor mapping. Competitive data unveils advantages and opportunities for your business by analyzing your competitors’ products, marketing strategy and social media. Examining your industry peers will help you better understand your customers’ needs and brand perception. There are more benefits to competitor mapping, but let’s walk through some of our favorites: competitive product analysis, marketing competitive analysis and social media analysis.

Competitive product analysis

Through competitive product analysis you can build a stronger product. Comparing your product to your competition highlights areas to improve whether it’s adding additional features or using better quality materials.

Marketing competitive analysis

Through marketing competitor analysis, you can pinpoint iterations for your marketing strategy. For example, you can determine how to optimize product placement by looking at how your competitors position their products through messaging, branding and packaging. This type of analysis can help you discover how your brand can differentiate itself through marketing.

Social media competitive analysis

Social media competitive analysis is another key benefit of competitor mapping. Through tools like Sprout Social you can use social listening to help identify conversations involving your competitors and what your audiences are talking about. With Sprout, you can also conduct sentiment analysis to compare how people feel about your brand vs. your competitors.

How to create a competitor map

Analyze and visualize your brand’s competitive intelligence with these steps:

1. Identify your competitors

Consider all of your competitors. This includes your direct, indirect and emerging competitors.

Direct competitors offer similar products and/or services as your business. Indirect competitors target the same market or customer segment, but offer a different product or service. For example, cable and streaming services are indirect competitors because they both offer film and TV shows. SEO competitors—businesses that outrank you in search engine results—can also be indirect competitors. Emerging competitors are companies that just entered the market and have the potential to disrupt the industry.

You can also consider replacement competitors. Replacement competitors offer products or services that fulfill a similar need or problem. For example, a bowling alley and roller rink may be replacement competitors because they both offer family-friendly entertainment.

Once you consider all of your competitors, select about four to 10 businesses. Review their websites, social media and overall online presence to discover more about their product, target audiences and marketing strategies.

2. Select a focus area

Identify focus areas such as product range, pricing or other variables to niche your research down and concentrate on the most relevant things to analyze. For example, if you wanted to create a competitor map for social media, you would take an in-depth look at your competitors’ profiles, from monitoring their engagement and most active channels to their overall content strategy. To help you get started, think about which areas you want to analyze deeper based on your goals. For example, if your brand is launching a new product, one focus area could be price.

3. Write a list of your strengths and improvement areas

List out your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. Consider brand perception in comparison to your competitors. What do people think about each brand and product? After considering strong and weaker areas, brainstorm a list of solutions or gaps to fill.

4. Create a competitor map

After all of your data is collected, you can create your competitor map. A competitor map can be visualized in a variety of formats such as comparison charts, pie charts, scatter graphs and bubble maps. You can create these through design platforms like Canva, but there are also tools like Sprout that can automate visuals as well.

For example with Sprout’s Competitive Analysis Listening tool, you can view and export a side-by-side competitor comparison of key performance metrics across social, including share of voice, engagement, sentiment and impressions.

If you want to track and compare your competitors’ social media profiles, Sprout’s Competitor Performance Report shows analytics across major networks like Instagram, Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter).

Examples of competitor mapping

As you execute competitive monitoring, you may discover you want to visualize the information differently based on your findings. Here are some examples of competitor maps to get you inspired.

SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis chart is a classic example of a competitor map. It enables you to simply organize your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, making it easier to understand the insights and compare them directly against yours.

For instance, in the example below, high engagement and social following are listed as strengths while not publishing as frequently as competitors is listed as a weakness. Also notice how in the “Opportunities” section, the brand has a chance to target a male audience better since they make up 20% of their market’s audience. And lastly, things out of their control like algorithm changes causing dips in performance is listed as a threat.

Comparison table

A comparison table is a traditional method for mapping. It involves making a list of factors and scoring each attribute per competitor. In the example below, quality, price, customer service and SEO rank are included as attributes. When using comparison tables, you can use numbers, stars or another system to indicate score.

Create a solid foundation of competitor analysis

Remember that competitive analysis is like preparing to face an opposing team. You need to study their strengths, weaknesses and behaviors to help identify opportunities for stronger plays that boost your competitive edge. If you haven’t already, consider signing up for a free Sprout trial and get started on finding the white space for your brand to fill in.

The post Competitor mapping: The benefits and how to create your own appeared first on Sprout Social.

According to Crayon’s 2023 State of Competitive Intelligence Report, 66% of stakeholders say competitive intelligence (CI) is important to their success.

The challenge? Gathering and analyzing massive amounts of competitive data. This is where competitive intelligence tools can help.

In this post, we’ll introduce you to 12 of the best competitive intelligence tools for marketers. We’ll also discuss the benefits of using these tools and how to make the most of them.

What is a competitive intelligence tool?

A competitive intelligence tool enables businesses to gather and analyze information about their competition. These tools help companies understand what their competitors are doing by tracking their marketing activities, interactions and overall performance.

Marketers use CI tools to learn from their competitors, anticipate their moves, identify gaps and opportunities in the market, stay on top of industry trends and develop competitive strategies that help their business stay ahead of the game.

How to use competitive intelligence tools to grow your business

Competitive intelligence tools make it easier to collect, analyze and distribute competitive research, especially when you’re dealing with astronomical amounts of data and dozens of players in the market.

These tools typically rely on AI and automation to do the heavy lifting for you. Here are five benefits of using competitive intelligence tools to grow your business:

Identify gaps in the market

Competitive intelligence tools let you analyze the market and spot any unmet needs or areas your competitors might be overlooking. This gives your business a chance to swoop in and fill those gaps.

For example, a healthy food brand might identify a rising interest in keto diets and find that none of its competitors are offering keto products. By filling this gap, the company can potentially capture a new market segment and position itself as innovative at the same time.

Respond quickly to new threats

What if your competitor launches a new product that directly competes with your flagship offering? What if they announce a merger that could significantly impact your sales? Finding out too late can spell disaster for your business.

Competitive intelligence tools help you stay on top of developments like these. For example, you could quickly gather information about new competitor products like features, pricing and initial customer reactions.

Competitive mapping by using these tools will allow you to use these insights to develop a counter-strategy, such as a new campaign, discount or innovative feature. You can even anticipate threats before they actually happen and take action to minimize or prevent any damage to your business.

Improve business strategy

Competitive intelligence drives smart, data-driven decision-making.

Data on your competition is a core element of business intelligence. Whether it’s tweaking pricing, developing new features, increasing budgets or partnering with other firms—knowing the market directly influences your business strategy.

Keeping an eye on the competition also helps you benchmark your own performance and learn about your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Do you need to post more engaging content? Could your customer service be better? Is your product missing an important feature?

Keep track of industry trends

Using a CI tool isn’t just about spying on the competition. It’s also for tracking trends relevant to your business, such as popular hashtags, hot topics and new technologies like AI.

Following industry trends and joining the conversation helps your business stay relevant. You also come across as innovative and flexible as you’re constantly making efforts to update your branding, content, products and services to align with market shifts.

Understand customer sentiment

Sentiment analysis—a core feature of competitive intelligence—gives you insight into how customers think and feel about certain brands and topics. It uses AI to identify and analyze the underlying emotions in online feedback, mentions and conversations.

Understanding sentiment helps you deliver better experiences and improve customer satisfaction. More importantly, you can take swift action to prevent negative word-of-mouth from spreading and damaging your business’s reputation.

Top 12 competitive intelligence tools to gain competitive insight

1. Sprout Social

Social media is one of the main sources of competitive intelligence. It’s where most of your customers hang out and interact with brands like yours.

Sprout Social’s competitive intelligence tools let you keep an eye on your competitors across multiple social networks. Track posts, engagement, mentions, performance metrics, sentiment and more from a single dashboard.

And there’s more. Let’s get into the details:

• Competitor reports: Whip up tailored reports for each platform to analyze what your competitors are posting, what’s working and what their growth looks like. Compare competitor metrics with your own to set benchmarks for future performance and goals.

• Social listening: Monitor brand mentions and conversations on trending topics across various social platforms. Uncover industry insights, analyze customer feedback, understand campaign success and track competitor share of voice.

• Sentiment analysis: Track customer sentiment around specific keywords. Explore their feelings and opinions about your own brand, competitors, products, campaigns, events, trending topics and more.

• Premium analytics: Track metrics across multiple social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter) and LinkedIn. Visualize data with interactive charts and graphs that you can customize according to your goals.

With Sprout’s listening, analytics and reporting tools, you can dig deep into your competitor’s strategy, compare it with your own and identify opportunities to differentiate yourself.

2. Similarweb

Similarweb is a powerful competitive intelligence tool that gives you a comprehensive, visual view of your competitors’ digital presence.

The platform lets you explore the traffic, engagement, marketing channels, keywords, content, affiliates and PPC ad campaigns of up to 25 competitor websites at a time. You can also benchmark your performance against your competitors and track their metrics over time.

3. Reputation

Reputation specializes in analyzing customer feedback and reviews. Along with this, Reputation offers competitive intelligence tools for tracking, comparing and analyzing competitor data.

Build a custom dashboard to compare select competitors and benchmark performance, track customer sentiment in real time and use AI to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses.

You can also track trends and opportunities, receive recommendations from the platform and generate visual competitor reports to share with your team or management.

4. Klue

Klue is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform that streamlines the process of collecting, analyzing and distributing competitor data.

Aggregate information from various sources about competitors, create and share battlecards, profiles and dashboards with your team, analyze market trends and competitor strategies, and distribute intel directly to your existing tech stack, including Slack and Salesforce.

5. Visualping

Visualping is a website monitoring tool that lets you track changes on specific pages. You can set up alerts to notify your team as soon as there’s an update, such as a new landing page design, a price drop or a new banner ad.

The tool also offers advanced AI analysis so you can pinpoint exactly what changed, compare it to previous versions and view visual and text summaries. You can also invite more users and send alerts via email or popular apps like Slack, Google Sheets and Teams.

6. Insightsfirst

Insightsfirst is an AI-driven competitive intelligence platform by Evalueserve. It curates competitive data from various sources, centralizes and filters through it using AI, and then distributes the insights via alerts, integrations and newsletters.

Access insights into industry trends and forecasts, track and analyze news related to competitors, and present information in an easily digestible way using data visualization.

7. Crayon

Crayon is an AI-powered competitive intelligence tool that helps sales teams analyze and use competitive data to score deals.

The platform summarizes, prioritizes and delivers insights directly to your inbox, helps you create sales enablement content like battlecards, leaderboards and newsletters, and even shows you data on how your team is using competitive insights.

8. Data.ai

Data.ai (formerly App Annie) provides analytics and market intelligence for mobile apps. Track competitor data like top performing apps, number of downloads, engagement, revenue, usage, app features and even ad creatives.

Identify threats by analyzing performance trends across your app category, track growth and rank data over time, and keep an eye on competitor app market share.

9. Contify

Contify’s enterprise-level competitive intelligence platform collects data form 500,000+ customizable sources, including websites, social media, press releases and regulatory portals.

It also analyzes that data using machine learning, presenting it visually using dedicated dashboards. You can also distribute competitor data via curated newsfeeds, automated emails, news APIs and branded newsletter reports.

The tool also offers a website change tracker that helps you stay on top of competitor strategies like pricing changes, rebrands, design tweaks, new deals, display ads and more.

10. Semrush

Semrush is one of the most popular SEO tools out there, but it also comes with powerful competitive intelligence features to help you stay ahead of the game.

The platform offers tools to analyze your competitor’s website traffic, backlinks, paid ad campaigns, keywords they’re ranking for and even their social media performance.

Semrush’s Market Explorer tool also gives you a bird’s eye view of any industry or niche—track trends in growth, audience and traffic, and detect leaders and emerging players.

11. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another well-known SEO platform that offers robust competitive intelligence tools. Their Site Explorer, in particular, lets you double down on your competitors’ websites and analyze their top organic keywords, backlinks, pages, content and more.

Fun fact—the tool boasts the fastest backlink crawler in the industry and the biggest database of live backlinks. Additionally, you can use the Content Explorer to find popular content and link opportunities in your niche.

12. Media Radar

Media Radar is an advertising intelligence platform that lets you compare your competitors’ ad campaigns and media buying strategies with your own.

Compare ad investment, review ad creatives across multiple formats, analyze messaging and see where your competitors are placing their ads.

Test a competitive intelligence tool

Keeping track of competitor activity and analyzing their strategic moves helps your business make timely and better decisions in every aspect. More importantly, it helps you stay relevant, innovative and competitive in your industry.

Use Sprout Social’s competitive intelligence tools to gather, analyze and present data related to your competitors’ social media presence. Track metrics, analyze sentiment, benchmark performance and create customized reports that empower your team to stay ahead.

Want to get started today? Try Sprout Social for free with a 30-day trial.

The post 12 of the best competitive intelligence tools for marketers appeared first on Sprout Social.

It can take as little as one bad review to send all your hard work crashing like a pack of cards. Several brands, including United Airlines, have reportedly lost patrons and billions in value due to their poor management of the Flight 3411 incident involving a forcefully removed passenger that went viral online.

Why leave your precious brand reputation up to others when you can effectively maintain a positive brand image through online reputation management? Reputation management helps you maintain a professional image and improve your customers’ perception of your brand. It can boost your brand visibility, increase revenue, and build customer trust.

In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into everything you need to know about reputation management, including important features and how you can choose the best software to help your target audience connect with your brand better.

Table of Contents

• What is reputation management software?
• Top 10 online reputation management software
• How to select the best reputation management software for your business
• Successful reputation management: From reactive to proactive

What is a reputation management software?

Reputation management software is a tool that allows businesses to promote their brand positively and respond promptly to negative customer experiences before they spiral out of control. Reputation management encompasses online review management and social listening, where businesses can monitor and respond to reviews that influence how people perceive their brand.

However, it’s much more than that, as review management is only one core part. A standard reputation management software also includes news monitoring, competitive analysis, and customer service, which all work together to help brands cultivate a strong reputation.

Top 10 online reputation management software

These are the top 10 online reputation management software for businesses:

1. Sprout Social

At the forefront of the list of top online reputation management software is Sprout Social, which functions as a one-stop shop for everything regarding brand reputation management. Brands can take advantage of Sprout’s review management, social listening and sentiment analysis features to monitor their brand’s online reputation at all times.

What are your customer’s opinions about your product? Are there positive reviews gaining traction online that need to be documented? Do you need to mitigate a social media crisis? These are daily pain points that brands face, and Sprout Social provides easy-to-use features to help brands respond to feedback and tackle issues effectively.

Sprout also can help your team increase ROI and efficiency through automation, chatbots and artificial intelligence.

2. Podium

Another tool that simplifies online reputation management for local businesses is Podium. Podium focuses on driving more leads and building engagement by taking advantage of the seamlessness of texting.

With this tool, customers can leave reviews for your products in a few clicks. As a brand, you can automate review invites, track online trends and keywords, respond promptly to reviews and build better customer relationships through its interface.

This online reputation management software works great with Google Reviews and is a handy tool for enhancing customer service. However, it doesn’t help with social media management or social listening.

3. Birdeye

This AI-powered platform helps brands manage their online reputation effortlessly and build great customer relationships. Birdeye is a tool that helps you leverage the power of AI so you can boost ratings, be more aware of customer feedback, and understand what your customers want. Through this online reputation management software, businesses can gain customer experience insights to help them effectively target pain points and grow sales.

Birdeye also helps to connect better with prospects through available social media channels. Establishing trust with your customer base significantly affects ROI and business growth.

4. Yext

Businesses with physical stores that need to regularly update their customers on location changes or expansion to multiple areas can take advantage of Yext to do this seamlessly. This is one of the best tools to manage your online footprint and help customers find you easily.

Yext allows users to update search engines with relevant keywords and include their information in major online directories. It also offers personalized responses for better communication and a centralized review dashboard so brands can always be updated on positive or negative feedback online. However, there are no integrated features for social media management.

5. Trustpilot

Due to its broad reach as a public platform, brands can leverage Trustpilot to follow up on trends and conversations about their business and competitive advantages.

Brands can encourage their customers to leave reviews here to build a positive reputation online. You can also use this to monitor what customers say about your competitors and how you can improve your products to stay ahead of them in your industry.

6. Brand24

When choosing an online reputation management software, a critical feature to watch out for is keeping track of what customers and critics are saying about your brand online. Brand24 features a media monitoring and analytics tool that does this satisfactorily. These tools provide brands with proper insight into their online presence.

Apart from this, you can stay updated on any keyword associated with your brand on social media, including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. It also monitors reviews on top review sites like Google App Store, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Brand24 features a tool that analyzes the performance of your keywords based on social media reach and sentiment analysis.

7. Mention

Mention features The Brand Grader, a dedicated tool for monitoring and analyzing online reputation management. The tracking runs across various websites, review platforms and social media. Due to this wide reach, several brands can count on this online reputation management software to provide valuable insights and timely updates whenever there’s a mention of a keyword associated with the brand. However, gaining access to the feature on sentiment analysis requires a pro plan that costs more.

8. Broadly

Broadly is a web-based, cloud online reputation management software targeted at making small and medium businesses stand out within and outside their locality. For most small businesses, attracting leads through positive reviews and connecting with customers can be a hassle, especially when considering your competition’s quality and spread.

However, Broadly helps to make this easier by implementing features to help you do this from a single easy-to-use app. Some of these features include streamlined email communication, automated web chat, automatically sending out review requests, Google leads, reminders for clients about appointments and managing all interactive social media platforms within one tool.

9. Qualtrics

The primary feature of Qualtrics is to help brands collect and organize customer feedback through ready-to-use survey templates. These surveys can be distributed via diverse methods, including chatbots, web-based question-and-answer systems, in-app features and mobile devices.

Through this feedback, brands can learn first-hand what their customers think about their products and ways to improve their service delivery significantly. This is a handy way to listen in on conversations surrounding your brand’s image and act accordingly. Qualtrics is best for conducting market research around marketing and branding for your business, as it lacks social media management and competitive analysis features.

10. Google Alerts

You may not have considered it, but Google Alerts is a free and simple software you can use to monitor your online mentions and, by extension, your reputation. Use Google Alerts to monitor the web, including social media, for your business name, trademarks, competitors and even your own name.

Setting up alerts and tracking specific keywords allows you to manage mentions around your brand’s reputation – both positive and negative. Once you set up alerts around specific keywords, you’ll receive an email notification as soon as those keywords are discovered online.

How to select the best reputation management software for your business

Before selecting a reputation management software for your business, you should answer one crucial question: why do you need this software? Knowing your “why” helps you understand the important features to look out for during your search. However, selecting the best online reputation management software depends on the organization’s size or industry.

Smaller, local businesses need to focus more on competitor analytics to help them identify growth opportunities and evaluate how they rank within your industry. Bigger companies must keep track of the myriad conversations that will influence their trust and credibility. Overall, the most important features are the availability of a collaborative workspace, multichannel capabilities, AI and automation, reporting and scalability with ease of deployment.

Most important features of a reputation management tool:

There are many reputation management tools in the market today, and finding one that suits your needs can be overwhelming. Each tool has unique features, so it’s important to research the available options before deciding.

As you research reputation management tools, look out for these features:

Collaborative workspace

One of the best ways to build an efficient team is to help them work together as seamlessly as possible. When there’s a linkage across various departments, it becomes easier to manage information and carry out tasks without unnecessary overlaps. This also applies to online reputation management.

As a brand, you need an efficient tool that allows internal and external teams to collaborate during social media campaigns. It’s important to use a tool that provides access to multiple users to manage various stages of online reputation management without interference.

Sprout provides a centralized dashboard that serves as a one-stop command center where team members can collaborate on social media management tasks. Multiple team members can brainstorm ideas, collaborate on social media post creation, schedule it and monitor analytics in real-time.

Multichannel

Many channels are available today to drive conversations and shape opinions about your brand. From Google Reviews and Yelp to Twitter and Facebook, keeping track of them manually is time-consuming and exhausting.

However, an online reputation management tool that seamlessly integrates with as many channels as possible to provide timely insights and help you improve your overall brand strategy is always a win. This tool should help you aggregate all the data collected into one easy-to-use platform where you can analyze and streamline your responses for better results.

The Sprout Smart Inbox allows social media and customer care teams to view and manage incoming messages on multiple social platforms and respond quickly.

AI and automation

The purpose of online reputation management software is to help you keep track of the numerous conversations about your brand. This can be difficult to do manually, and that’s where AI and automation come in.

With auto notifications, you can get an instant update on a positive comment or negative feedback about your brand and act accordingly. One of the best ways to manage your brand’s reputation is to respond to negative feedback early.

AI can also help you carry out detailed sentiment analysis and automated monitoring, where you get deeper insights into the general reaction around your brand and respond to positive reviews automatically with a link that builds customer relationships.

Reporting

The best reputation management tools provide timely updates about your customers and how they view your products. However, this shouldn’t be limited to just reporting.

Your chosen tool should also be able to measure and analyze these reports across various channels. This means tracking emerging conversations and their origins across social media platforms and generating reports to help you build a better online presence.

Scalability with ease of deployment

Having exceptional features is excellent, but it becomes a burden on your brand when it’s too rigid and doesn’t integrate easily with newer solutions. Therefore, an important feature when choosing a reputation management tool is to look out for one that can easily handle increasing workloads as you work towards monitoring your brand’s reputation across various channels.

Your chosen tool should respond well to changes and updates and not resist expansion as your technology and employees grow. Total flexibility is necessary as there will be more social media platforms over time, and your reputation management tool should have media monitoring capabilities.

Successful reputation management: From reactive to proactive

Online reputation management is no walk in the park. You need to connect with your audience and build trust consistently; these are long-term strategies. But one thing that makes this journey easier is choosing the right online reputation management software.

Ready to position your brand better online and take control of your image? Sign up for a free trial of Sprout Social and test our reputation management features, including sentiment analysis, automation, and social listening.

The post Top 10 reputation management software and how to select the best tool for your business appeared first on Sprout Social.

Digging into your competitor’s approach through a marketing competitor analysis is critical to putting together or updating your brand’s marketing strategy. It is the key to your business’s future success because when you look more closely into your competitors’ marketing, you learn from their successes and mistakes. And this informs your marketing game plan.

In this article, you’ll see why a marketing competitive analysis is important and get expert tips on conducting one.

What is competitor analysis in marketing?

Marketing competitor analysis is the process of researching and analyzing your competitors’ marketing strategies and tactics to identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Look at the four Ps of marketing—product, price, place and promotion—these are four essential factors in marketing a product or service. Analyzing this gives you a competitive edge. Once you know more about your competitors’ methods, you can avoid their pitfalls and take advantage of missed opportunities to optimize your marketing.

But who exactly are your competitors? A competitor is any business that could pull market share away from your organization now or in the future.

There are two main types of competitors: direct and indirect. Direct competitors actively compete with you for the same customers, such as a similar business in your local area. Indirect competitors are those in the same category as you but sell different products or services and target a different market.

For example, if you run a B2B CRM software company that sells to small and medium-sized businesses, a CRM for enterprise clients would be your indirect competitor.

For a marketing competitor analysis, you should focus on your direct competitors.

How to analyze marketing competitors

To analyze your competitor’s marketing strategy, you need to gather as much competitive intelligence as possible about their marketing, from web and social media to field marketing. Fortunately, there are competitive intelligence tools to make this process much easier. You’ll also need to establish criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of their efforts.

What are the steps for a marketing competitor analysis?

While you were likely already familiar with the concept of a marketing competitor analysis, you might not know exactly how to put one together from scratch. Plus, with so much data available, you might find it tough to know where to start or where to focus.

Here’s a step by step process to get you started.

1. Determine your competitors

To find your direct competitors, turn to search engines, social media and customer insights to learn who’s competing against you. Search for keywords related to your product or service and see what other businesses rank for them.

For example, a Google search for “makeup brands” highlights a few of the world’s leading makeup companies.

Also follow social media hashtags related to your product or service. For example, if you run a home office furniture company, you might follow hashtags like #ergonomicchair or #homeoffice.

You could also survey and ask your customers what other brands they considered when making a similar purchase.

2. Research their content strategy

Once you have a shortlist of competitors, look at their online content. Consider these five key factors when evaluating your competitor’s content strategy:

• Content type: Do they have a blog? Are they running paid social ads or posting organic social content? Publishing whitepapers/ebooks? Creating engaging videos? Podcasts? Take stock of the different kinds of content they’re producing.

Use tools like Meta’s Ad Library to see your competitors’ ads. Continuing with the furniture brand example, we can see that one brand, Autonomous, is currently promoting its bulk order promotion and an ErgoChair deal.

Knowing what types of discounts and products your competitors heavily promote is extremely helpful for your sales, marketing or product development strategies.

• Total amount of content: If they have a blog, see how many posts have they published. Checking out how much content they’ve developed in total could help you set expectations or benchmarks for your content.
• Publishing frequency: Are they publishing new content weekly, monthly or less often? Posting more frequently than your competitors could help you engage your audience better.
• Quality: Is their content accurate, well-researched and polished? If not, this is a clear area where your brand can pull ahead.
• Calls-to-action (CTAs): What’s their sales pitch? What unique selling propositions (USPs) do they include in the content? Use their approach as a guide—or try something entirely different to differentiate your brand. For example, scheduling software Calendly has a section on its homepage highlighting a few USPs, like its granular availability tools and easily shareable and embeddable scheduling link.

When it comes to competitor analysis, these USPs serve as a benchmark and inspiration for product development as they highlight features users expect from a scheduling tool. This will enable you to optimize your offer to compete.

3. Monitor their social media reach

According to The Sprout Social Index ™ 2023, 68% of consumers follow brands on social to stay informed about new products or services. Look closely at your biggest competitors’ social presence and see how you compare and where to improve.

When conducting a social media competitive analysis, consider the following factors:

• Audience size: Your competitors’ follower count may indicate your biggest competition.
• Engagement: How many likes and comments does your competitor’s content get. If they’re getting a lot of attention, try to understand why.
• Hashtags: What hashtags are your competitors using? How many people are tagging your competitors in posts? These factors help you better understand your competitors’ overall discoverability and level of brand awareness.
• Top posts: Track competitor posts performing the best. Make a note of any patterns or themes and use this information to improve your content.

FYI: Sprout Social’s Listening and Competitive Analysis features make tracking these data points a breeze.

4. Keep an eye on their online presence

Conduct keyword research to see what keywords your competitors use and rank highly for, and find new opportunities for your content. News mentions tell you about how your competitors are doing in the media and provide data for sentiment analysis (i.e., how the public feels about their brand).

Sprout’s Competitive Analysis Listening tool offers a side-by-side competitor comparison of metrics like average positive sentiment. Sprout’s Listening insights also show you trends, topics and posts in your industry, all filterable by sentiment.

Online reviews also give you insight into brand sentiment. Google Alerts will keep you in the loop about your competitors’ new content, news mentions and website changes. And ofcourse, our Spike Alerts help you monitor and respond to significant increases in mentions or keywords related to your brand or industry.

5. Evaluate their website for affiliations and events

Looking into the events your competitors attend or sponsor offers insight into their target audience, brand values and personality. Sponsoring an important cause also helps a brand foster a more positive reputation, so researching competitor events and affiliations will tell you more about what your target audience cares about, which you can use to your benefit in your marketing strategy.

For example, consulting firm Accenture sponsoring AfroTech, an annual conference for Black tech professionals, highlights their commitment to inclusion and diversity.

6. Consider working with a market research firm

If all this research and analysis sounds daunting, outsource the work to a market research firm. They will gather and analyze competitor data about your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). Plus, since they’re not a part of your company, they often gather more neutral, unbiased findings.

7. Summarize findings and determine next steps

You’ve collected all this data, but what does it all mean? Once you’ve completed your research, break down your marketing competitor analysis into actionable takeaways that your key stakeholders can easily understand. Summarize the key findings and most interesting points, and use charts, graphs and other visual aids to make the data more digestible. Form your next steps based on the insights you gather.

Benefits of a marketing competitor analysis

Even if your competitors don’t change, your general market will. From evolving consumer behavior to new technological developments, your business must be aware of, and ready to, adapt to these shifts.

Plus, with the right tools for competitor analysis, you can quickly collect, refine and incorporate this data into your marketing strategy. For example, adding Sprout’s marketing toolkit makes competitive analysis less daunting and more automated.

Here are a few more ways regular competitor analysis marketing helps you stay agile and ahead of the curve.

Optimize product placement

Look at how your competitors position their products compared to yours. Analyze their messaging, branding and packaging to see how your products or services compare and what you can do better. Also, look at the channels they use to distribute their products, such as retail stores, online marketplaces or direct-to-consumer sales. If there are any channels they don’t use effectively, this could be an opportunity for your brand to shine.

Determine product outlook

Monitoring your competitors’ product releases and updates may uncover areas where they are falling behind. Fill in these gaps to better position your brand. Analyzing your competitors’ marketing strategies helps you anticipate upcoming product launches or promotions that could impact your sales.

Establish benchmarks

Comparing your competitors’ marketing metrics, such as website traffic, social media engagement and conversion rates, allows you to set competitive benchmarks for improvement. Competitor analysis also often reveals industry best practices to incorporate into your marketing strategy.

Gain a competitive edge with marketing competitor analysis

A marketing competitor analysis is valuable for any business that wants to stay competitive and grow its market share. Keep an eye on your competitors to identify new growth opportunities, benchmark your performance and adapt to changes in the market.

Try Sprout free for 30 days and use our competitive analysis reports to get a leg up on your competition.

The post How to gain a competitive advantage by analyzing marketing initiatives by competitors appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social listening serves as a powerful competitive analysis tool, extracting targeted brand insights from widespread online conversations across social networks. You get real-time insights into consumer behavior, emerging trends and competitors’ activities, which you can use to promptly pivot strategies and stay ahead of the game.

Let’s dive deeper into how social listening gives you an edge when used for market research.

The competitive advantage of using social listening for marketing research

Social listening empowers you with real-world insights extracted from raw, unfiltered brand-related online chatter for a birds’ eye-view of the competitive landscape. These insights help you refine marketing strategies to optimize your return on investment (ROI). They also help you uncover whitespace opportunities to innovate and expand on product, pricing and geographic expansion strategies.

Competitive research also gives you insight into macro consumer trends such as the influence of elevated consumer prices on overall spending habits and brand preferences. Or, how to better target Gen Z, a demographic known for its high purchasing power and unique consumer behavior.

Competitive intelligence is especially critical in social media marketing because of the nature of social. As new platforms, features and trends emerge, social teams must keep competitive market research on their radar to prep for 2024.

Competitive listening gives social teams swift, comprehensive insights simultaneously from across social platforms, review sites and customer forums—at a fraction of the cost and time traditional research methods take. You’re able to overcome flux in platform algorithms and face continuously evolving consumer behavior. You also understand how your competitors are navigating these shifts and adapting their strategies to meet them.

Analyze sentiment in thousands of brand conversations to address customer needs more productively and ensure the competition doesn’t affect your market share.

Pairing cross-departmental knowledge with social listening for deeper insights

Social listening data gives you a deep understanding of your business environment not just for marketing but also other key areas such as product enhancement, finding growth opportunities and informing customer care.

Per The State of Social Media Report, 95% of business executives agree companies must rely more heavily on social media data to inform business decisions outside of marketing.

There is a reason behind this. As the latest Sprout Social Index ™ revealed, 68% of customers follow brands on social to stay informed about new products or services. They ask questions, talk to each other and discuss product and service alternatives. This is a wealth of customer-driven information waiting to be harnessed.

That’s why pairing cross-departmental knowledge with social listening insights is a win-win.

Social competitor analysis tools enable you to combine internal knowledge and social media intelligence to bridge disparities between how you think your audience perceives your brand and their actual sentiment. These insights, paired with data from your own CRM, product research and sales data, give you an even clearer picture of how to grow market share.

Building materials pioneer, James Hardie®, uses social listening for competitive research to do just this. They engage in audience and trend analysis, research product sentiment, identify industry influencers and conduct competitor comparisons to build holistic brand strategies beyond marketing.

“Not only is it good from a brand health and marketing angle, it’s also important information we can pass on to our sales teams and product teams. We can find trends and common themes that come up in conversations. We can identify not only our own brand advocates but brand advocates for our competition,” says Bridget Kulla, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at James Hardie.

Here’s a quick look at how you can combine insights from various departments with social listening.

Identify patterns and correlations

Look for patterns and overlaps between your internal knowledge and what social listening data reveals. Use competitor mapping to contextualize your research and competitive data. This exercise will help you identify competitors that weren’t even on your radar before, enabling a more in-depth understanding of your market.

Integrate social listening workflows

Work with department leaders across the organization to educate all team members on the power of what social listening can do and where social insights can plug into their workflows.

Track listening data by topics

Marketing, sales and product teams each focus on different aspects of your brand experience. By narrowing your social media listening focus on data that is truly relevant to your goals, you can get insights from thousands of social conversations without getting overwhelmed.

Sprout’s Listening solution enables this kind of detailed competitive research analysis to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration. Our competitive listening capabilities help you identify keywords and hashtags in competitor-related conversations, revealing common topics in your industry.

Users can create Groups to analyze multiple competitors in one view and create separate Competitive Analysis Listening Templates to analyze data by product names. This is especially useful for large brands with multiple product lines.

Our integrated, AI-driven Query Builder provides customization options for your listening allowing you to include or exclude keywords. Here’s a quick video of the tool in action cutting through the noise in social listening.

How to champion your social listening findings across your organization

A key part of social media competitive analysis is ensuring you can build a collective narrative from all your research. This is necessary to champion your social listening research as a resource for decision-making to drive your business forward.

To get cross-organizational buy-in for listening insights, you also need to break down data silos and make sure your findings are digestible and actionable, especially for exec audiences.

Sprout Listening’s competitive analysis reports and templates with pre-designed topic templates help you achieve this. These templates give your teams access to unfiltered data from millions of social conversions to build winning brand strategies. And, they consolidate all your competitive research data into a unified source to facilitate swift collaboration across departments.

The template provides a comprehensive side-by-side comparison of key metrics, including total engagement, potential impressions, brand sentiment and share of voice. This allows for a straightforward analysis of your brand’s performance in comparison to competitors. These metrics also offer an in-depth understanding of which brand is leading the conversation and how your target audience perceives you versus the competition.

Use the templates to:

Find insights by network

Gain valuable insights into your content performance on different platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly known as Twitter) through network-specific performance and engagement reports. These competitive reports give you a comparative view of which networks your competitors are heavily investing in, which in turn can inform your platform strategy or highlight a content gap you can fill for your audience.

Also use Sprout’s Custom Reports to share relevant insights across departments. These reports help your teams combine cross-network competitor engagement and listening data for a holistic view.

Spot top industry and competitor trends

Discover prominent trends and topics within your industry and extract insights on a number of factors such as competitors, content types, message styles and audience sentiment. Utilize keyword filters to refine your search and choose a date range to examine both long-term and short-term competitive trends.

For example, listening data can reveal an upward trend in consumer demand for products that are ethically sourced and environmentally friendly, which can influence your overall brand strategy and differentiate you from the crowd.

Assess detailed content performance and engagement data across Facebook, X and Instagram based on the uniqueness of each social network. For instance, content that excels on Instagram may not perform as well on Facebook due to differences in format and user behavior.

Identify areas of growth

Analyze feedback about your product and service to proactively address customer concerns and identify areas for improvement and growth. Also analyze competitor feedback and use those findings to refine your own ad messaging and develop more targeted selling propositions. This approach enables you to differentiate your brand while staying vigilant on competitor performance.

Integrate findings across your tech stack

Further strengthen the value of your competitive analysis by integrating your competitive research across your company’s tech stack. With Sprout’s Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector, you can aggregate insights from multiple systems into rich data visualizations of key metrics throughout your customer journey. Track social engagements, average response rates for social customer care initiatives and your competitive share of voice.

You can also customize visuals and gain an immersive view by mapping social engagements and conversion rates to sales data.

Put your competitive marketing research to use for a better 2024

Use social listening to conduct a thorough SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis for yourself and your key competitors. This approach to competitive market research will provide you with actionable insights to navigate successfully through 2024 and beyond.

From analyzing your competitors’ pricing strategies and value props to assessing gaps in your content strategy, use Sprout’s listening templates and reports to identify opportunities and differentiate your brand from competitors.

Request a demo to deep dive into insights that matter.

The post Why competitive research will become more important for social teams in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

• What are they posting on social media?
• What’s their email marketing strategy?
• What kind of content are they publishing on their blog?
• Where are they getting most of their traffic from?

You need to know it all.

Competitive monitoring helps you stay on top of this data at all times.

It’s the first step of competitive analysis that involves gathering the intelligence you need to make informed business decisions.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the benefits of competitive monitoring and how to keep an eye on the competition using top strategies, tips and tools.

What is competitive monitoring?

Competitive monitoring is the process of continuously tracking your competitors’ activities and strategies. This includes keeping tabs on your competitors’ social media activity, pricing changes, marketing campaigns, product launches and more.

The goal of competitive monitoring is to understand where (and how) your competitors are outperforming your brand and where there’s an opportunity for you to swoop in.

Competitive monitoring also involves collecting data on market trends and other key aspects of your industry landscape. Businesses can then analyze this data to derive actionable insights and develop long-term strategies to gain competitive advantage.

Why is competitive monitoring important?

Competitive monitoring forms the backbone of competitive intelligence. It deals with collecting insights that help your business stay ahead, adapt and grow.

Here are five key benefits of competitive monitoring:

Get ahead of the competition

The biggest advantage of competitive monitoring is it provides you with the insight you need to gain the upper hand.

By keeping an eye on your competitors’ activities, you can learn from their wins and losses, develop foolproof strategies, better position your products and differentiate your brand.

For example, you might anticipate a new product launch or business merger before it actually happens. This information can help you move quickly to launch a better product or develop strategies to prevent the merger from stealing your brand’s market share.

Identify untapped markets

Tracking competitor weaknesses, shifts in customer demand, market trends and potential threats allows your brand to capitalize on new opportunities before others do.

For instance, you might spot some niche market segments your competitors might be neglecting, like a different age group or interest.

Or, you might find their customers are asking for a new feature. You could add that feature into your product before they do to steal their subscriptions.

Stay on top of industry trends

Things are always changing in business. There might be a new automation software slashing marketing costs in half. Customers might be demanding more eco-friendly products. Or there might be a new viral trend your competitors are all hopping on.

Competitive monitoring helps you stay updated with all the buzz. You’re able to adopt new technologies earlier, align your offerings with customer preferences, pivot your strategies and sidestep missing out on short-term but potentially lucrative marketing trends.

Explore potential gaps in your strategy

Competitive monitoring isn’t just about looking at what others are doing. It’s also about understanding your own strengths and weaknesses.

For example, analyzing your competitor’s social media might reveal gaps in your own strategy. Maybe you need to share more engaging content. Maybe you’re using outdated formats or posting at the wrong times.

Studying your competitors can also highlight weaknesses in your products, services, business model and other areas that could use innovation and improvement.

Set benchmarks for future performance

Monitoring the competition helps you set realistic goals for your business. This could be sales targets, customer satisfaction scores, the number of sign-ups or engagement rates.

For example, you might find your competitor gets consistently get good reviews on Google about their customer service. This could help you set benchmarks for your customer service team so they can try to snag as many or more positive reviews by the end of the quarter.

Or, competitive monitoring could reveal your competitor is ranking on search engines for several high-volume keywords related to your niche. Your goal could be to outrank them by creating quality content around those specific topics.

How to monitor competitors

Competitive monitoring is more than just watching what your competitors are doing. You need to actively collect, analyze and use that data to your advantage.

This means you need a smart, organized strategy combined with the right competitor analysis tools. Here’s a step-by-step guide to monitoring your competition and extracting insights:

Step 1: Identify the top competitors

The first step is to find out who you’re competing with. This may sound simple but it can get messy if you don’t start out in a systematic, organized way.

Before you make a list, divide your competitors into three distinct categories:

• Direct competitors: These are businesses that target the same audience and offer similar products or services to yours (e.g. two accounting software for small businesses.)
• Indirect competitors: These businesses have similar offerings to yours but target a different audience or market segment (e.g. accounting software for small businesses and accounting software for enterprises.)
• Replacement competitors: These businesses offer alternatives to your products or services (e.g. accounting software for small businesses and virtual accounting services.)

Once you’ve got that down, it’s time to do your research.

Find competitors that fall into each category by searching for relevant keywords on Google, scouring social media platforms and forums, using local search on Google Maps and even leveraging market research professionals if you have the budget for it.

Remember to prioritize the competitors that require more attention, such as direct competitors and local businesses operating in your niche.

Step 2: Scope out priorities with SWOT analysis

After identifying your competitors, the next step is to conduct a SWOT analysis for each. This involves breaking down their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Here’s what to look out for:

• Strengths: Start by identifying what your competitors do well. Analyze their product quality, brand reputation, customer service and online presence. For example, if a competitor is known for excellent customer service, note this as a strength.
• Weaknesses: Look for areas where your competitors are lacking. This could be anything from pricing, limited product range to weak engagement. For instance, if a competitor has a poorly designed website, this is a weakness you can capitalize on.
• Opportunities: Identify external factors that could be advantageous for your competitors. This might include market trends, regulatory changes or new technology. For example, if there’s a growing trend for organic products and your competitor offers these, it’s an opportunity for them.
• Threats: Assess external challenges your competitors might face. These could include new market entrants, changing consumer preferences or economic downturns. For instance, if a new competitor enters the market with a disruptive technology, this could be a threat to your existing competitors.

This information can help shape your own strategy. Look for ways to leverage your competitors’ weaknesses and guard against their strengths.

Also, consider how you can position your business, products and services to take advantage of the same opportunities and mitigate similar threats.

Step 3: Benchmark the sources and metrics

Now, it’s time to measure and compare key metrics to understand where your business stands against the competition. Competitor benchmarking can help you set standards and evaluate performance more effectively.

First, determine which metrics are important for your business. These could include social media engagement rates, website traffic, conversion rates or customer satisfaction levels.

With Sprout Social, you can track your competitors’ social media performance on a visual dashboard. Compare metrics like engagement rates, impressions and share of voice across multiple sources, like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and more.

Sprout’s sentiment analysis tool can also provide insights into how customers perceive your competitors. Dig deeper and analyze sentiment in comments, reviews and social media posts to understand how customers think and feel about specific brands—including yours.

Continuously monitor these metrics and compare them with your competitors. Look for trends, spikes or declines in performance to study the impact of recent strategies and campaigns.

Step 4: Plot the timelines for reporting

Finally, establish a reporting schedule for your competitive monitoring efforts. Decide whether you need weekly, monthly or quarterly reports based on your industry’s pace, stakeholder preferences and the intensity of competition.

Your reports should include updates on competitors’ activities, performance benchmarks, and any shifts in consumer sentiment or market trends. This continual flow of information will help you adjust your strategy quickly in response to any changes in the competitive landscape.

Use Sprout’s competitor reports to put together metrics like engagement, follower growth, publishing behavior and top-performing content. Present everything visually with charts, graphs and tables to make sense of the data and identify new opportunities.

Top competitive monitoring tools

You don’t have to track all your competitors manually—thankfully, we have tools for that.

Here are the top three competitive monitoring tools to help you keep an eye on your rivals and make strategic, data-driven decisions for your company.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a powerful tool for monitoring competitors on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter.)

Benchmark metrics and compare performance with tailored competitor reports. Want to dive deeper? Use Premium Analytics to access more insights with interactive charts and graphs.

Finally, leverage Sprout’s listening tools to monitor public conversations about your competitors and your own brand, understand customer sentiment and identify trends.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO competitor monitoring tool that helps you track and understand your competitors’ online performance.

The platform’s site explorer lets you check any URL’s top organic keywords and content. Additionally, Ahrefs can pinpoint the source of your competitors’ backlinks and detail the keywords driving most traffic to their sites.

Crayon

Crayon uses AI to streamline competitor analysis and intelligence. It automatically collects competitor updates and organizes them into a visual dashboard so brands can stay updated.

The tool also supports team collaboration so you can easily share these insights with stakeholders. Additionally, create sales battlecards and newsletters with competitive intelligence to empower your team, and customize dashboards to simplify reporting.

Monitoring competition with Sprout Social

Watching your competitors’ every move can help you in dozens of ways. You can not just outperform them with this intelligence but also identify your own weaknesses, set realistic benchmarks and hop on new trends before they do.

Use Sprout Social to monitor competitors, create engaging, in-depth reports, assess customer sentiment and compare their social media performance metrics with your own. Ready to check it out for yourself? Sign up for a free trial today.

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The unbiased consumer, industry and competitor insights gleaned from social can be influential far beyond the marketing department. Social is the first place consumers turn to when they need information, entertainment or an outlet to voice their thoughts and opinions. It’s a place they go daily to engage with their favorite brands, provide feedback and learn about new products and services. Social moves fast, which is one of its strengths as a marketing business intelligence channel. However, that also means that customer sentiment, brand perception and cultural trends can change in a matter of minutes. Getting the most value from social business intelligence starts with the ability to access and act on it quickly.

We’ll take a deep dive in the article, but watch the video below for a five-minute break down of social business intelligence and how to use it, along with brand examples to help visualize how to use the data for your brand.

Speeding up time to social insights

Historically, business leaders might have only reviewed social data retrospectively to gauge performance and progress to goals. Now, we’ve entered a new era of social media management where that data can and should be used to drive proactive-decision making.

For instance, you might find that social content focused on an older product still consistently drives engagement, link clicks and website traffic. Your product team might use that data to upgrade the product in question or inspire a new product to the delight of your fans.

Or perhaps, a wave of customers suddenly begin seeking support through your social channels with concerns about a service outage, product flaw or website error. Based on those messages, your communications team can publish a statement while product or IT teams investigate. At the same time, customer service representatives can coordinate a support plan, monitor the situation and update customers as your business works toward a solution.

In both scenarios, the resulting qualitative and quantitative social data can also help your business reflect on the situation, assess the impact and apply learnings in the future.

Sprout Social’s Analytics give businesses the power to harness real-time and retrospective social business intelligence with ease.

In our Analytics Reports home, Sprout users can access social media performance across channels, from a network-level perspective all the way down to individual post performance. The intuitive interface makes it easy to navigate to the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that matter most to your business.

Sprout eliminates time-consuming tasks from the reporting process, so you can digest, apply and share data faster. No scrubbing data, manual calculations, clunky spreadsheets or busy dashboards necessary. In minutes, Sprout users can customize, annotate, export and share presentation-ready reports among stakeholders.

Democratizing social listening data

As more businesses embrace social data as a business intelligence source, social professionals must be trusted and empowered to share their insights. But moving forward, extracting value from social should be something anyone across a business can do. To truly make social a part of business transformation, brands must democratize social data.

Marketing departments are already challenged by a lack of technology adoption, often because their tools are cumbersome or prohibitive to users who aren’t deep analytics experts. Marketers only use 58% of their existing technology capabilities, according to Gartner research. To get that percentage up, most businesses would need to dedicate more time and resources to team upskilling.

Sprout Social is intuitive enough for anyone to use, without a significant investment in technical training.

Social listening, in particular, enables anyone to zoom out beyond owned data and tap into larger social conversations that are rich with industry, competitor and audience insights. Sprout’s social listening tool plugs brands into that power source and immediately surfaces data that can supercharge your business. Create highly customizable Topics that cut through the noise and help your business:

• Gauge consumer perception and sentiment around your brand
• Identify gaps in your industry that your brand is equipped to fill
• Discover opportunities to differentiate your brand from the competition
• Uncover inspiration for product innovation
• Collect voice of the customer (VoC) data to improve the overall customer experience

The user-friendly experience and digestible format make it so that a diverse set of stakeholders—marketers, customer service representatives, product developers, executive leadership and more—can all distill actionable insights from social listening data, without having a data science background.

At Sprout, employees outside of the marketing team are empowered to use listening data. Our sales representatives often create listening reports around timely events, and use the takeaways in their sales process. Listening also helped Sprout’s cross-functional tiger team reevaluate our business plan and hone in on what our customers needed most during the pandemic.

Using social listening to drive business growth

Sprout customers have used listening to answer questions like, what day is leg day? What should be the focus for the next season of our podcast? Who was the artist of the summer? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Sprout’s Social Listening tool made it clear to Trek Bicycle that 2020 was the year of the bike boom. And with the bike boom came a surge in the brand’s audience. New cyclists and riders that hadn’t expressed interest in biking were suddenly vocal biking enthusiasts.

To better understand these “bike boom riders” and what they’re looking to get from cycling, the biking brand leveraged Sprout’s Advanced Listening solution. Not only did the listening data help inform their social strategy, but it also influenced the brand’s overall business strategy as well. It helped the brand forecast how long this bike boom might last and how they could capitalize on it.

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