Top 10 Competitor Research Tools To Stay Ahead In The Marketing Game

As a savvy business person, you must realize that your company doesn’t exist in a bubble. You must find your competitors. Competitor analysis will help you track, analyze, and outsmart your competitors. Sadly, there are hundreds of tools available around the web. So, deciding which option will work best for you can be challenging. But we’ve got you covered – here are the top ten competitor research tools to help you step up in the marketing game. 

1. Sprout Social

Chicago-based Sprout Social is a software company that assists businesses in becoming better marketers using various analytical tools. Sprout Social enables organizations to understand competitive report packages and assess and optimize their social strategy using multiple data points across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

You can even level up your analytics game with Sprout’s Premium Analytics tool, which provides deeper insights into your social channel with interactive charts and graphs. In addition, Sprout Social offers competitive analytics on Instagram. 

2. Phlanx 

Phlanx is a social media marketing website that measures engagement rates, contact influencers, audit Instagram accounts, and many more. Its Instagram engagement calculator tells you how active the followers of a particular IG account are. 

Phlanx is a fantastic resource for analyzing the online presence of your competitors. Likewise, it helps determine whether or not an influencer has legitimate followers. With Phlanx, the engagement ratio is measured using the number of followers an account has compared to the rate at which followers interact with content.

3. SEMRush

SEMRush is one of the most in-demand SEO software in the market. Moreover, its competitor analysis solution sets them apart from other software. Beginners can use SEMRush to pull their competitor’s backlinks and monitor changes in their ranking.

This is a useful tool for understanding your competition from a strictly SEO perspective. Likewise, highlighting what keywords competitors target directly influences your content strategy.

4. Ahrefs

Ahrefs Site Explorer is another reliable competitor research tool for SEO that enables you to check any URL’s top organic keywords. In addition, you get a rough estimate of how much traffic a competitor receives on that keyword. It’s easy to identify a site’s highest-performing content based on backlinks (instead of shares). This information teaches you what product or messaging works best for a brand. Aside from that, Ahrefs also allows you to assess the  keywords with the most traffic to a competing site.

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an app that helps you analyze the top-performing content for particular topics for your brand and your competitors. The tool digs deeper into a piece of content’s engagement on social sites and its total shares across the web. Not only does this lead you in on who’s killing it in industry content, but it also helps you identify potentially hot topics to explore yourself.

6. Similarweb

Similarweb is a comprehensive tool for content and SEO. The tools help you investigate your competitor’s content and where their traffic comes from. For instance, you can identify a site’s referral traffic and where it ends up sending its visitors. More importantly, it helps content marketers see what topics visitors search for and other relevant sites they visit.

7. Feedly

Use Feedly if you want to keep track of your competitor’s content without constantly checking up on their website. Feedly is a content aggregator that stores and organizes content as it’s published, including that of your rivals. The tool lets you see hot topics covered by your competitors on one page.

8. WooRank

WooRank is a digital marketing tool and an SEO checker. It will scan your website and give you an audit of its SEO. We’ve included this in our list of competitor research tools because it allows you to keep track of your rivals. Woorank enables you to add three competitors to compare the technical SEO, site performance, keywords, backlinks, and social media engagement. 

WooRank’s Keyword Tool, in particular, tracks and calculates keyword rankings and SEO impact. Your competitors have been added automatically, meaning you’ll receive insights into their marketing strategies, goals, and priorities. It monitors your website’s SEO performance and your competitors’ keyword ranking and landing pages.

9. Mailcharts

Email marketing is one of the most tedious channels for competitive analysis. Mailcharts consolidates emails from competing campaigns to help influence your own. In addition to grabbing subject lines, the platform pulls data such as send frequency and compares it to your business’ campaigns to see where your emails stand.

Mailcharts also compares your campaigns to their massive library of marketing emails to ensure you’re in tune with best practices. This powerful competitor analysis tool also offers many email examples to draw inspiration.

10. Owletter

This competitive research tool captures, stores, and analyzes emails from a website. It means you can monitor your competitors’ emails. And from there, you can determine what strategies are working for them and what are not. 

The Owletter tool gives you access to various insights, which include the following:

• Learn whether your competitors have a spam reputation
• If they strictly follow a schedule for sending email
• If they change their programs according to the season
• Trending topics
• Undiscovered opportunities

Owletter takes a screenshot of every email you receive. To achieve that, you must be on your competitors’ mailing lists. Then Owletter will store and analyze it and notify you if the system thinks there are important insights.

Keep an eye on your competitors– it’s an essential business strategy.

To stay ahead of the game, you must keep a close eye on your competition. While learning from your competitors can seem intimidating, it’s okay if you’ve chosen suitable competitor analysis tools for your organization. Remember that these competitor research tools are necessary for fine-tuning your marketing strategy. And using the right tools allows you to run your analysis efficiently and focus more on your goals.