Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

My article today will discuss the best competitive intelligence tools that will give you a secret advantage over your competitors. Integrating these solutions into your daily routine will help you make informed decisions based on real data.

I have carefully selected 21 tools that provide competitive insights about your rivals’ content marketing activities in paid and organic results, display advertising and social media. After giving these softwares a try, I promise that you’ll see that spying on your competitors has never been so easy!

Competitive analysis is an excellent way for businesses to map out their fledgling social strategy or give existing social channels a shot in the arm.

After all it pays to learn from the best and the beauty of social is that a huge amount of useful data is publicly available.

It does take time and a bit of skill to mine that data, but luckily there are a number of free tools available to automate at least part of the process.

To this end, I’ve come up with a six stage plan that will at least get your business on the road to completing a competitor analysis on Twitter, which will help to identify the influencers within your industry and the type of content that drives relevant conversations....

“If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles” - Sun Tzu

Business can learn a lot from ancient military wisdom. Armies have been using spies for millenia to report on the other side's strategies, weaponry, supplies, morale, and general's hangover.

While binoculars and a fake mustache may have been the most important tools for most of spying history, the internet age has provided us with somewhat more advanced tools to keep track of our competitors. Take a look at the following list of free(mium) tools you can use to unravel the actions and underlying strategies of your competition....