Having a clear idea of what your competitors are up to is essential in order to stay ahead and be at the forefront of your industry.
By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors you’ll be able to find opportunities to stand out, offer better services and reach more customers. And now, thanks to the internet, an entire lineup of tools are available to help you analyse your competitors’ online presence, messaging and product performance (and even target their customers!).
We’ve put together a list of some of the top competitor analysis tools to help retailers analyse their competitors.
If social media is part of your marketing strategy, you’ll want to know how your competitors are doing online and what marketing tactics they are implementing.
Brandwatch is a great tool not only to see how your competitors are doing, but also to stay on top of your own social media presence and understand how consumers are engaging with your brand. Brandwatch tracks the names of your competitors, their products and also offers a “sentiment analysis”, which is their own calculation of the general reputation of your competitor. They do this by analysing blog posts and social media mentions, as well as looking at the important information about your audience, such as profession and interests (as opposed to only demographics).
A tool like Brandwatch helps you benchmark the overall presence of your competitors online and compare the perception consumers have of your brand in comparison to your competitors. Brandwatch will help you understand where your competitors are weakest, and how you can turn that into an opportunity for your brand.
If you’re implementing a digital marketing strategy, it’s likely content marketing is part of your overall marketing plan. This means you’ll be implementing SEO and trying to rank on Google in order to acquire “hot” customers. Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset to see how your competitors are implementing content marketing and what strategies are working for them - without having to get too technical.
With Ahrefs, you can easily see what keywords your competitors are ranking for, what their monthly traffic is and who is linking to them. Ahrefs also lets you track your competitors over time: this will show you what new strategies your competitors are implementing and see what their customers are engaging with. You’ll also be able to see their highest performing products and the kind of messaging they are implementing.
Ahrefs is perfect if you want to implement SEO but aren’t sure where to get started. They do all the analytics and heavy lifting as well as a thorough analysis of your competitors.
Wiser is a software that goes a little more in-depth than the previous two tools. Wiser will monitor the pricing of your competitors and offers insights on how to improve your own pricing structure. The key thing to note about Wiser is that not only will they give you information about your competitors, but they will sync with your own inventory and automatically adjust your pricing according to your competitors. This means you can implement your own mark up and mark down strategies in order to keep your prices competitive at all times.
Wiser also monitors your competitors’ inventory, and can help you optimise your in-store experience by offering insights on competitors’ store layouts. Wiser gathers a large amount of data and analytics to help you test different pricing strategies, store layouts and marketing tactics.
A tool like Wiser can help you improve your own operations by gathering data and gaining unique consumer insights on you and your competitors’ consumer experience.
Recash is a tool that dives even deeper into understanding customers’ buying habits and overall customer behaviour. Recash is an AISP registered entity, which means it can implement the Open Banking directive to gather relevant financial data from customers. This means that Recash can collect and process customer banking data anonymously and turn it into digestible and relevant information for their retail partners.
Not only can retailers gather insights on consumers’ financial behaviour, but they can also see where their customers are shopping - i.e. which competitors are your consumers shopping at. This is done by upgrading the customer’s bank card to a cashback card; the retailer can offer rewards for loyalty, and at the same time gather relevant data on consumer spending habits.
By implementing a tool such as Recash, you can gain unprecedented information on competitors and therefore target their competitors’ customers - all while rewarding your current customers through their own cashback card. Through Recash’s dashboard, retailers can compare their total sales, the number of transactions and the overall sales trend with their competitors.
By tracking the transactions that take place with competitors or other merchants, you can take precision targeting to the next level and attract a new range of customers.
Keeping an eye on how your competitors are doing is essential in order to keep up with industry standards and find new opportunities for your brand. Using a diverse range of tools means your company is prepared on all fronts and can easily adapt to new market trends.