A Guide to Competitive Intelligence in Marketing 2024

Introduction

Staying ahead of the competition is no easy feat. That’s why every marketing team should conduct some form of competitive intelligence – gather information about their competitors and analyze it for insights to inform their own strategies.

One easy way marketers can stay one step ahead is with Visualping.

Visualping is a simple tool online that lets you monitor any web pages on the internet for changes. Marketers use it to get automatic updates on competitor activity from anywhere on the web, like to track competitors' websites for changes, or for competitor price tracking. Get notified of new product or feature releases, new blog content, and interesting shifts in their marketing messages on key landing pages.

In this article, we’ll delve into the world of competitive intelligence in marketing – why it’s important for marketers to embrace competitive intelligence, the pros and cons of different methods for keeping tabs on the competition, and how marketers can use automated tools, like Visualping, to stay on top of the competitors in their industry.

Importance of Competitive Intelligence in Marketing

In Differentiating Your Brand

Marketing, of course, is how a business promotes and sells its products or services, including market research and advertising.

Deciding how to differentiate your brand depends on analyzing what the competition is doing – how they’re positioning their product or service, and the unique value they offer, relative to everybody else. You can only identify what’s missing until you’ve gathered competitive intel to understand what’s currently being offered.

For example, you can keep an eye on the header statements on your competitors’ homepages – how they communicate the benefits they provide prospective customers, the language they use and how they describe their product and services.

In Executing Marketing Tactics

Effective marketing tactics are key to your business’s success. Maybe the players in your industry tend to have a strong presence on social media, or maybe they’ve specialized in content marketing and search engine optimization to dominate the search results for your target queries and keywords.

By taking notes on how your competitors are marketing and promoting their products and services, you can fine-tune your own tactics, outmaneuver them, and secure your fair share of the market.

For example, you can sign up for your competitors’ newsletters to funnel all their marketing campaigns straight in your inbox, which you can use for your inspiration for your email marketing strategies.

In Understanding Your Target Audience

By keeping an eye on the competition, you can learn a lot about your target audience – key demographics, the features and product offerings they care about, and even undiscovered use cases and markets you and your team haven’t tapped into yet.

By monitoring how your competitors understand your target audience, and what makes them tick, you can identify new marketing opportunities, such as tweaking your messaging to resonate with them.

Competitive Intelligence Tools in Marketing

But the marketing landscape is constantly evolving, and it’s difficult to keep up with every competitor update that’s relevant to you and your competitive intelligence team. This is where competitive intelligence tools shine.

Competitive intelligence tools automate the process of gathering and analyzing competitor web data. They make it easier for you to keep track of the information you care about, because they gather the data for you.

Limitations of Current Approaches to Competitive Intelligence

Manual Tracking

Manually looking up the information you care about is not a recommended strategy for competitive intelligence in marketing.

Marketing teams are busy enough as is. Spending time looking it up yourself and manually recording your findings in a spreadsheet is generally considered an inefficient and error-prone process, because doing it yourself opens up the possibility of missing important updates, and making accidental errors.

These conventional methods often fail to provide real-time insights, leaving marketers reliant on outdated information. The dynamic nature of the marketing environment demands a more agile and accurate approach to competitor monitoring.

Especially with the availability of competitor monitoring tools, which can automate this process for you, getting your intel manually is considered time-consuming, ineffective and ultimately more costly than investing in competitive intelligence software.

Generic Competitive Intelligence Software

While investing in software is generally considered the way to go, not all of these tools are considered equal.

Most industry standard competitive intelligence software have garnered somewhat of a reputation for being expensive and dense with overly complicated and specialized functionalities – most of which your team would not make use of.

Especially if your marketing team has a limited budget, when evaluating the many different options out there, it’s important to first identify your team’s goals, and review your options relative to your team’s designated milestones.

This is why Visualping is one of the most popular competitive intelligence tools in marketing. It’s more affordable than most industry standard tools, and its methodology is simple: simply enter the web pages you want to track for updates, and Visualping will notify you of changes.

Visualping is the top competitive intelligence solution for teams looking to keep an eye on competitor activity from literally anywhere on the web.

How to Gather Your Own Competitive Intelligence in Marketing

Visualping

Visualping offers marketers a simple and convenient way for staying on top of the exact competitor activity they care about – from anywhere on the web. With features like automated website monitoring and alerts, Visualping empowers marketers to make data-driven decisions and seize the competitive advantage.

By automating the process of checking web pages for changes for you, you and your team can save time reviewing competitor activity. And, by sending alerts when there’s an update, you can more easily keep track of the competitor landscape, and keep your competitive intelligence up-to-date.

How to Use Visualping for Competitive Intelligence

Step 1: Input the URL into Visualping’s homepage

To track your competitors, open the desired webpage on your browser and copy the URL from the address bar. Then, open up the Visualping homepage and paste the URL into the provided search field.

The web page will appear in Visualping’s viewfinder.

Step 2: Select the Page Section for Monitoring

Next, select the specific area of the page you want to receive updates on. You can select the area, or specific web page elements. Optionally, you can use Visualping’s advanced features to get notified only on certain keywords of interest – if they’re removed or added to the page.

Step 3: Set the Monitoring Frequency

Specify how frequently Visualping should check the page for changes. Adjust the interval based on your preference, ranging from as frequently as every five minutes to as long as every month.

Step 4: Provide Email for Notification Delivery

Next, enter the email address you would like your change alerts sent to.

As a last step, after you click “Start Monitoring”, you will receive an email prompting you to confirm your account – do not skip this! In order to receive alerts on your competitors, you need to confirm your account.

Conclusion

In conclusion, competitive intelligence is a key ingredient in effective marketing strategies. Not only does analyzing the competition enable you to carve out your own unique spot in the market, but you can glean insights from your competitors’ marketing strategies to further understand the audience, and what makes your audience tick.

By incorporating Visualping, you can harness the power of real-time competitive data, monitor your competitors effortlessly, and adapt swiftly to the ever-changing marketing landscape. Embrace competitive intelligence with Visualping and gain that competitive edge today.

Interested in finding out more about how your marketing team can use Visualping for competitive intelligence? Contact us today – our support team would be happy to help.