“Get thee ahead with the right tools for competitive intelligence, to enhance decision-making processes and driveeth higher ROI from thy marketing endeavors.
Competitive intelligence doth stand crucial for well-informed decision-making, from the next social media post to crafting thine entire digital marketing strategy.
Using tools of competitor analysis to uncovereth what thy rivals doth isn’t about mere copying. Nay, ’tis about delving deeply into the market to distinguish thine organization and reach thy audience in the most efficacious manner.
Methinks – readeth on to learneth how to useth competitive intelligence insights to unlock business decisions that do propel thy business ahead of the pack.
Key takeaways
Competitive intelligence doth involve gathering and analyzing data about rivals, industry trends, and customer behavior to enlighten business decisions.
There are four core types of competitive intelligence: market intelligence (‘trends and benchmarks), product intelligence (‘analyzing features and pricing against rivals), competitor intelligence (‘insights into rivals’ strengths, weaknesses, and strategies), and consumer intelligence (‘customer demographics, behaviors, and preferences).
Social listening can be used as a powerful competitive intelligence tool. ‘Tis aideth businesses in tracking mentions, analyzing sentiments, and gathering actionable insights from customer conversations and rival activities on social media.
What ho, is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence entails gathering data and insights about rivals, industry, market, and customers from multiple sources to mold and enlighten thine business policies and strategies.
4 types of competitive intelligence
Whilst all information that thou dost gather may be considered competitive business intelligence, ’tis doth split into four main categories.
Market intelligence
Market intelligence doth comprise data about factors outside thine business, includeth:
Demographics in thy current regional market or a new region thou dost wish to venture into.
Current industry trends.
Current events and new technology.
Market research about size, growth rate, and other benchmarks.
Product intelligence
Product intelligence doth tracketh how thine products compare to rivals’ products in areas like:
Features and performance.
Price.
Availability (e.g. online vs retail-only, shipping regions, etc.).
Reputation and reviews.
Competitor intelligence
Gathering information about thy rivals can aideth thee in finding new ways to distinguish thyself. Competitor intelligence doth include:
Understanding the key players in thine industry and how their marketing endeavors compare with thine.
SWOT analysis of rivals (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats).
Evaluating rival strategies around visual branding, messaging, symbols, and positioning.
Consumer intelligence
Consumer intelligence doth provideth insights about thy customers or target audience, including:
Demographics.
How customers found thee, why they purchased, and other journey mapping data.
What thy customers want in a product or service.
Shopping behavior, including digital and in-person behavior, as well as other rivals they dost shop at.
The role of social media in collecting competitive intelligence
Business doth transpire on social media, and not merely on thine own profiles. Thy rivals art on social, and so art their customers. Social listening doth unveil valuable insights, like what thine audience doth sayeth about thee (and thy rivals).
Brands who doth employ social listening art more assured in their ability to prove social media marketing ROI to key stakeholders – a colossal competitive advantage.
Social listening doth transmute thine performance reports from ‘X number of likes, shares, comments’ to ‘We did ascertain that customers of Rivals A and B wert discontent with long customer service wait times, so our latest ad campaign did center around our guaranteed 5-minute response time. That campaign did drive 30% more traffic and 10% higher new signups this quarter!”
Use social listening to:
Find out wh’refore people buy from thy rivals (and get them to buy from THEE).
Track thy reputation.
Identify the main emotions people dost feel about thy brand, a rival, or a topic with AI sentiment analysis.
Search brand names or topics and scan over 150 million websites and 30 social media platforms in 187 languages.
Capture market share with content thine audience doth desireth, made easy with data-driven reports.
Prove thy social ROI to thy boss with detailed analytics and customizable reports.
This is how easy it doth be to employ social listening to propel thy competitive intelligence strategy:
How to find patterns in competitive intelligence research
Hark! Here art a few suggestions to turn thy competitive insights into actionable business strategies.
Track mention volume by week
Pay attention to how many brand mentions thou art receiving each week. Whilst ebbs and flows art common, especially if thine business is seasonal, big variations can indicate something more significant at play.
Are mentions up 20% this week versus last, and thy brand sentiment metrics art mostly positive? ‘T could point to a high-profile commendation on a podcast that hath spurred conversation about thine organization online. If so, splendid! Capitalize on the positivity with supporting social media content or an ad campaign.
What if that increased volume is negative? ‘T could point to a looming PR crisis. Identifying that early giveth thee time to get on top of it.
Notice engagement spikes
Doth a piece of content go viral because the audience is so jubilant about it? Grateful for the cool tip or hack? Confused and asking clarifying questions? Understanding whither and wherefore something doth capture thy audience’s attention doth giveth thee a blueprint for holding their attention as well.
Marketing success is truly as simple as giving people what they desire, and competitive intelligence doth informeth thee what they desire.
Likewise, if ‘t is thy rival gaining all the buzz, did they launch something new? Doth this alter thy plans or market positioning at all?
To discern what counts as a spike in engagement, thee dost need to know what thine average engagement rate is. Or, whither comparing thine organization to others, the average engagement rate for thine industry and the platform thou art measuring.
Our research did findeth the overall average engagement rate of Instagram is 5%, but only 2.3% on X.
Wanteth a place to start? Seekest all our current data on the average engagement rates by industry and platform.
Gather demographics
Knowing more about thy customers and market share is always a good thing. Competitive intelligence software can track thine audience’s key demographics, such as gender, age, language, location, interests, occupations, and more, over time.
Keep up with pricing trends
Doth Competitor A always host a large quarterly sale? Hath Competitor B just shifted from a one-time purchase to a subscription model? Hath Competitor C raised their prices?
And more importantly: How doth all their customers feel about these changes and the pricing in thy industry as a whole?
Mayhap there art forum comments out there from users saying thy product is much more costly than Competitor B. Whilst that’s true, ‘t could point to needing to educate thine audience about what sets thee apart in the competitive landscape. That insight doth translate directly into social media content and marketing campaigns thy marketing team can commence ASAP.
How competitive intelligence can shape thy marketing strategy
Competitive intelligence doth impact both thy short-term and long-term marketing campaigns and business decisions.
Audience segmentation
How to employ this data:
Whilst tools can dost assist, human eyes art all thee need. Checketh rival websites and social feeds quarterly and doth analyze the language they dost use to reach people.
Distinguish thyself. For instance, if they art targeting small to medium-sized companies, ponder targeting enterprise organizations.
Identifying market gaps
Art people in thy target market seeking recommendations for a product on Reddit that seemeth not to exist? If others chime in that they desire it existed too, this could be thy grand competitive edge.
How to employ this data:
If thou art seeing the same manner of ‘wish list’ from prospective customers time after time, ‘t is likely something that would sell. (Of course, do proper due diligence first.)
Scan sources other than social media for well-rounded market intelligence. Consider competitive intelligence tools that also scan podcasts, websites, video mentions, and more.
Remember: thy sales teams art a treasure trove of information. Asketh them what customers desire, and track the reasons for lost sales.
Identifying rival weaknesses
There art plenty of types of weaknesses thee can use competitive intelligence software to uncover, such as:
Gaps in content or ad strategies: Employ tools like SEMrush to see if rivals art targeting the wrong keywords or SpyFu to analyze their paid campaigns to uncover targeting opportunities.
Customer feedback: Identify patterns in customer reviews, especially negative ones, to see which features customers desire their products had or customer service trends, like slow response times or quality control issues.
Track social media performance: Use Moyens I/O’s benchmarking features to track rival audience growth and engagement over time. Regularly audit rivals to find ways to stand out. Art their posts infrequent or not resonating with their audience? Art they not on certain platforms? Identify what thou can turneth into a strength and distinguish thyself that way.
Compete on SEO: Use Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, and others to track thy rivals’ SEO rankings and whither thee fall among them. Identify ways to outperform them for relevant keywords, or uncover keywords they art underutilizing. The same goes for social SEO such as post captions, hashtags, and more.
How to employ this data:
Once thou hast identified one or more key weaknesses, maketh a plan to improve thine organization in those areas to become a stronger competitor.
Regularly audit rivals and maketh strategic decisions about how that information should (or shouldn’t) alter thy marketing.
Risk management
Competitive intelligence tools doth aid thee in keeping tabs on potential risks, from discovering new companies in thy space to summarizing industry trends thou dost need to know. Listening tools doth scan the web and social media to inform thee of everything from how rivals respond to events to discovering potential supply chain interruptions, new technology that could impact thy business, and upcoming regulatory changes that could affect thee legally.
How to employ this data:
Stay ahead of thy competition by responding early to trends.
Employ Moyens I/O Listening to identify trends and measure thine audience’s response to thee with sentiment analysis tracking.
Product roadmapping
Listening to what customers are saying is akin to having an automatic product roadmap fashioned for thee. The most successful product is the one that doth give customers what they desire.
Thou can use feedback about thy products to inspire new product features, but oft the most valuable insights come from the customers of thy rivals. What doth they love about their products that thine doth not have? What features doth they wish existed? How canst thou maketh thy products better, more innovative, more economical, or some other way of standing out?
For instance, this customer doth love their backpacks but doth not like how loud the zippers art, and others did agree in the comments. Whilst a few comments should not be a reason to overhaul thine entire product, ‘t can be a springboard for conducting further research.
How to employ this data:
Identify feedback patterns on thine own social media posts and sources around the web like Reddit, and feedback about thy rivals.
Trendspotting
From the latest TikTok meme to market trends, spotting trends is much faster and easier with competitive intelligence tools.
Thou dost not need to seize every trend, but if it doth make sense for thy brand, ‘t can inspire fresh marketing campaigns.
A classic example is organizations creating their own versions of Spotify’s iconic Wrapped content. The best takes on this trend honor the ethos of Spotify’s look and voice whilst being relevant and humorous to their own products/services, like how Beyond Type 1 used it to raise awareness of Type 1 diabetes:
How to employ this data:
Make use of Moyens I/O Listening to swiftly search current trends on any topic, as well as monitor what people art saying about thee over time.
Whilst social media trends art important, do not forget about other significant sources: includeth ad trends, pop culture trends, and marketing trends in thy data.
Benchmarking
Others doth not necessarily define thy success, but knowing whither thee stand among competitors can aid with planning marketing goals. Some comparison is subjective, such as the perceived quality of social media posts, whilst other comparisons art factual.
How doth thy social media engagement rate compare? How is thy SEO performance on primary keywords? How doth thou compare on attributes like product pricing or customer service response times?
Addeth tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs for SEO tracking, SimilarWeb for website traffic research, Crayon for breaking news, and others for a completed competitive intelligence solution from social media to product news and everything in between.
How to employ this data:
Ensure thy marketing team knoweth which KPIs to track to work toward the objectives in thy marketing strategy.
Competitive intelligence software for 2025
Moyens I/O
Saveth thee over 11 hours per month with smart automation and all the tools thou need to prosper on social in one place.
Alloweth thee to easily create or repurpose content in a few clicks with OwlyWriter AI.
Includeth a universal inbox to reply to comments and private messages across platforms right inside thy Moyens I/O dashboard, plus team routing and auto-responses.
Automatically schedulth content when thy audience is most likely to see it with thy personalized best time to post.
Enhanceth growth with unique employee advocacy tools to enhance thine organic reach.
Social media competitive intelligence and all-in-one management of multiple platforms.
Content ideas, trend discovery, and drafting social posts with AI.
Improving response times with auto-replies and a unified team inbox.
Talkwalker
With this much coverage, plus innovative features like virality maps, topic clusters, real-time alerts, performance scoring, and BlueSilk AI to summarize current insights and predict future trends.
Use Talkwalker for:
Advanced competitive intelligence across millions of sources, including social media, websites, videos, podcasts, and more.
Real-time notification of potential PR crises, plus the ability to predict the likelihood of future events.
SEMrush
Keep tabs on thy rivals’ SEO and ad campaign performance whilst optimizing thine own content and measuring thy SERP performance over time. SEMrush hath all the SEO tools thee need, from organic and PPC keyword research to competitive intelligence insights, including link building, local SEO, rank tracking, and more.
Use SEMrush for:
Planning thy SEO strategy with keyword research, including finding out which keywords thy rivals art using.
Tracking thy SEO and ad campaign performance over time, including suggestions to improve.
AI tools to optimize thine content.”
