37 Marketing Tools to Spy on Your Competitors

Numbers 35 to 37

Final Thoughts: Other Ways to Spy on the Competition

Don't forget that there are three more ways you can find out what your competitors are doing, and they are all free.

35. Follow them on social media, add them to a list or interest group, and track what they are talking about.

36. Subscribe to their blogs so you can see what kind of content they are covering and check out announcements of forthcoming launches.

37. Sign up for their newsletter, which is hands-down the best way to see how they are targeting your ideal customers.

Source; http://www.entrepreneur.com

37 Marketing Tools to Spy on Your Competitors

 Numbers 30 to 34

A Mixed Bag

There are a few tools that don't fit in any of the categories above, which can provide additional insight into what your competitors are doing.

30. BuiltWith investigates the technology behind your competitors' sites, covering servers, content management, underlying technology, analytics, advertising, and much more.

31. Marketing Grader is a free HubSpot tool that assesses websites in terms of blogging, social media, SEO, lead generation, and mobile, giving an overall score. It's a good way to see what your competitors are getting right, and wrong

32. Simply Measured rolls many of the tools on our list into one, including analysis of influencers, brands, trends, traffic, conversions, competitors, and more. It covers all the main social media channels with 35 different reports. The basic plans start at $500 per month, though there are free reports available for your own accounts.

33. The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive lets you see how your competitors' pages looked in the past. You never know, you might learn something about how website changes improved conversions.

34. Check out your competitors' direct mail, email, and social campaigns with Who's Mailing What. It's a good way to keep track of trends, get ideas, and see what the competition is up to. This tool costs $747 per year.

37 Marketing Tools to Spy on Your Competitors - No's 26 to 29

Social Engagement and Social Sentiment Tools

This next batch of tools will help you to see how your competitors are building engagement and how their key audiences feel about them.

26. Commun.it is best known as a free tool for building engagement on your own Twitter account. Why not plug in the URL of your top competitor to see how that company is performing online?

27. Fanpage Karma allows you to input the URL of any Facebook fan page and assess the number of fans, growth, and a range of other performance metrics. There's a 14-day free trial of additional features, and the premium package includes Twitter monitoring, too.

28. Login with your Twitter account and you can analyze any profile's followers for free with Followerwonk. There's a wealth of detail available on the authority of followers, recent tweets, bios and locations, enabling you to build a comprehensive picture of your competitor's Twitter presence.

29. Open Social Buzz provides real time search of Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Plug in your competitor's name and see how much social prominence they have.