Know About Your Competitors More Than They Know About Themselves

Tools For Founders To Do Competitor Research

Many times, we are thinking about our competitors. What are they doing? How can we be better? And so on.

Well, Technology does provides us a lot of options that if used wisely open door to a lot of understanding about competitors and their strategies. While using these tools, of course, only the data is available and one has to still interpret the signs like a savvy marketer.

What do you need to know about your competitors-

Who Is Your Competitor?

To be able to do that, search your value proposition on Google. That’s your competitors.

You search in Google and check companies that offer the same. I use it all the time. For example, you want to build software for logistics optimization.

Fig: Sample competitor research with Google

Once you know your competitors, here is a list of different tools to find out your competitors-

1. Find The Keywords Your Competitors Rank For: From Where Do They Get Backlinks And Audience? What Domains Refer To It?

Use – Owler/SimilarWeb/Semrush

I have been using SemRush with pretty satisfying results. You can check the keywords that your competitor ranks for. You can also learn about the pages that are working great for them as well as sources from which their competitor is getting visitors

Fig: Sample results of Khanacademy.org from SEMrush

2. Find what ads your competitors run: Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Facebook Ads Library shows you all the ads that any brand runs on Facebook. You can filter by date as well as by location.

Fig: IBM ads on Facebook possible to see via Facebook Ads Library

On LinkedIn, go on the brand page and find ads under posts

Fig: Mindbowser ads on LinkedIn

Moat.com/ Adbeat.com/ Poweradspy.com are some of the other paid tools to see all the ads of a company.

Being able to see the ads, you can understand what pricing your competitor is charging

Or say if a particular ad is running for a long time, you know that such a value proposition is running good for them.

Also if the competition is running an ad in a particular location, they may be pushing in that geolocation

3. Find Emails Of Competitors Through Owletter.com

Owletter provides you an email address where you receive all the emails that your competitor sends out Reminders/newsletters/ prompts/Discount etc. This means you always know what they are doing and can take action.

Fig: Sample results from Owletter

4. Keep An Eye On Their Landing Page Changes

Suppose you want to know when your competitor makes any changes to their value proposition or their positioning. Their Homepage/Landing Page is the first thing they would be changing then.

Versionista is the tool that allows you to track it.

Fig: Landing page of  Versionista

5. If You Are Building A Mobile App Only: App Annie Is The Platform To Track Metrics For Apps And Finding Competitor Information

Fig: App Annie analytics dashboard