In the competitive business world, keeping an eye on the competition is something that every business owner should do. This in no way means that you should obsess over the competition. It is important to know what they next move is, to follow their performance and to evaluate what works and what doesn’t work for them.
It is a great source of valuable information that can help you and your team to strategize more effectively and to get ahead of the rest. Knowing your competition well is also very important when you pitch investors.
Read also: 5 Ways to Differentiate Yourself from the Competition
There are many elements of successful investor pitch and one of these key elements consists of pointing out the competition. It is required to know who your main competitors are and to highlight in your pitch how and why you are better than them.
There are numerous online tools that can help you keep an eye on the competition without spending much of your valuable time on that, such as the following five:
Google Alerts
This one is the best tool to use if you want to receive an email on a daily basis that consists of the top news about a topic that you have chosen. In your case, when you want to monitor what is new with your main competitor simply add their name and you will receive an email with information about where and when your competitor was mentioned online.
SEMrush
This tool gives you well-organized in a graph detailed information about a particular key word that will help you create better content and advertising strategies. It is all-in-one marketing toolkit that will give you information about SEO, paid traffic, social media, content & PR, and insights into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, and link building – basically all data that you need to make more informed decisions.
Monitor Backlinks
This tool is a must-have for SEO experts, marketers and entrepreneurs as it gives them the opportunity to check your bad backlinks and your competitor’s good backlinks. Some of the features include auto backlink discovery, competition new link alerts, keyword rank checker, and email alerts.
What Runs Where
This is the best tool to help you understand better what works and what doesn’t when it comes to online advertising. What Runs Where will give you the opportunity to track a list of your competitors and information about the ads that your competitors are running.
Simply Measured
This tool is very advanced and offers full-funnel social analytics and detailed information about your competition – from their social media channels performance through traffic and conversions to the analysis of the trends.