Competitive intelligence is a vital tool for any forward-thinking marketer. It helps you to create an informed, customer-driven understanding of your brand position in the market and the industry.
CI software also includes information about a competitor’s movement, business, and online marketing strategies your business can leverage to get a competitive edge. With lots of companies launching aggressive marketing campaigns every day, it can be challenging to compete head to head in such a crowded space.
Beyond differentiating products and services, marketers must identify gaps or missed opportunities their competitors have, and that’s where NetBase Quid, a competitive intelligence tool, comes in. It helps businesses understand their audience, their needs, and stay up to tabs with their competitors.
About NetBase Quid
This is a consumer and intelligence tool that provides real-time social media analytics solutions to help businesses grow. It was formed after a merger between NetBase, the leader of social media analytics in the industry, and Quid, a leading AI-based text analytics company.
The premise for the merger is to provide contextual insights that explain business trends from using structured and unstructured data.
NetBase Quid appreciates the presence of a vast amount of information in the modern-day market, hence providing a faster and more accurate solution. It allows access to indexed resources like consumer reviews, social media posts, product reviews and more. It aggregates all that information, analyzes it and visualizes it to help marketers understand consumer and market insights.
It uses an Advanced Language Processing technology that interprets and categorizes complex language to ensure businesses make decisions based on highly accurate data. Its primary features include:
- Brand health monitoring
- Social media monitoring
- Engagement management
- Campaign performance measurement
Other Competitive Intelligence Tools
Competitive Intelligence solutions can range from free to basic to enterprise-level analysis programs. Here are some of them:
1. Crunchbase
This CI tool is helpful when looking for a quick and brief overview of a competitor. It aggregates a vast array of information, including leadership, funding, and investments. The platform relies on its venture partner network, community contributors, and in-house data teams using machine technologies to get a company’s information.
2. Visualping
This CI tool is designed for monitoring a competitor’s web page. It provides email alerts accompanied by a screenshot of the page you’re tracking along with the change. It’s pretty easy to use the software as you only need to insert the URL of the page you want to track, select the section you’re interested in, and the system does the rest. What’s more, you can set the number of times you want to monitor target pages, e.g., every 5, 10, or 20 minutes. Apart from the usual web pages, the software also monitors social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
3. Talkwalker
The tool is ideal for businesses looking for an alternative to Google Alerts. It tracks competitor news and compares social media conversations about a competitor. What makes this CI software stand out is its two free tools for competitor tracking. Like Visualping, it sends email alerts for your search terms across Twitter, news, press, blogs, and discussion boards.
Apart from setting up teams to perform competitive intelligence analysis, it’s essential to have these tools at hand. They offer valuable information about your competitors faster, help you understand your market position and identify growth opportunities. With insights from your team and those from CI tools, you can discover areas that will give your business a competitive edge.