How to monitor your competitors with no budget

It actually doesn’t matter what blog you read or courses you take, analyzing and monitoring your competitors is usually on every Marketing Strategy checklist out there. If you’re looking for a way to monitor your competition and don’t have the budget to use competitive intelligence tools, this article should provide you with a few solutions.

tl;dr

  • Use an RSS reader (Feedly) to get blog, press release and release note updates.
  • Let Wachete or visualping monitor website changes for you.
  • Use Kill the newsletter to transform newsletters into an RSS feed that’s embeddable in your RSS reader.
  • Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for mentions of your competitors.
  • Know other tools? Feel free to let me know.

Blog, press releases and release notes

The first place to go for good information in terms of competitive intelligence is your competitor’s blog, the press releases and the release notes (in the case of a SAAS company). To avoid visiting the website at regular intervals, it’s worth subscribing to the RSS feed and integrating it into your RSS reader of choice. In case you have trouble finding the RSS feed: There are proper browser plug-ins.

Changes on the website

In order to monitor changes in your competitor prices, job offers or the feature set, there is no need to do it manually. It’s a good idea to use a tool for this purpose and get alerted about changes over email, Slack or Teams. Tools like Wachete or visualping can do the job for you.

Newsletter

In order to understand how your competitors are using email to communicate with their users and prospects, you need to be able to see their emails. If you’re not willing to subscribe with your private or business mail address there’s an easy solution: Kill the newsletter. It transforms the subscription into an RSS feed that’s embeddable in your RSS reader.

Monitor keyword mentions

Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for mentions of your competitors, your company, or other relevant topics.

Know other tools?

I know that there are other free tools out there. And I know that there are tools out there that aren’t costly (in terms of B2B costs). If you know other tools or you have other use cases, do not hesitate to contact me.