Marketing intelligence seems daunting, but all it means is data that can be used for marketing a business.
For instance, if you want to get to know your customers, you need market intelligence.
The same goes for monitoring your competitors or analyzing anything related to your market and industry trends.
Why does it even matter?
Well, because, as a marketer, you need to take decisions, every single day.
Should you promote this offer, or this one?
Should we launch a new product? Should we increase prices?
Which level of promotion should you do in your email campaign? Should you ask for a review 3 days or 17 days after the first purchase?
These are hard decisions to take. In a perfect world, you’d get access to infinite knowledge, you’d be able to anticipate your audience’s reactions to these changes, etc.
Yes, it’s not the case.
To take the right decisions, what you need to do is inform your own marketing strategy with additional data.
This is where marketing intelligence comes in. This is why marketing intelligence is important.
Tracking your competitors is key to help you take the right decisions for your business.
To make it less daunting, you can use specialized tools for collecting marketing intelligence and making it easy to interpret. Social media to websites to emails–there’s software for analyzing each of those!
We’ve rounded up a list of the very best marketing intelligence software to take the guesswork out of gathering market data and actionable insights.
Here’s what made the final cut:
Panoramata
If you want to track your competitor’s…
- Ads
- Landing pages
- Email newsletters
- Email flows (automations)
- SMS
- Products and prices
- Software and tech stacks
- Marketing calendars
- SEO
- Website changes
…Panoramata is your friend. It’s made for competitive tracking and benchmarking, with a suite of features that monitor your competitors automatically so you can gather insights and upgrade your strategy.
This means that you can fire yourself from the role of competitor detective and let Panoramata do the hard work for you.
No more signing up to newsletters only to clog your inbox. No more clicking on an ad, hoping to be retargeted. No more screenshotting and making a note to yourself for later.
With Panoramata, you can do away with this for good.
On top of that, its extensive and searchable database comprises 20 million creatives (and counting) so you can get inspiration ahead of Black Friday, Christmas, summer–you name it.
Plus you can compare any brand’s (including your) ad and email performance with its industry competitors for detailed benchmarking. Gauge factors like:
- Emails sent per week
- Ads detected per week
- Discounts
- Email categories
- Promotions rate
- Spam scores
- Organic traffic
- SMS messages sent
If you need it, Panoramata can send you daily or weekly AI summaries on your competitor’s activity and marketing strategy so you always know what they’re up to and what you need to stand out.
If you want to get to know your customers, you need market intelligence. The same goes for monitoring your competitors or analyzing anything related to your market and industry trends.
It truly is the most complete competitive marketing intelligence platform today, if we do say so ourselves.
Pricing information:
- Startup: €84 monthly
- Professional: €149 monthly
- Advanced: €399 monthly
Similarweb
Similarweb is a marketing intelligence tool, specifically for competitive intelligence, and gathers information into a website’s traffic sources, geo-profiles, audience metrics, and other performance indicators.
It’s suitable for any industry, app, or market and tracks over 190 countries, 210 industries, and one billion websites on its platform.
Similarweb claims to invest heavily in collecting these datasets and source their data from first-party analytics, a contributory network, their partners (a global network), and public data. What do companies use with this data? There are different use cases but the most popular ones are:
- Conduct market research
- Understand traffic share from different sources
- Find competitor keywords
A drawback is its data accuracy. Compared to Google Analytics data, its accuracy suffers for sites with smaller traffic (50,000 visits and below).
Pricing information:
- Starter: $125 monthly
- Professional: $333 monthly
- Team: custom price
- Enterprise: custom price
Add-ons such as app intelligence and search intelligence are included in the team and enterprise packages but you have to pay separately for these if you have a lower plan.
Semrush
Semrush is an ideal marketing intelligence tool for marketers focused on technical SEO and keyword research–anything related to improving organic search rankings, namely:
- Position tracking
- On-page SEO checker
- Content template for writers
- Organic traffic insights
- Site audit
- Keyword research tool
- Keyword gap analysis
- Link building
It has over 50 digital marketing tools in a single platform geared towards making a business more visible online. Key features are:
- Check overall website health and identify potential SEO issues
- Gain insights into your competitor’s marketing strategy (both organic and paid) and compare your website to theirs so you can increase organic traffic
- Optimize your website content to attract more visitors
- Improve your backlink profile
- Evaluate the progress of your marketing efforts and website visibility
With its feature-packed tool, it understandably commands a higher price.
Pricing information
- Pro: $139.95 monthly
- Guru: $249.95 monthly
- Enterprise: from $5,000 monthly
Crayon
Crayon helps you “Compete like you mean it,” as its tagline says.
This marketing intelligence software’s key feature is its battlecards, which are like visual cheat sheets that compile information that the whole company can access so everyone is up to speed and on the same page. Crayon plays well with other sales tools such as Slack and Salesforce so you don’t have to migrate your data to a new platform again. What does Crayon track exactly? The “competitor intel” it scours comes from over 300 sources such as:
- News sites
- PR sources
- Social media
- Review sites
- Forums
- App stores
- Hiring websites
- Filing sites
On top of that, its functionalities include:
- Understand hiring trends
- Monitor press mentions
On the downside, it doesn’t track competitor ads or SEO so you will have to use a separate tool for those.
Brand24
Brand24 is a social listening tool that’s suitable for businesses interested in online mentions and perception of their brand on multiple platforms such as social media, forums, blogs, and the news.
It monitors a company’s mentions in real time so you can respond quickly to interactions, whether positive or negative. It also conducts sentiment analysis to notify you of negative mentions.
These features extend to competitors too. Brand24 offers competitive monitoring tools to help you gain insights into your rival’s strategies, performance, and brand perception.
You can also identify influencers who are talking about your competitors and your industry actively. Also, it can identify competitors through keywords and allows you to benchmark yourself through your competitor’s performance.
Brand24 also supports link-building efforts through its Backlink Acquisition platform that uses algorithms to determine link sources, evaluate link quality, and assess your backlink profile.
The filters are quite sophisticated and can track industry-related mentions. It has an influencer score feature that assesses which influencers you can trust and have high engagement.
Finally, it produces comprehensive marketing reports from real-time data from your dashboard.
You can personalize these reports further and choose from different report formats (PDF, Excel, PowerPoint) depending on your use case.
In summary, the main uses of Brand 24 are:
- Brand monitoring and online reputation management
- Customer service improvement
- PR crisis management
- Industry monitoring and market research
- Competitor monitoring
- Link-building
- Reports
- Influencer acquisition or collaboration
Pricing information
- Individual: $119 monthly, billed annually
- Team: $159 monthly, billed annually
- Pro: $239 monthly, billed annually
- Enterprise: $399 monthly, billed annually (this plan can be extended)
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is marketing intelligence software?
Marketing intelligence software helps businesses collect, analyze, and understand data about their market, competitors, and customer behavior. It provides insights that can improve decision-making and marketing strategies.
2. How does marketing intelligence software benefit my business?
It allows you to track trends, identify new opportunities, and optimize your campaigns based on data. This can lead to better targeting, increased efficiency, and a competitive edge in your market.
3. What features should I look for in marketing intelligence software?
Look for tools that offer data tracking, competitor analysis, and customer insights. It’s also helpful if the software integrates with other platforms you use and provides customizable reporting options.