Competitive Marketing Intelligence: What It Is and 10 Real-World Examples

Smart businesses aren’t threatened by their competitors. They use their competitors’ strengths to their advantage. 

This is the basis for competitive marketing intelligence. Competitive marketing intelligence can supercharge your marketing efforts, save you time and money, and streamline cumbersome or resource-heavy processes.

Below, we’ll cover how competitive analysis works and why it’s worth investing in. We’ll also provide concrete and easily achievable competitive marketing intelligence examples to put it into practice.

What Is Competitive Marketing Intelligence?

Competitive marketing intelligence is when you gather data on businesses similar to yours — companies that are similar in size, serve the same customer base, offer the same products and services, and/or function in the same main location(s) or market(s) — to guide your own marketing strategy and investments.

It looks at several factors that make up your competitor’s business and marketing practices, including:

• How they price (and change the price of) their offerings
• How they launch new products or services
• How they advertise, engage with consumers, and promote themselves online (websites, social media, etc.) or in person (billboards, word-of-mouth, etc.)
• How (and how well) their brand appears in search results and media
• How they promote locally on listings platforms, and how their strategies differ by region or market
• Their reputation, based on customer sentiment and feedback

By tracking these factors, you gain the insights needed to make smarter marketing decisions and stay competitive in your market.

Why Competitive Marketing Intelligence Matters for Marketing Teams

Marketing teams need competitive marketing intelligence to make well-informed decisions about where to invest their time, energy, and resources.

Without it, they’re missing a large piece of the puzzle. Marketers can guess why a campaign is or isn’t working, but only competitive insights can confirm those suspicions — and provide real, tangible solutions for solving the problem. Basically, the more data you have to back up your actions, the easier it will be to get stakeholder and executive buy-in, and the more likely you’ll have success in driving engagement, clicks, sales, and brand awareness.

10 Competitive Marketing Intelligence Examples

So how can you actually enact a competitive analysis strategy? Let’s dive into several real-world competitive marketing intelligence examples.

1. Tracking Competitor Ad Campaigns

Tracking how other businesses run ad campaigns can inform what kinds of ads you should run, where you should place them, and how long you should run them to maximize the return on your investment.

Start by checking out Meta’s Ad Library and Google’s Ads Transparency Center to easily search for and find ads currently running on those platforms by your local competitors. From there, take a close look at the ad copy, campaign start date, platform, and other elements like imagery, links, and profile follower count.

Ask yourself: What’s a consistent theme in terms of language used or timing of the ad across high-performing campaigns (campaigns that get a lot of buzz online or receive many comments and other indicators of engagement)? What can you replicate, and what can’t you?

Once you’ve done this research, you can turn around and improve your own strategy. For instance, seeing that a competitor has begun marketing to a new target market could open up conversations about whether that market would be right for you as well. You don’t have to copy them, but it should get you thinking about how your own ad campaigns could be more effective.

2. Monitoring Changes in Competitor Messaging

Every time your competitors change up their messaging, you too should be thinking about whether your communications need a refresh.

The answer may not always be yes. In fact, seeing another business lose engagement — or worse, stir up controversy — just confirms that what you’re doing is working and worth continuing.

Stay on top of competitor messaging changes with Google Alerts and other brand reputation tools that automatically inform you when brands in your orbit are featured or post something new online. With that information, you can dig into how people are responding in comments or reposts to gather customer sentiment: Is the messaging resonating, and what are people saying about it that makes it good or bad?

For example, maybe your competitor has adopted a “younger” voice that uses popular Gen Z terms or abbreviations, and that seems to be helping them attract a new audience. You might consider running an ad campaign using similar language to see whether that also helps you tap into this market.

3. Identifying New Product Features or Launches

When similar businesses launch new products, features, or rebrands, you’ll want to take note — both so you can proactively avoid losing customers in the wake of this new, exciting update and collect ideas for positioning your own future launches. Keeping tabs is as simple as subscribing to their newsletters or following them on social media.

Take, for example, a local competitor that announces a new restaurant right in your market. Where did they announce it — in your local paper, via flyers, in an Instagram post? Which of those avenues seemed to drive the most buzz? How did they describe the opening, and how does that language differ from other content they’ve created, such as their website? With a little critical thinking and brainstorming, you can emulate their success and, more importantly, avoid their failures.

4. Spotting Competitor Pricing Updates

Knowing the prices your competitors set can help you determine how to price your own products and services — maybe they should be the same or a slightly lower cost to remain competitive, or pricier if you use higher-quality elements like fresher ingredients or more luxurious fabrics. This context can also influence how you approach sales or seasonal moments like Black Friday or a summer slump. Finally, you can gain insights into tailoring your pricing based on shipping costs or geographical location.

To stay informed, start by setting up Google Alerts on brands that reside in your area or sell similar products, as well as following them in places they tend to promote price changes, like newsletters or app notifications. While price tracking can easily be done manually, there are also plenty of competitor pricing tools like PricingHunter and Intelligence Node out there that automate this process for you.

Take a competitor that runs a month-long sale not tied to a specific holiday, but their own novel promotion. Do people seem to be talking about it? Have there been signs, through social media engagement or press coverage, that people are making purchases? If yes, you could infer that running your own campaign could boost your sales during a particularly slow period.

5. Analyzing Competitor SEO and Content Strategy

Search engine optimization, or SEO, sounds a lot scarier than it is: Basically, it uses the right language (or “keywords”) to appear in results when people search for your type of business online.

For example, if you run a dentist’s office in Florida, you probably want to include words like “dentist,” “Florida,” and “teeth” in places like your website or social media (and in internet backend materials like image alt texts, meta description, and title tag), so that people who type those terms into Google or Bing see your business pop up.

There’s a lot of content online that’s competing with you for your customers’ attention, so it’s important to try to rank as high in search results as possible (think: the first five results). The good news is that you can use that competitive content as inspiration: Whatever keywords companies like yours use in blog posts, website landing pages, social posts, and elsewhere, you should be using them, too. Local SEO tools, like Chatmeter and Semrush, can help you identify these keywords and opportunities to naturally place them in your own content.

You can also analyze your competitors’ SEO by simply doing a Google or Bing search of common keywords someone might look up for your business. From there, see how top search results position their brand: What words or phrases do they use as the title of their website and website meta description (the description below the search result)? What pieces of content are appearing — blog posts, landing pages, pricing pages? Following the dentist example, you might search for dentists’ offices near your locations, then analyze how the top results frame their businesses.

6. Reviewing Competitor Customer Sentiment

Your customers are telling you exactly what they want — you just have to look beyond your own brand’s reviews and customer feedback.

Competitor reviews are gold mines of information. They can tell you what people like and dislike about similar products to yours, encouraging you to invest more in some areas and pivot in others. They can also tell you what ad campaigns resonate: For example, maybe a lot of people engaged with a commercial posted on Meta.

Start by manually looking at your competitor’s review pages on Google Maps, Yelp, and other listings platforms. Then, browse their social media, Reddit, and website for other customer insights, such as how they speak about support or product issues and how the company responds to this feedback. If, for example, a bunch of consumers complained about shipping issues amid back-to-school season on your competitor’s page, that might inform how you stock up or how you set delivery expectations this time of year.

7. Tracking Social Media Engagement or Influencer Partnerships

Tracking competitors’ social media presences on platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, and Bluesky isn’t just great for gathering customer sentiment and feedback — it can also help you strategize on your own social platforms.

Let’s say one of your competitors gets tons of positive comments on their Instagram posts after partnering with an influencer. You might decide to go to leadership and ask for the budget to run a similar campaign.

On the other hand, if you’re noticing your competitors running video ads but those ads receive as much or less engagement (such as likes or reposts) than your still image ads, you can rest assured that you’re not missing anything by not investing in video advertising.

8. Observing Website Changes or Landing Page Tests

Make it a habit to check your competitors’ websites at least every month or quarter, to see what, if anything, has changed. See whether they’ve added new sections, materials, or landing pages for inspiration for your next website refresh.

Also, take note of aspects of their website and landing pages that you like, specifically if they host local pages for each market they serve. How do the pages differ, and how do they describe each location? What information, be it office hours or bundled services, do they provide? What don’t they provide, and why do you suppose that is? Ask yourself these questions to better understand what brand positioning might work for your industry and individual markets.

Say your competitor created a new landing page just for their East Coast market. If that’s an area you serve, too, you could learn what kinds of topics are worth covering to help your customers trust your brand and choose your offerings over your competitors.

9. Monitoring Competitor Partnerships or Sponsorships

If companies like yours are partnering with other organizations in or around your industry, that’s important to dig into. It’s possible that those partnerships produce more net sales, or they’re just about brand awareness and community recognition. Either way, your business could benefit from the same approach.

Consider who they partner with (individuals, groups, companies, nonprofits), how frequently they launch partnerships (once a month, once a quarter, once a year?), and how they advertise and get people engaged with those opportunities.

For example, maybe a competitor launched a short collaboration with a local nonprofit, and it’s getting a lot of positive press. That could be an area worth exploring for your business.

10. Watching Job Postings for Go-to-Market Shifts

How your competitors hire and maintain internal staff tells you a lot about how to conduct business effectively. Aggressively recruiting could indicate they see growth in your industry before the signals are truly there, while pulling back on job postings could mean they’re preparing for the worst.

The kinds of jobs your competitors are hiring for matter, too. If, for example, they’re posting a lot of artificial intelligence or supply chain management roles, you may want to consider investing in those areas as well to keep up with market trends (of course, make sure you first evaluate whether it really makes sense for your budget and business priorities). To stay informed, review their careers pages and hiring platforms like Indeed or Glassdoor.

How to Apply Intelligence to Your Marketing Strategy

Once you gather competitive intelligence data manually, automate its collection through a social media or brand management tool, or have a data expert compile it, here are some tips for applying it to your marketing strategy:

• Collaborate: Share the data with your team or other teams, like sales or content, that may be able to pull some unique insights. Pose questions to them like, “What do you see as the biggest opportunity?” and “What does this data tell you about what we should stop doing?” Then, schedule some time to meet face-to-face with your team and colleagues to swap ideas and formulate next steps.

• Start small: Just because your competitors are taking one route doesn’t mean you should drop everything to do the same. Instead, try small, incremental tests based on your analysis. For example, if the data suggests Meta ads are more effective than Google ads, spend a couple of weeks investing more in Meta. Afterwards, do a retrospective to understand what worked, what didn’t, and whether you should continue.

• Track everything: Whatever changes you decide to enact with your marketing approach, make sure you’re keeping track of how they’re performing and outside factors that may be influencing their performance, such as seasonal shifts or a Google algorithm update. Things you could track: click-through percentage of ads, likes or comments on social media, or daily website visitors, among other factors. With this clear and current data, you’ll be better positioned to course correct before you’ve spent too much time or money on unsuccessful avenues. Before you switch up anything, of course, gather data on how your current strategy is doing as a benchmark.

Get Better Competitor Intelligence With Chatmeter

Chatmeter automates and simplifies competitive intelligence so you’re freed up for other important tasks. With our AI-powered solution, Pulse AI, you’ll gain useful insights from customer feedback around your competitors, receive comprehensive analyses tailored to your market or specific locations, and spot never-before-considered opportunities for expansion.

With Chatmeter, your marketing team can work fast, confidently, and strategically with the right competitive marketing intelligence. Sign up for a demo today to get started.