Competitive intelligence is crucial for the success of any business and all the more so for retail businesses since the market for retail consumer goods and services is aggressively competitive. The most effective and efficient way to gain accurate and current data that is relevant to your business is by deploying various competitor monitoring tools.

With our decades of experience in the retail domain, we have pulled together a list of tools and services that a retail business must deploy to not just stay ahead of the competition but learn from them, be inspired by them, and thrive in this competitive retail landscape.

Price monitoring: For 60% of customers, product prices directly affect their purchase decision. Whether this means they are looking for the cheapest option, the best price for value, or are looking for a premium for luxury value depends on your audience, competition, and niche.

Price monitoring tools help you track, monitor, and analyse competitors’ prices and price promotions so you can tweak your pricing strategies and price promotions when and where you see a competitive price advantage. Tools like pricechecker allow you to attract new customers with competitive prices, keep existing customers happy by giving them the best deal, and increase revenue.

Technology monitoring: 96% of retailers are investing in new technology to increase efficiency in various business processes including inventory management, competitor monitoring, personalising customer experience, etc. and 95% of them say that these investments have positively impacted their customers’ experiences.

Finding the right technology to invest in involves spending a lot of time and resources evaluating them. Understanding your competitor’s technology stack will give you insight into the current and preferred tools in the industry allowing you to make a more informed tech decision.

Track Email marketing: 58% of consumers say that email marketing influences their purchase decisions and 50% of them make a purchase through a marketing email at least once a month.

Now imagine if you could find out how often your competitors are emailing their customers with discounts, when they send emails, and even how they segment it. Tools like MailCharts and sendview do just that. You can use this information to plan your own email marketing strategy and boost conversion rates.

Ad tracking: retailers in the US alone will be spending over $50 billion on digital ads even when they are likely to convert only 3% of the leads generated by them. Paid marketing is evidently the most expensive way to generate leads and if you are choosing to generate leads this way, you want to bid where you have the most chance of conversions.

While your SEO tool could tell you a lot about the keywords that businesses are spending most on, to get data that is most relevant to your business, you want to track what your competitors are doing specifically. Tools like BigSpy and SerpStat allow you to monitor your competitors’ ad copy, contextual ads, PPC, channels, etc. allowing you to choose from what works best for your industry.

Keyword and content monitoring: as marketing strategies go, Search and content marketing is the best if you are looking for consistent and sustainable growth in awareness and traffic. While the results may not be immediate, your patience and resources will be rewarded with lasting results that paid ads cannot promise.

By keeping a close eye on the kind of content your competitors are publishing and the keywords they are targeting, you can spend less time researching and more on developing quality content. SEO tools like UberSuggest and ahrefs help you do just that. Of course, monitoring your competitors’ content can also serve as inspiration when you’re hit by writer’s block!

Social media monitoring: 60% of Instagram users (that’s 600 million users) are already using the social media platform to look for and purchase products. It’s not crucial for businesses, especially B2C businesses to have a social media presence. But social media can be hard to crack and monitoring your competitors’ social media activity can help you with that.

Monitoring your competitors’ social media will help you in multiple ways including inspiring you when you’re stumped for content, gauging their social media strategy so you can compete with them, understand what works, and learn from their mistakes.

Financial Intelligence: Any business worthy of its name will be curious about its business and financial movements. This includes data regarding their hiring, revenue, funding, competitors, etc. This information can help you plan your growth strategy and understand your business’ potential.

Owler and CrunchBase allow you to gain competitive business intelligence while also helping you find the most suitable tools and services that can help you scale your business.

Final thoughts

Technology is definitely high up on the list of things retail businesses will be spending on in the coming years. Whether you are looking to scale up or remain competitive, relevant, and efficient while not compromising on revenue and customer experience, you have to invest in the right technology for your business.

While there are multiple tools and services required for a retailer to be successful in the industry, staying ahead of the competition is extremely crucial. The sustainability of a brand is decided based on the competitiveness in the market. Pricing is a key in determining how competitive in the industry.

Pricechecker has been a leading software used by top retailers to remain competitive in their respective markets. From consumer electronics to food and beverage, pricechecker has footprints in delivering the best price monitoring services.

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