12 Affordable Digital Marketing Tools To Spy On Your Competitors (Like A Boss)

Digital marketing trends shifts at a lightning pace presenting it as a far reached goldmine for the small and big business ventures. Surveys show that within every single second, Google gets an average of 63,000 searches every day. 96% of search traffic contributes from smartphone and 94% are organic traffic sources. This digital era witnesses a paradigm on the business’ marketing approach from old ways to adopting technical SEO and quality content marketing approaches for enhancing their online presence.

"Statistics show that 85% of companies engage in competitor analysis to do strategic research on rival firms’ marketing strategies."

This essential tactic will boost your financial stability and achieve better business survival opportunities.

Most companies getting started with digital marketing don’t know where to start and what to do. They lack clarity and direction. For a remarkable competitive edge in the industry, you can’t survive with if’s and but’s on a long haul. You need to strive for the best digital marketing strategy to outstand and beat the competition. As you know success comes with a price, the need to widen your thoughts and actions to get the right digital marketing support has become inevitable. It is no more an aimless journey wherein you struggle in a competitive mess.

Do you have the clarity and direction know what type of content to produce, what platforms to promote on, budgets to allocate, what type of ads to produce, keywords to target, nurturing process like email marketing tactics to follow. If all these look like alien to you and still feel your nerve, it’s high time for your business to rush towards the right digital marketing decisions before it gets off track. Many established companies still struggle to get online visibility with the lack of using upgraded digital marketing tools which immensely impacting their business growth in an adverse way.

Companies use a haphazard approach in terms of their strategies, without knowing what really works. It’s like shooting arrows in the dark. Thus, competitor analysis is essential to emulate successful results & objectives. Companies that are getting started with digital marketing & don’t do competitor analysis end up wasting time, money & resources. Before your precious resources get drained out and you end up losing the game in the digital platforms, it’s wise to get the right solution. So make it a smart move worth every penny!

You don’t need to always reinvent the wheel in terms of digital strategies. You just need to identify what’s working for your high-level competitors and what isn’t. These competitors have ‘been there and done that’. They use top-notch talent and resources to execute their strategies and achieve amazing results. Thus, competitor analysis is the first & foremost process. It helps you understand the keywords your competitors are targeting, the platforms they are on, nurturing process, their content marketing strategy and a whole lot more.

Using certain tools makes this possible and thus we can draw inspiration from competitors. Identifying KPIs and statistics that work well for your competitors can be a significant ingredient of your marketing success formula. Using the right set of tools can save a ton of time and help you accelerate the process of achieving results. The right set of tools helps you automate stuff and focus on more important tasks like formulating strategies, team management, etc.

1. SEMrush

Price: Currently available on three standardized monthly subscriptions with Pro – $99.95, Guru – $199.95 and Business – $399.9 plans.

Ease of use: It’s easy to use SEO tool with instructions to follow. No prior expertise is required.

Purpose/what it does: A trusted SEO and SEM competitor analysis tool widely used by a large number of all types of businesses across the world for keyword research and does competitor analysis on their keyword strategies. It is a good tool for your blog audit creating backlinks and a lot more.

How to use: When you distinguish your top rivals, you can utilize SEMrush Organic Research and Advertising Research reports to see the accurate keywords originated from their search traffic.

2. Buzzsumo

Price: All their plans start with a free 7-day trial. Their plans range from $79 to $499 per month, which can be either pay monthly or annually with cancellation option at any time.

Easy to Use: Yes

Purpose: Buzzsumo does unlimited content research and influencer searchers in which you can view any number of pages without a limit. It is used to identify which content has been shared the most.

How to use: Its free plan enables you to look for the most shared content, top influencers, and track a brand. It is limited in any case, and will just permit you four searches for each day. Paid subscriptions take into account more associations for content campaigns and agencies, just as exportable information and can be customized too. You’ll additionally get boundless access to BuzzSumo’s search information.

3. SimilarWeb

Price: SimilarWeb comes with PRO packages which starts from the basic plan-$199 and advanced plan-$499 per month

Easy to Use: Yes

Purpose: SimilarWeb is an effective tool which is used to identify traffic sources of competitors.

How to use: SimilarWeb assembles data by infusing itself into a large number of browsers by means of mostly chrome extensions. Additionally, SimilarWeb offers incentives for review sites when they share their precise web traffic information, consequently persistently aligning their gathered information with genuine input from Google Analytics

4. BigSpy

Price: It is a free Facebook Ad spy tool with unlimited uses that is available for anyone.

Easy to Use: Yes

Purpose: A user-friendly tool that is used to spy on competitors Facebook ads.

How to use: It customizes the most intriguing Facebook advertisements for you. This is a progressed application will permit you to find and get more cash-flow with Facebook advertisements by yourself. BigSpy AD spy amasses huge information, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Shopify promotions and continually updated. BigSpy permits looking for 6 social media marketing ads.

5. AdEspresso

Price: It’s pricing starts from the basic plan-$69 to advance plan-$599 with an option of free 14 days trial period under each plan.

Easy to use: Yes

Purpose: AdEspresso is used to spy on competitor’sfacebook ads.

How to use: If you begin truly increase on the promotions you make, you might need to test out various varieties of pictures, features, content and so forth and AdEspresso truly assists with this. You can start by creating campaigns and then create your ads with AdEspresso and finally test headlines, texts or images based on your requirements.

6. Ubersuggest

Price: This is a free tool for keywords which help you to revise your SEO, content marketing and social media marketing strategies to most effective ones.

Easy to use: Yes

Purpose: Ubersuggest enables you to get knowledge into the procedures that are working for others in your target market so you can receive them, improve them, and get a higher competitive edge.

How to use: Ubersuggest is a standout amongst the free SEO tool out available today. In case you’re an advertiser and need to do extensive research yet would prefer not to pay for a paid SEO tool, this is a decent alternative for you. Ubersuggest figures scores to decide the accompanying SEO terms; the search volume, SEO trouble, paid trouble, and cost per click.

7. Ahrefs

Price: The monthly price ranges from the basic plan -$99 to advanced plan-$999 with additional taxes based on your location and country.

Easy to Use: Yes

Purpose: The purpose of ahrefs is to do effective keyword research, backlink audits, validate keywords, track individual keywords, site audits and brand management for your brands and website.

How to use: When you have effectively signed in, you will meet your dashboard. You can set up progressing projects whereby domain you indicate are observed for changes in the Ahrefs set of metrics.

8. Spyfu

Price: It has an annual subscription plan starts from $33/month to $199/month and monthly plan starts from $39/month to $299/month.

Easy to use: Yes

Purpose: SpyFu demonstrates the keywords that sites purchase on Google Adwords just like the keywords that sites which are shown within the search results.

How to use: When the Spyfu account is created, you need to go to projects and create a new project. Then go ahead with entering your domain name and add your keywords. Repeat this process for multiple competitors in your target market.

9. Hootsuite

Price: One of the best tools to manage social media, which you can start using through a free-trial for 30 days. Once the trial period is completed, you get the options of three subscription plans.

Easy to use: Yes

Purpose: An effective tool to create highly customized online communication networks that helps you to do tasks in an organized manner and see conversations easily. It is used to spy on the performance of competitors SMM posts & SMM metrics

How to use: Firstly, you can create a Hootsuite account and after which add your social profiles for publishing the contents and check their engagement rates. Now set up streams and check conversations to know customer engagements. Regularly publish posts.

10. Google Search Operators

Price: A free tool to search unlimited number of keywords and information.

Easy to use: Yes

Purpose: It can enable you to pick up understanding into SEO opportunities and audit focuses you generally would not have recognized and the potential outcomes are huge.

How to use: You can enter search operators legitimately into the Google search box, similarly as you would a content inquiry: Except in exceptional cases, (for example, the "in" operator), Google will show the normal organic search results.

11. Facebook Ads Library

Price: It’s a free platform wherein the library can be explored by anyone even if the user doesn’t have a Facebook account.

Easy to use: Yes

Purpose: It is used to spy on competitors Facebook ads.

How to use: For every ad, the Ad Library gives data on who saw the promotion, how much amount the purchaser spent to run it, and the number of impressions it got. Facebook says the library will currently store ads for a long time after they run.

12. Feedly

Price: Feedly offers a free plans for casual readers with also an upgrading option to Feedly Pro which cost $5 per month or $45 per year

Easy to use: Yes

Purpose: This new aggregator app run in web browsers as well as in Android and iOS mobile platforms. It can be also used as cloud-based service. The user can customise the news feeds collected from online sources and share it with others.

How to use: Feedly collects RSS feeds that enable publishing of online information by websites. This information will be syndicated automatically to all the subscribers.

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