Competitive intelligence is the art and science of watching your competitors and forecasting potential ways consumers and your industry may evolve over time. Whether you're enhancing or automating your existing competitive intelligence program or starting one, these tools will help you achieve your goals. Here are a few free tools to get you started:
1. BlogPulse (http://www.blogpulse.com/trend)
This consumer trends research tool can be used to measure the popularity of keywords & company names on blogs. Use BlogPulse to compare what consumers are talking about online & trend the data over a six-month period.
2. GoogSpy (http://www.googspy.com)
This free competitive intelligence search engine provides the keywords and rankings in Google. Find out who's bidding on your product names and company name. You can search by a company name or by keyword. GoogSpy will give you insight into the keywords your competitors are running pay-per-click campaigns on (Google ads). This information is helpful to come up with new keywords for your own campaigns and to make sure that your competitor isn't illegally profiting from bidding on your company name or trademarked products.
3. WatchThatPage (http://www.watchthatpage.com)
This site has been instrumental in helping companies keep an eye on their competition. Sign up for free and enter the URLs (webpage addresses) that you want to watch for changes. The website will "watch" the webpages and send you an email alert whenever the HTML code changes on that webpage. This is very useful if you want to know when a competitor updates their homepage, releases a new product, changes pricing on products or services, etc. It automates much of the time-consuming work that goes into competitive intelligence. Once you receive the alert, it's up to you to interpret the data. One way to simplify this is to keep screenshots of the webpages before and after the changes. Then, you can compare the two and determine the significance of the changes.
Competitive intelligence is increasingly important for companies as they compete in the global marketplace. The free tools listed above will give you insight into your competition and save you time with your market research efforts.