LONDON - s4story -- Many of your competitors want your customers. So, it seems pointless spending so much money on developing new business when your competitors are taking existing and potential customers off you. Of course, using Octopus Intelligence would be an excellent idea, but you can also look to do it yourself. And, either way, it need not cost you a fortune either. So here are 10 marketing tools to spy on your competitors:

1. Just Google it

Google search. Once you have defined what you are looking for, any research should begin with a simple Google search and then visiting your competitor's website. However, there are other search engines which may give you a different set of results. Like Bing, Yahoo, Ask etc.

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Then they are the metasearch engines like Dogpile, Yippy, Startpage, Carrot2 and Metacrawler. A meta search engine is a specialised search engine which aggregates results from data of other search engines. Meta search engines are either generalists or topic/industry specialised. Also, if you are searching overseas, use a local search engine but make sure you have a VPN switched on, so they think you are in that country. Another insider secret to remove Google's search results personalisation is to add "pws=0" at the end of the search string.

So, rather than https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk012jc3 it's https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk012jc3pws=0

Google and Bing provide several tools to help you with Competitor Insights and using tools like Spyfu, and the free and the excellent Ubersuggests enables you to see the keywords your competitors are using. It also reveals what they think is important to them when looking for new customers. And what they say about their own products or services.

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Trends and patents

Google Trends allows you to keep on top of the latest industry movements and to compare yourself to others. Google alerts enables you to keep track of your competitors and their keywords. Creating  Google Alerts on a number of your keywords will reveal how much interest there is in it. Also, are the keywords they are using different to yours? And why? Add an alert with your own company name, and you could be less surprised in the future. And, keep a track on your rival's patents. That's current, historical and new patents. Try Google Patents, Espace and WIPO.


More here:

https://octopusintelligence.com/10-marketing-to...