The Definitive Guide to B2B Competitive Monitoring
What Is Competitive Monitoring?
Competitive monitoring is the process of analyzing your competitors’ online and offline presences across the web, social, review sites, press distribution, partner networks and more. While many marketers may do competitive monitoring manually, increasingly they are using data and AI-powered platforms like Competitor Genius to reduce the effort by 90% or more.
Running a business means more than just focusing on your own product and customers — you also need to keep an eye on what your direct and indirect competitors are doing. That's where B2B competitive monitoring comes in. It's about regularly checking on your competitors' activities, like their marketing strategies, pricing, product launches, social media presence, what their customers are saying online, and then extract all that data into competitive intelligence that helps you shape your product and marketing strategy and tactics.
While the sheer breadth of competitive monitoring data and the work it takes to organize it may seem overwhelming, new B2B competitive monitoring tools powered by AI and natural language processing (NLP) reduce the work by 95% or more and help you get more quickly to the insights and actions you need. The latest generation of platforms provide shareable competitive monitoring reports that align executives and teams to strategy and action so you can turn your B2B competitive monitoring into a competitive advantage.
Why Competitive Monitoring Matters
Think of competitive monitoring as your inside track on the market. By observing what your competitors are up to, you might get ideas on how to market or improve your product, you can spot opportunities they might be missing or avoid their mistakes.
Here are a couple areas you can apply B2B competitive monitoring.
See how your customer satisfaction trends compared to competitors. Competitive intelligence allows you to compare the number and quality of reviews (both ratings and sentiment analysis) to see who in the industry is growing most quickly and which have the highest customer satisfaction. It’s also a great way to measure your review solicitation and customer loyalty and referral programs.
Measure customer velocity. Monitor how quickly competitors are acquiring customers and publicizing case studies.
Update your pricing strategy. See how your competitors are pricing their products, and customer feedback to their models, so you aren’t surprised by market shifts.
Identify most and least popular competitive features. Competitive monitoring looks at product features across all your competitors and sees which ones get positive or negative customer feedback. You can use that insight to improve your product, sidestep issues or prioritize work that drives customer satisfaction.
Monitor industry trends. You can see across your competitor sets how quickly they are adopting new technology or marketing trends
Avoid product design that leads to customer complaints. Competitive monitoring allows you to see a competitor dealing with customer complaints about a specific feature. Even more powerful, you can see feature popularity across multiple competitors.
Identify new target markets. Competitive monitoring organizes which industries competitors are getting traction and which ones are worth expanding into.
Improve SEO and content marketing. Competitive monitoring tools can see which keywords competitors are targeting and which pieces of content most resonate to drive customer acquisition.
How Competitive Monitoring Works
Effective competitive monitoring involves focusing on a few key areas:
Product Information And Updates: What features are your competitors launching, what is their pricing, and how do they position their product. Many companies organize this in badly-structured Google or Excel Sheets that are tactical at best and hard to analyze and can’t show trending .
Marketing Activities: What are your competitors posting on their blogs, website or social media? Are they changing their positioning or running promotions? Many companies don’t track this at all.
Marketing Performance: How do they compare in terms of website traffic, social media engagement, or customer reviews? This helps you benchmark your own performance. Many companies use tactical tools like SEM Rush or Ahrefs for website and SEO; Sprout Social, Sprinkly or Hootsuite for social; etc. but find it difficult to synthesize the tactical tools into a more complete analysis.
Market Intelligence And Voice Of The Customer: Beyond just competitors, it’s about understanding the bigger evolution of the market and customer needs—emerging trends or shifts in customer preferences; customer feedback and sentiment monitoring; and providing guides to how market needs are evolving. Many B2B companies don’t monitor the Voice of The Customer at all.
With so many different tools and sources of competitive monitoring data, many product and marketing managers feel overwhelmed and disorganized, keeping disparate tools separate and often marketing and product insights never merged between product and marketing teams.
Competitive monitoring equips you to make smarter business decisions. It helps you stay proactive, adapt to industry trends, and find new ways to stand out in the market.
B2B Companies Are Failing At Competitive Monitoring But Those That Invest See Big ROI
So why are so many B2B companies failing to invest in competitive monitoring?
With so many disparate tools and disorganized google sheets, it’s not surprising 86% of B2B companies are not satisfied with their competitive monitoring and intelligence (Klue, no follow). Many are still using rudimentary tools trying to make sense of disparate data sources, even when AI provides new capabilities to provide unified insights. According to Valona, just 35% of large orgs are using AI for market intelligence, let alone mid-market or smaller B2B companies.
Many B2B companies feel lost, don’t know what’s out there, or how it can drive value and ROI - but the stats are clear for those that do invest. 78% feel that incremental investments in competitive monitoring and intelligence have paid off according to Valona.
Finding the ROI of Competitive Monitoring
Two big reasons that many companies don’t use advanced competitive monitoring tools is that they don’t know what’s possible with the tools on the market and they don’t know where they will justify ROI. That’s a big problem for expensive platforms or consulting services that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s why we’ve priced Competitive Genius so that any marketing or product manager can put it on a credit card and offer it as a free trial.
But you also need to see the insights that lead to ROI. Here are some examples of how to use competitive monitoring to drive ROI.
Improving Battlecards Informed With AI-based Competitive Monitoring And Links To Negative Competitor Reviews
There are so many reviews across multiple sites like G2, Capterra, Trust Pilot, Gartner, Salesforce and more, that it can be hard to find patterns and organize them in a way that is helpful to sales. Luckily, AI is great at reading through thousands (or more) of reviews and organizing them by topic so you can find what happy customers complain about (an opportunity to steal happy clients) or why unhappy customers cancel - an opportunity to highlight a key weakness.
Smarter tools like Competitor Genius not only highlight these key weaknesses and wedge issues, but also provide you shareable links to the reviews so you can point sales teams and prospects to what real customers are actually saying. Instant credibility. Enhanced ability to create Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD). Share these on sales battlecards and watch your sales teams herald your competitive monitoring prowess.
Get Ahead by Benchmarking Your Performance
In today’s fast-paced market, many marketing and sales professionals feel like they're constantly playing catch-up. It's easy to find yourself reacting to competitors instead of leading the way.
Without a clear comparison, it’s tough to know where you stand. Competitive monitoring allows you to benchmark your performance against key competitors in areas like customer ratings, website traffic, social media engagement, and keyword rankings. This data-driven approach helps you set realistic goals and fine tune your strategy for better results.
Client Spotlight: Falling Behind In Customer Sentiment And Reviews And Finding New Opportunities To Improve
One of our clients thought they were doing well on customer review sites, but with Competitor Genius’s review monitoring software, they saw that they were behind the competition in number and average rating, and they saw that week to week, competitors were getting more reviews and outpacing them. They put more focus on review solicitation. One issue they noticed was that they didn’t have as much of a presence on Trust Radius and Gartner’s review sites comparatively. registered their profiles on those sites and started to outpace the competition with positive reviews. And of course, this also improves marketing and SEO.
Spot Market Trends and Capitalize on Opportunities
The market is always changing, with new trends emerging regularly. Competitive monitoring keeps you updated on these shifts, allowing you to adapt quickly. By observing what your competitors are doing—and what they’re not—you can identify opportunities that others may have missed, keeping you relevant and ahead of the competition.
Client Spotlight: Spotting Competitors Adopting A New Digital Signage Standard
One of our clients was actively monitoring a new digital signage hardware standard called System on Chip or SOC. With Competitor Genius, they saw competitors customers adopting the standard faster than they expected by monitoring review sites and social chatter. They prioritized SOC in their product roadmap and made sure not to be left behind.
Learn from Competitors to Enhance Your Marketing Tactics
By analyzing your competitors’ strategies—whether in social media, content marketing, or SEO—you can gain valuable insights into what works. This doesn’t mean copying; it’s about adopting proven tactics, avoiding common pitfalls, and improving your own marketing effectiveness.
Differentiate Your Brand with Strategic Insights
Understanding how your competitors position their products or services helps you carve out a unique space in the market. Competitive monitoring reveals gaps in their strategies that you can exploit, helping you differentiate your brand and attract customers looking for something different.
Client Spotlight: Identifying The Need For A Low Cost SMB Product
One of our clients saw that their pricing on review sites was seen as both a strength and a weakness. Competitor Genius explained that pricing was right-sized for mid-market and enterprise clients, but the customers that complained were primarily SMB and non-profits. They created a pricing bundle to tackle those markets and increased sales velocity and reduced churn in that segment by over 10%.
Set Clear, Strategic Goals
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Set Clear, Strategic Goals 〰️
Competitive monitoring isn’t just about gathering data; it’s about using that information to set clear, strategic goals. By learning from your competitors’ successes and failures, you can plan your next steps with confidence, ensuring that your marketing efforts are strategically proactive.
How AI Is Transforming Competitive Monitoring Platforms
Automated Data Collection and Analysis
AI can continuously gather data from various sources, such as competitors' websites, social media channels, and industry news. This automation ensures you always have the most up-to-date information without the hassle of manual data collection, organization and analysis.
Sentiment Analysis With Natural Language Processing (NLP)
AI-powered platforms are increasingly using NLP to evaluate customer opinions and sentiments. Understanding how you and competitors are perceived helps you identify both weaknesses and opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed - directly from the feedback of customers themselves.
RealTime Insights and Alerts
With AI, you don’t just collect data—you get real-time insights. AI tracks competitors' digital activities and alerts you to significant changes, allowing you to respond more quickly. This real-time visibility keeps you a step ahead.
Predictive Analytics for Proactive Strategy
AI doesn’t just show you what’s happening now; it can also predict future trends. By analyzing historical data and current patterns, AI provides predictive insights that help you anticipate market shifts so you can adjust your strategies proactively.
Simplified Reporting and Visualization
AI-powered competitive monitoring simplifies complex data into clear, actionable reports and visualizations, making it easy to grasp the competitive landscape and make informed decisions quickly. For example, Competitor Genius provides a leaderboard on how you rank against your competitors based on the buying criteria you set up.
Human Queryable Data
With GenAI tools and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, product marketers can now query the data to ask custom questions and dig in beyond out-of-the-box reports. This can be extraordinarily valuable to support custom questions that take into account your specific business, customer base, or product feature set. At the top of every page of the Competitor Genius dashboard is an opportunity for you to put a custom question in. Just look at the top for “Ask Your Genius.”
Cast A Wider Net With Your Competitive Monitoring
Knowing who your top competitors are is crucial, but often companies limit their monitoring to a small set of obvious competitors. In part, that means less onerous data to track. However, systematically identifying and understanding the competition enables to position your business more effectively.
Identifying Non-Obvious Competitors Can Be Tricky
Many businesses struggle with identifying their real competition. It’s easy to spot the obvious players, but tracking smaller or indirect competitors can be just as impactful. Overlooking them can lead to missed opportunities and blind spots in your strategy.
Categorize and Analyze Competitors
Start by dividing your competitors into three categories:
Direct Competitors: Those offering similar products or services to the same target market.
Indirect Competitors: Companies that serve the same customer needs or solve similar problems, even if their products are different.
Replacement Competitors: Alternatives to your product or service that fulfill the same need in a different way.
Once identified, dig deeper with a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to understand where your competitors are strong and where they might be vulnerable.
Common Mistakes in Competitive Monitoring
Even with the best intentions, businesses often make mistakes when it comes to competitive monitoring. Here’s what to watch out for:
Relying Too Much on Basic Metrics
Focusing only on surface level data like market share or sales numbers can leave you with an incomplete picture, especially when competitor sales data may be hard to source. Often the deeper insights—like customer sentiment and the reasons behind competitor movements—are what really matter. Make sure you have the capabilities to organize and analyze competitor data sources. Even better, make sure you have a GenAI wrapper so you can ask questions from the data and get answers.
Ignoring Indirect Competitors
It’s easy to overlook companies that aren't in your exact industry but still compete for the same customer dollars. For example, if you’re in the coffee business, energy drinks or productivity enhancing tech gadgets could be cutting into your market share without you realizing it.
Overlooking Long-Term CompetitiveTrends
Businesses often get caught up in immediate threats and fail to track long-term trends. Missing these trends can leave you unprepared when the market shifts, putting your business at risk. Many B2B companies are tracking competitors in Excel or Google Sheets where it is difficult to track trends over time.
Not Involving the Whole Team
Competitive monitoring shouldn’t be confined to a single department. Input from across the organization—from sales to customer service—is crucial for a complete and accurate picture of the market. We have found that competitive monitoring tools like Competitor Genius provide data and graphs that are great conversation starters that solicit conversations and more on-the-ground intelligence. Low effort and high ROI platforms encourage more effort from the rest of the team.
Start AI-Powered Competitive Monitoring With Just 5 Minutes Of Setup For Free!
Effective competitive monitoring goes beyond just knowing who your competitors are—it’s about understanding how they operate and identifying their strengths and weaknesses - and yours - and anticipating customer demands and market trends. It’s about getting a baseline of the entire market and making more informed decisions so you can win.
There are a lot of disparate tools and platforms on the market, but we are convinced that Competitor Genius will provide insights that will change the way you think of your product, your competitors and market, and make you look like a hero to your coworkers and executive teams.
Click here for a free trial. With just 5 minutes of setup, you could get started now and see what all the buzz is about.