How to Use Competitive Insights to Drive Business Growth

How do you outsmart competitors when you don’t even know what they’re up to?

In marketing, flying blind rarely ever works.

Here’s where competitive insights enter the scene. Think of them as your secret weapon for learning about your competitors’ best-performing campaigns, top audience segments, key strategies, and potential gaps.

In this article, we’ll guide you through the journey of how to gather competitive insights and make the most of them. We’ll also dig deeper into how you can supercharge your social media competitor analysis using top tools and perspectives.

8 powerful competitive insights to fuel your strategy and guide on how to get them

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#1. Market and industry insights

Understanding broader industry trends enables businesses to stay ahead of market shifts. Competitive analysis insights, combined with market research, can help refine brand positioning and target audience strategies.

Take a look at the different ways you can track market and industry insights connected to your competitors.

Market trends and consumer behavior

Track demand fluctuations, emerging trends, and customer preferences to better understand the current market trends. Your market research should also consider consumer behavior and economic factors to identify potential business opportunities.

Social media strategists can use these types of insights to get a good understanding of their competitors’ position in the market.

Evaluate key questions like:

• Who is the target audience for your competitors?
• What is the demand for the products/services offered by your competitors?
• What is the current market size and saturation level?
• When are customers more inclined to buy these products/ services?
• Are there new trends in the market that are slowly gaining momentum?
• Why do some customers prefer one brand over the other?

By analyzing these factors, you can tailor your offerings, marketing campaigns, and pricing strategies to better meet customer needs.

Industry benchmarking

Using performance insights about competitors, you can benchmark your brand against industry standards and identify areas for improvement.

AI-powered social media analytics tools like Socialinsider provide valuable competitive insights by analyzing social media trends, engagement rates, and content performance. Businesses can use data from Socialinsider to:

• Run a head-to-head social media competitive analysis;
• Benchmark against industry, competitors, or brands they admire;
• Discover their competitors’ weakest and strongest strategy points and gain a competitive advantage;
• Categorize social media content from competitors based on keywords, topics, or hashtagsIdentify social media best practices.

For example, retail brands can leverage Socialinsider to track the success of their competitors' seasonal campaigns.

After adding all of the competitor profiles in Socialinsider, go to the Posts section and use the search tab to find social media posts that contain keywords such as 'deal, ' 'Black Friday, ' or 'holiday sale.' To compare and benchmark the performance of these posts, categorize them using custom tags.

This helps businesses adjust inventory, refine promotions, and align marketing efforts with peak consumer demand periods.

Regulatory and economic changes

External factors such as new regulations, trade policies, or economic shifts can significantly impact market conditions. Always staying on top of the legislative changes and economic indicators enables businesses to:

• Adjust pricing strategies based on inflation or market shifts;
• Comply with industry regulations and avoid legal challenges;
• Anticipate market downturns and develop risk mitigation strategies.

New technologies and innovations

New technologies can disrupt industries and create new market opportunities. Businesses that stay ahead of technological advancements are the ones that gain a competitive edge.

#2. Competitor performance insights

Analyzing competitor performance across different channels provides a clearer picture of their market positioning and highlights areas of opportunity for your brand. These insights can reveal their strengths and weaknesses, helping you refine your own competitive strategies.

Take a look at the different ways you can gather competitor performance insights.

Competitor growth trends

Monitor competitors’ expansions, new product launches, acquisitions, communication strategies, and content pillars to get insights. The best way to stay ahead is to know exactly what the other players are up to.

Socialinsider provides an inside look into the content strategy of your competitors through AI content pillars. The tool uses AI to categorize posts across different platforms into strategic content themes.

To find the main content pillars of your competitors, add their social media profiles to Socialinsider. Then go to their profile → Click on content pillars.

You’ll find the AI-generated content pillars here. You can also analyze the performance of each pillar to identify which drives higher engagement.

Financial performance

Evaluate your competitors’ financial health to fine-tune your own pricing strategies and assess the industry’s overall growth potential.

You should look into your competitors’ revenue reports, pricing models, and funding rounds.

By analyzing insights from competitors’ strategies, you can better understand their position in the market and adjust your pricing models accordingly.

Brand positioning and messaging

Look into how competitors define their unique value proposition and position in the industry. This can involve analyzing their:

• Mission statements, values, goals, and vision;
• Brand personality and tone across different digital channels;
• Core messaging themes of their major marketing campaigns;
• Customer perception and average engagement levels.

Using Socialinsider, you can also compare the performance of a brand across different channels by grouping together their social media profiles.

For example, here's an overview of Walmart's social media performance across channels.

And if you want to dig even more profound, and have a breakdown of each channel's contribution to the brand's social media performance, well, you can also do that.

#3. Social media performance and engagement insights

There’s no better place to get real-time competitive insights than social media platforms. You can get an inside look into your competitors’ audience engagement levels, content strategy, and even influencer collaborations.

Combining social media market research with competitive insights can help you identify emerging social media trends and adapt your strategy accordingly.

Take a look at the different ways to gather social media insights.

Audience engagement and sentiment analysis

Analyzing your competitors' audience can reveal gaps and opportunities in their social media marketing strategy.

You might find they’re neglecting certain social media platforms or struggling to gain traction. For example, a competitor may dominate Instagram but have little to no presence on TikTok, even though your target audience is active there.

For example, a retail brand like Target can use Socialinsider to compare competitor engagement rates and top-performing posts to refine their social media strategy. They can review all the competitor profiles together, analyze industry benchmarks, and compare engagement.

On the other hand, sentiment analysis is also another powerful tool for learning about your competitor's audience and their opinions about the companies.

For example, they may have their customers complaining heavily about a specific business segment, and by knowing this is their weakest point, you can integrate into your messaging reasons why your brand is better at handling that specific issue.

Consider the following factors when reviewing the audience engagement metrics of a competitor.

• Audience size: What’s the follower count of your biggest competitor?
• Audience growth: How quickly are your competitors growing their audience on different platforms?
• Sentiment: What is the general sentiment around their social media content? Is it more positive, negative, or neutral?

Content performance and virality

Examining what kind of content drives the most engagement for your competitors can provide deep insights into their successful content strategies.

Social media analytics can track their top-performing posts and identify social media trends that resonate with your target audience.

Here are the social media insights that you should look into:

• Top posts: Track the best-performing content of your competitors. See to which content pillars belong.
• Engagement: Look into the number of likes and comments your competitors get on average. If certain posts are getting a lot more attention than others, try to find the reasons behind it.
• Hashtags: What are the hashtags or keywords your competitors usually use in their top-performing content? How does it help brand awareness and discoverability?

Influencer and partnership tracking

Evaluating the effectiveness of your competitors' influencer marketing campaigns can help you understand their audience reach and brand visibility.

• Analyze engagement metrics: Check the likes, comments, shares, and overall engagement on your competitors’ influencer posts. High engagement often indicates successful campaigns.
• Identify untapped influencers: Find influencers who align with your brand value but haven't partnered with any of your competitors.
• Leverage niche influencers: Collaborate with micro-influencers who have dedicated followings in niches relevant to your brand.

#4. SEO and digital marketing insights

Tracking how competitors attract and convert online traffic can help you build a stronger marketing strategy. A competitive landscape analysis can also uncover strategic marketing insights about competitors.

Take a look at the different ways to gather SEO and marketing insights.

Organic search rankings

Create an SEO competitor analysis report to identify patterns and trends in their organic content strategy. Look into the type of content your competitors have published in the last 12 months and how that has performed on search engines.

Conduct a keyword gap analysis to identify keywords that are yet to be targeted by your competitors. Keep in mind that while low volume, low ROI keywords have less competition, they might also deliver lower conversions.

On the other hand, high ROI keywords are usually highly relevant to your target audience and offer higher conversion rates, but they are also more competitive.

You can use SEO tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to:

• Identify high-performing keywords competitors rank for;
• Analyze competitor blog topics and content structure;
• Optimize your own SEO strategy to get more search traffic.

Paid ads and PPC strategies

Analyzing competitor ad copy, targeting, and bidding strategies reveals where they invest their marketing budget.

SEO tools can help you track PPC activities, ad spend, and the most profitable copy of your competitors. You can also view past ads from the last 12 months and check examples of live ads to gain insights.

With PPC competitive analysis, your goal should be:

• Assess competitor ad creatives and messaging;
• Review successful ad placements and audience targeting techniques;
• Optimize your own bidding strategies to maximize ROI.

Backlink and domain authority analysis

Analyzing backlinks gives you a clear picture of the link-building tactics your competitors are using and the overall effectiveness of their backlink profiles.

While analyzing the backlinks of your competitors, you should focus on:

• Identifying the total number of backlinks and the relevancy of these links;
• Looking into the high authority sites linked to your competitors;
• Discovering potential partnership or guest posting opportunities;

But backlinks alone don’t tell the whole story. Domain Authority (DA) also plays a crucial role in determining the overall strength of a website.

Compare your DA with your competitors to gauge where you stand. If their DA is significantly higher, their backlink strategy might be more advanced, requiring you to step up your efforts.

#5. Customer and audience insights

By analyzing your competitors’ audiences and reviewing customer feedback, you can better understand how to position your brand and meet your target market’s needs.

These analysis insights help you identify competitors’ positioning and craft messaging that resonates with your audience.

Take a look at the different ways to gather customer and audience insights.

Demographics and buyer personas

You can identify the target demographic of your competitors by looking at their website messaging and checking comments on their social media posts.

Also, consider examining industry reports and case studies (if available) that provide details about consumer behavior trends relevant to your competitors. This information can then be used to build customer personas and understand their marketing tactics.

Developing detailed customer personas should include:

• Competitor product usage and customer demographics;
• Job roles, interests, and buying motivators;
• Customer pain points and how they measure success;
• Opportunities to differentiate and craft compelling messaging.

Customer pain points and reviews

Head to your competitors' public pages on Google Business, G2, Trustpilot, and similar websites to see what customers say about them. Online reviews give you insights into the overall brand perception and the current market trends as well.

Additionally, you can monitor brand mentions and track how customers talk about competitors.

• Does the company take too long to get back to customers? You can provide better support to get ahead of them.
• Are customers praising a competitor’s transparent pricing model while criticizing hidden fees elsewhere? Highlight your straightforward pricing in marketing materials.
• Are customers frustrated with limited integrations? Build partnerships or create seamless API connections to differentiate yourself.
• Do reviews mention a lack of customization options? Offer flexible plans with modular features to attract enterprise clients.

#6. Product and pricing insights

Take a look at the different ways to gather product and pricing insights.

Feature comparison and innovation tracking

Stack your product against the competition: feature by feature, benefit by benefit. Identify the strengths, weaknesses, and unique selling points (USPs) that set them apart.

• What do they offer that you don’t?
• What are the newest features that they have launched?
• Where do you outperform them?

Create a comparison table to visually map out the key differences among multiple competitors. This will help you spot gaps in the market and areas for innovation.

Pricing and discount strategies

Compare your pricing with both direct competitors offering similar products and indirect competitors providing alternative solutions with competing approaches.

Look into how they package their pricing:

• Do they offer tiered pricing (basic, pro, enterprise)?
• Are there any annual discounts, free trials, or money-back guarantees?
• How do they justify their price points (better support, premium materials, advanced features)?
• What is the minimum and maximum pricing plan?

You should also keep monitoring changes in competitor pricing to stay up to date.

Keep in mind that while charging less than your competitors might attract some short-term customers, it could devalue your brand and only attract customers who care more about the pricing than the features or support you offer. These customers will leave you the moment another competitor offers an even lower price.

Customer retention and subscription models

Pricing alone doesn’t tell the whole story. You also need to look into how competitors structure their customer retention strategies.

• Do competitors offer a free trial or a freemium model? If there’s a free trial, how long is the trial period?
• Are they using credit card-free sign-ups to reduce friction, or do they require payment details upfront?
• How do they convert free users into paying customers? Are there email sequences, limited feature access, or other perks offered?
• Do competitors have referral programs, cashback rewards, or VIP memberships for long-term customers?
• Are they offering discounts for long-term commitments (annual vs monthly pricing)?

Use the data you collect to identify gaps in your own customer retention strategy and refine the sales funnel to improve customer lifetime value. More than pricing, strong retention strategies help brands improve customer satisfaction.

These data-backed insights about competitors’ strategies and performance can help you identify gaps in your own approach and refine your marketing efforts.

For example, let’s say a fintech startup tracks competitors to refine its own subscription model. Seeing that one of their competitors now offers a 30-day free trial, the startup also extends its trial from 14 to 30 days while requiring a credit card to reduce churn.

To sweeten the deal, they also introduce a 20% discount on annual plans and a one-month free extension for users who attempt to cancel. The startup also uses AI-driven personalized upsells, recommending premium upgrades based on user behavior. By continuously monitoring their competitors' pricing and retention tactics, the startup can maximize customer loyalty and revenue.

#7. Advertising and content strategy insights

To better understand your competitors' advertising and content strategies, consider analyzing their approach across several key areas.

Ad creatives and copy

Look into the most popular types of ads your competitors use, such as static images, carousels, or short-form videos, and assess which formats get the highest engagement rates.

Analyze the messaging tone, call-to-action (CTAs), and value propositions to determine what resonates with the target audience.

Is their messaging witty, emotional, or straight to the point? What call-to-action hooks their audience? Uncover the patterns to fine-tune your own ad strategy.

Campaign performance tracking

Monitor competitors' social media campaigns, focusing on metrics such as likes, shares, comments, CPCs, and click-through rates.

A competitor increasing their ad spend on a particular platform may indicate a shift in their content strategy. They may be targeting a new audience or preparing for a product launch. The analysis can help identify effective strategies and potential areas for improvement in your campaigns.

Video and visual content trends

Conduct an in-depth content performance analysis to identify which types of content perform the best with your competitors’ audiences.

When you know exactly what drives conversions and engagement in the industry, creating a powerful content strategy becomes much easier.

Analyze video and visual content published by competitors to identify what formats drive the most engagement. Track high-performing content types like short-form videos (Reels, TikToks), live streams, carousels, infographics, and user-generated content (UGC).

Monitor key metrics like the ones below and use these insights to refine your strategy, boost engagement, and create content that outperforms competitors.

• Views and watch time: They indicate content relevance and audience interest.
• Shares and saves: They signal high-value content that the audience finds worth sharing.
• Comments and engagement: They measure audience interaction and sentiment.
• CTR and conversions: They reveal what content drives action.

You can use Socialinsider to find your competitor’s high-performing content types. Go to any competitor’s profile → Click on Engagement → Check Post types sorted by engagement.

For example, here are the content formats used by Target on Instagram for the last 6 months. As we can see from the data, Reels are the most performing content format, which enables further content strategy optimization.

#8. Sales and customer acquisition insights

You've looked into how your competitors generate engagement and get new leads. Now, it's time to analyze how they convert those leads into paying customers.

Lead nurturing tactics

Examine the competitor's customer journeys and how they guide prospects from initial interest to purchase. Look into their lead nurturing campaigns, content strategies, and the value they provide at each stage of the funnel.

Email and retargeting strategies

Subscribe to competitors' newsletters to evaluate their email frequency, content, personalization, and segmentation tactics. Assess how they re-engage potential customers who haven’t taken the next step yet.

Affiliate and partnership strategies

Identify partnerships and affiliate programs your competitors currently use to attract more paying customers. Check the kind of incentives they pay their affiliate partners and the overall satisfaction level of the program.

How to gather competitive insights effectively?

To gather competitive insights, you’ll first need to collect competitive data from the best sources possible, which can include:

• Industry reports: Access comprehensive reports about market trends and competitor performance
• Search engine rankings: Use SEO tools to analyze competitors' organic content strategies and their high-performing pages
• Social media: Monitor competitors' engagement metrics to understand audience preferences

Social media analysis is probably one of the best ways to analyze competitor content and performance in real time.

You can use tools like Socialinsider to add competitive context to your social media data. Analyze industry benchmarks and competitor performance to see how your brand’s analytics stack up in the market.

Here’s how you can set up and analyze industry benchmarks on SocialInsider:

• Navigate to the Benchmarks section in the left sidebar;
  
• Select the required social media platform from the available options;
  
• Select the competitor profiles you want to compare;
  
• Choose relevant metrics for comparison;
  
• Click Update to generate the analysis.

The in-depth benchmark report provides details about competitive positioning, reach, engagement rate, content strategy, growth trajectory, and more.

Best tools for competitive insights (2025 Edition)

Socialinsider: The ultimate social media competitive analysis tool

Socialinsider is a straightforward competitive analytics tool for busy social media marketers interested in deep competitive analysis. The tool can help compare your brand's performance across different channels.

With competitor and industry-level benchmarking, the tool provides a clear view of how your brand is performing against competitors and the whole industry. You can identify content gaps, analyze competitor strategies, and refine social media campaigns–all through the same tool.

Using Socialinsider, you can even conduct a social media audit, identify trends, monitor audience sentiment, and generate detailed reports for strategy optimization.

SEMrush & Ahrefs: For SEO and digital marketing insights

SEMrush: The SEO tool comes packed with features to improve SEO, content marketing, and paid ad strategies. You’ll have access to in-depth search intent insights, keyword clustering, backlinking insights, and PPC reports.

Ahrefs: This tool is known for its powerful backlink analysis. It can help discover keyword opportunities to build valuable links and recover lost link authority by identifying broken links. Ahrefs also offers all the basic SEO features, including site audit, keyword research, rank tracker, and content gap analysis.

Google Trends and industry reports: Market research essentials

Regular market research can help understand consumer behavior and stay competitive. Here are two valuable resources to enhance your research:

Google Trends: Use it to monitor real-time search trends and audience interests. Analyze rising keywords and seasonal patterns to refine your content strategy and identify emerging opportunities.

Industry reports: Get detailed insights from industry reports to analyze market trends, consumer behavior, and competitive dynamics. These reports can shed more light on industry performance, growth projections, and key market drivers.

AI-powered competitive intelligence platforms

There are also many AI-powered tools available that help you collect competitor data and convert it into valuable insights.

Quid for consumer trend insights

Quid is a powerful AI social media analytics tool that helps enterprises identify emerging trends, detect risks early, and uncover potential growth opportunities. It offers actionable insights through predictive analytics, monitors brand health, and analyzes customer sentiment from various sources to help businesses optimize their strategies.

Brandwatch for competitive insights

Brandwatch comes decked with competitive intelligence capabilities that help businesses gain detailed consumer insights. The tool offers comprehensive social listening, detailed sentiment analysis, and trend detection.

Dash Social for sentiment and brand health reports

Dash Social is an AI-powered social media analytics tool for brands focused on visual content. It offers AI-driven social listening, sentiment analysis, and brand health reporting.

The tool’s USP is that it can analyze videos, images, and text trends on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. It can also identify and analyze high-performing user-generated content to help you improve brand visibility.

Final thoughts

Competitive insights can help you stay ahead in the market. Using tools like Socialinsider, you can uncover competitor strategies and identify growth opportunities. Start by benchmarking your performance, analyzing gaps, and adapting your strategy to outsmart competitors.