5 Tools to Track Marketing Spend for Competitive Analysis

Public perception is a huge driver for business success. When a brand takes control over its narrative, it can control the way it is perceived by consumers. Commercials, sponsored content, social media campaigns, and other forms of advertising are how brands cultivate their public image. The total amount they spend on these pursuits is known as the marketing spend. By tracking the performance of a brand’s ads, you can gather competitive intelligence on how it is using its marketing spend as well as the kind of returns it is getting.

Here are five tools that you can use to check how much your competitors are spending on marketing.

1. AdForum

Building your own advertising network is crucial. If you can also keep tabs on your competition, it’s doubly effective. AdForum allows you to create your company profile and connect with ad agencies and marketing executives around the world. It’s an international directory of advertising professionals where you can view other companies’ profiles to gather data.

AdForum lets you follow profiles you’re interested in and stay updated through real-time notifications every time new content is posted. These alerts are crucial to your competitor analysis for marketing since they let you track what your competitors are releasing into the ad world.

2. The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)

Members of the ARF are united by their mission to “further the scientific practice of advertising and marketing through research.” Signing up for ARF grants access to actionable insights that are drawn from empirical research, objective experiments, and valid market tests. As a source for reliable facts and figures from studies conducted by professionals, the ARF’s archives add massive value to any competitor report.

3. BestAdsOnTV

The scope of your competitive intelligence should go beyond tracking your closest rivals. There is much to be learned from observing and analyzing the activities of market leaders as well. The website BestAdsOnTV.com lets you track the most ground-breaking advertisements that are currently taking the marketing world by storm.

Despite the name, the site covers ads across media, including television, print, radio, online, and outdoor advertising. Using the site for competitive intelligence lets you know what’s working for your audience so that you can adopt it in your strategies.

4. Ad Age

Preparing a marketing spend budget without being aware of what the broader advertising landscape looks like is wasted effort. Ad Age is a publication with a legacy of accurate, objective reporting in the advertising field. Published by marketing experts for marketing experts, its competitive intelligence tools let you know what’s working with audiences at the moment. Track your industry’s trends via Ad Age’s award-winning journalism when gathering competitive intelligence for sales.

5. Critical Mention

The Media Monitoring Suite from Critical Mention is one of the most versatile competitive intelligence tools for tracking competitors’ marketing spends. It tracks brand mentions across multiple platforms, including broadcast TV and radio, online news outlets, podcasts, and social media sites. Turn the data from all these sources into cutting competitive intelligence by tracking competitors’ keywords and receiving real-time alerts on their marketing activities.

Analyzing competitors’ marketing expenses can give you an edge as you prepare your own marketing strategy. Beef up your competitive intelligence by exploring these five online tools.

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