How do you stay on top of competitors when it's a crowded market and things are changing every day?

Here are some ways I've tackled this with my teams:

1. It is important to establish a cadence for your competitive research. How often is actually achievable based on your resources/bandwidth? Do you have a dedicated CI person on the team or is your team smaller where this is part of your overall scope? and how often is good enough? This will vary based on your internal structure and org needs.
2. Do some passive research. Use Alerts and RSS feeds. Sign up for competitors’ marketing newsletters or blog content, etc. This enables you to keep tabs on an ongoing basis, without a lot of regular effort.
3. There are many tools out there that also track changes on things like website changes, news updates, etc. The two I am aware of are Crayon, SEMRush, and Klue, and I have personally used Klue!
4. Dedicate an hour or two every week (I prefer Friday afternoons) and block that on your calendar to just do research!

There's no silver bullet here because this really does involve setting aside time, especially when CI is not the only part of your job. You can set aside 1-2 hours once a week to do deep dives into your competitors website, PR/news, social media, etc. 

There are a few automated ways to do this leveraging sophisticated tools like Klue and Crayon that will track your competitors every move (from news, PR, website changes, social media) and alert you to those changes. They can integrate with slack so you can get a competitive daily digest(or whatever frequency you decide). They have various filters that allow you to filter out the noise and focus on what is relevant to you. 

Similar to an earlier question: (1) define and tier your competitors, (2) determine the competitive assets you need, (3) set your cadence, (4) invest in a Competitive Intelligence platform, and (5) block off an hour or so weekly to review competitive updates.

For competitive intelligence to be fresh, relevant, actionable, and accessible you need the right tools. PMM has too much on their plate to stay on top of all the competitive moves. If competitive intelligence is important to winning deals, as it is across B2B SaaS and most other spaces, then invest in a competitive intelligence platform such as Crayon and Klue. It’s easy to make the business case - depending on your ACV, just one incremental deal closed more than covers the cost.

This is going to sound like a product management (not marketing) answer, but if things are truly moving that quickly -- new competitors, new use cases, new feature requirements -- the best way to stay on top of competitors is listen to your customers first.

Many times, companies are too focused on what the competition is doing and forget what's most important: solving your customers' problems as effectively as possible. We had this problem at Box early on. On the surface, the market we were in had a very low barrier to entry. It seemed like we uncovered a new "free storage" service every week. At one point I had a list of 400+ of these would-be competitors.

That's an impossible list, so we simplified the problem. We trained everyone in the field on our core strengths and gave them a framework to identify how best to help customers based on that. Competition became a secondary consideration, and we really only focused on the top 5-6 threats in the market. 

If you know what you're great at, and what situations you tend to win most frequently, focus your attention there. It's also a lot more fun to drive marketing around your strengths than others' perceived weaknesses.

There are many ways to stay on top of competitive intel. If you have the budget and a clear use case, use a tool like Klue to help gather intel, and disperse it in your existing channels. Other ways I always used are the following:

• Use your frontline teams - open up communication channels with your sales and customer success teams. They can gather invaluable information every single day from direct conversations.
• Use gong - we live in unprecedented times of access to data and insights. Set alerts on gong for competitor names or lexicons indicating competitors. Have someone on your team monitor those conversations for usable intel. We get a ton out of this.
• Hack together a slack channel - You need a go-to place fort conversation around this topic. Otherwise it never gets out or gets lost in private conversations. Encourage people to ask questions or post in the channel for record keeping or discussion.
• Google alerts - Set google alerts for keywords and phrases involving your competitors. This makes sure you dont miss critical public information.
• Be their audience. Subscribe to all their comms - newsletter, webinars, email nurtures, etc. Use a private email as many companies reject @gmail, etc. Domains are cheap to buy.
• Hop on their live chat, and ask them anonymously without giving yourself away. Tow the line of honesty and ethics here. Use your best judgement.

Finally, I like having ownership of gathering intel distributed across product intel owners even if you have a central person owning the intelligence consolidation and distribution.

Oftentimes the day-to-day of changes can be "noisy", so try to not get too caught-up in the everyday changes. If a competitor is having a major product launch, or doing a complete rebrand -- then absolutely spend time digging in and processing the news and how it impacts your company/position. 

But overall, I'd carve out regular time weekly and monthly to digest the noise -- and ensure you earmark time in your calendar for any of those high-profile announcements. That way you don't get pulled in to the day to day changes and can focus on executing at a high-level. Good luck!

Ongoing: Google alerts to get pushed industry and/or competitive content, subscribing to your competitors lead gen lists, reading earnings call transcripts. From existing customers, (SAM teams can help here a lot!) understand who is churning and where are they switching, or any complementary products being used to fill your own product gaps. 

Quarterly deep dive to see if there is anything critical that needs to change about your own GTM strategy, internal or external comms.

Limit the competitors you track to ~8 - 10 of the TOP competitors that are impacting revenue most.

Yes, we should still be keeping a pulse and maintaining awareness of other vendors. But we can't REALLY track all of the activity on dozens of competitors unless we have a large team. 

Get buy-in from your executives on who you consider being top competitors (again, I'd start by organizing this list by revenue impact). And then prioritize them ruthlessly. 

This depends on the necessary level of detail. We use Google Alerts + an internal Slack channel for ongoing monitoring. As for in-depth analysis, Crunchbase, Angel.co, G2Crowd, Capterra, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and competitors' websites can be useful. 

Also, check out this blog post: http://max2c.com/competitive-intelligence-tools/

In B2B: Make sure your sales team is activated to share information with you. Much important competitive information will not be public, and your sales reps are in the best position to hear about and gather new data. Just keep in mind that you don't need to react the same way they do to new information (they're likely to overreact to a perceived competitive threat).

Google Alerts are a great way to keep up on content that your competitors are posting. I have a weekly digest email that's delivered to my inbox with my top 6-7 competitors. 

If you have the resources, the big three analyst research firms are also a great way to stay on top of it. A big part of Forrester, IDC, and Gartner's offering is compettive intelligence. Just be aware, these engagements typically cost anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 per year. 

Depending on your space, G2Crowd or Capterra can also provide good insight into your competition. 

You can also use services like Respondent.io to source users who are current/former customers of your competition and set up calls with them. 

In addition to the above, I also like Owler and LinkedIn Sales Navigator for keeping on top of news and updates.

I allocate one team member to focus on competitive and then that individual curates the updates for the internal audiences as appropriate. We make sure to share the right level of information with sales and we also make sure to keep product on their toes in terms of letting them know about all of the innovations are competitors are launching.

Depending on the outcomes desired (360* view of competition, product knowledge, pricing, positioning, etc.) there are a lot of different way to stay on top of a lot of different data points. In addition to using Google/ RSS Alerts:

1. Integrate as much intel into your current processes as possible
- If your customers have to provide a cancellation notice, set a default checkbox to select if leaving to a competitor, and provide a text box to elaborate
- Track migrations or transitions from another product to yours during onboarding and offboarding
- Set keyword trackers on sales calls if using a tool like gong.io
- Track NPS comments that mention other tools or apps
- Set up alerts for reviews of other apps and sync to a Slack channel
The majority of the above can be synced to Slack channels using a variety of integrations to compliment that “set and forget” component of staying on top of things, and provide a lot of both qualitative and quantitative data.

2. Become a customer
- Gain access/ licences to your competitors apps to know when updates/ changes are made
- Get into their funnel; sign up for a trial, sign up to their newsletter
- Demo their product; learn about their product from their Sales team

3. Use people
- Survey your customers
- Conduct win/loss analysis
- Talk to your Sales team

I haven’t tried using tools, but have heard good things about klue.com

1. Automate as much of the research / data collection as possible. (I'm biased, but I think Crayon does the best job of capturing competitive moves across millions of sources.) Honestly, this should be "outsourced" to technology because it can do a better job at a fraction of the cost (think of your time) and time (enabling real-time analysis and action).

2. Prioritize what you find. Not everything will be critical, so take a tiered approach - by groups of competitors (tier 1, tier 2, indirect competitors, emerging competitors) and by type of update (acquisition vs. new ebook). This will keep you sane and make the CI more digestible to the various internal stakeholders consuming it.

3. Set goals and get agreement beforehand. Figure out what you want to capture, what you want to impact internally, which competitors you care about most, etc. Get agreement internally so that everyone who cares about competitors are on the same page.

RSS feed fed to a slack channel that I review each week. Also, I have alerts setup for key competitor pages (home, pricing, etc...) that notifiy me of any significant changes.

Something like Talkwalker Alerts is free like Google Alerts and much more flexible. If you are ready to get serious, something like Crayon from Ellie (above) or Kompyte can be helpful. 

That said, I've found that in tech it's often a problem of too much information and a noise over signal problem. There is something inherent to tech that requires a lot of information sharing in order to run the business. The near constant self promotion often requires sharing roadmaps, updating documentation, constant press releases, Techcrunch articles etc. and means there is often a ton of information floating around. This is not always the case, in CI for industries like pharma. 

My recommendation is to automate this secondary internet information gathering as much as possible, and swiftly shift from worrying about sucking up every possible piece of information to sorting the signal vs. noise and optimize for determining what actually matters to the business. 

Once you get the insights (from the different methods that the other answers have already shared), it will help to crystalize important changes in competitive deck so that sales and other customer-facing team members have access to the key competitive data points. This could be done through one single slide deck or having different assets to compare Features, Pricing, SWOT, etc. 

I'll start by saying - having a solid competitive positioning framework with a few buckets for your entire universe of competitors helps immensely. I think this is the only way to build a competitive function from scratch with a lean team. e.g. Competitor X, Y, and Z fit into Category A and can generally be positioned against this way, Competitor Y fits into Category B and can be positioned against that way.

The next step is using the right tools and automation to stay informed about top competitors. One easy (and probably obvious) way is to subscribe to social and RSS feeds mentioning competitors to stay on top of new messaging, content, and press releases. Alternatively, tools like Crayon, Klue and SEMRush can be immensely helpful here once your competitive function is well defined and you're ready to invest seriously.

@Ellie Mirman has the right idea, in terms of broad, general principles to apply. My personal bias is against following every release and customer move because it sets one up to play a capability-level, reactive game. Personally, I think it's more important to observe commonalities among competitors, so that you can use your marketing to attack those particular traits and position yourself against an entire category (instead of competitor-by-competitor).