How to Gain a Competitive Edge with Audience Intelligence
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Pulsar Power Up: Get Competitive
Understanding your competitors isn’t just about tracking their moves - it's about understanding the audiences they’re speaking to, and how your brand can reach them better. In this Power Up session, Rob Hill shows how audience intelligence can be your competitive edge, using Pulsar's suite of tools - TRAC, CORE, and Audiences - to uncover insights that drive smarter decisions.
Track competitor performance with TRAC
If you want to stay ahead, you need to know how your competitors are showing up in the public conversation. Pulsar TRAC helps you map earned media and social chatter across platforms, surfacing what’s resonating and where your opportunities lie.
Start with Pulsar’s AI Boolean Generator to quickly build a comprehensive query. It automatically identifies competitors, related terms, and relevant platforms. By combining all competitors into a single search, you can streamline segmentation, set brand-specific filters, and benchmark sentiment and engagement.
With filters in place, the Entities tab offers a fast way to spot which brands and organisations are dominating the conversation - including those you might have missed. These automated insights are powered by large language models that tag brands, people, and products, enabling deeper analysis without manual Boolean tweaking.
From there, TRAC dashboards help visualise share of voice, sentiment trends, and performance by channel. You can compare how each competitor is discussed on platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit or online news, helping you identify moments to act fast, whether that’s capitalising on momentum or seizing the chance to outperform a struggling rival.
Analyse owned media with CORE
While TRAC focuses on the conversation, CORE helps you analyse how your competitors communicate through their own channels. This gives you a detailed view of owned content performance across social platforms.
Track engagement rates, post frequency, and audience growth across brands. When one competitor is outperforming others, CORE helps you understand why - whether it’s due to content format, tone of voice, or channel strategy.
Use audience insights to win market share
Audience intelligence is where true competitive advantage begins. Pulsar's audience tools let you look beyond surface metrics and understand who’s engaging with your competitors - and how they compare to your own audience.
You can identify where audiences overlap and where they diverge: maybe your competitor is over-indexing in the US while you’re stronger in the UK. Maybe they’re winning on TikTok, while your core base prefers Instagram or Reddit. Even if demographic profiles are similar, Pulsar helps uncover differences in online habits, cultural preferences, and influencer affinities.
Pulsar Audiences allows you to benchmark audience segments directly, comparing interests, platforms, geographies, and the creators they trust. Want to expand into a new market? These insights help you choose the right platforms to focus on, the right partners to collaborate with, and the right messages to deliver.
Audience intelligence in actionBy combining Pulsar TRAC, CORE, and Audiences, you can listen to the conversation, monitor performance, and understand the people driving it. That’s the foundation of modern competitive strategy - and why audience intelligence is the most powerful tool you can use to get (and stay) ahead.
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Watch the full recording of Pulsar Power Up: Get Competitive below.
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