Marketing Operations · Competitive Intelligence · Claude Code

📊 Competitive Content Intelligence Dashboard

A live dashboard that tracks publishing activity, topic distribution, and content gaps across five competing SaaS marketing platforms — updated in real time

The Problem

Content teams make publishing decisions largely on instinct. They know roughly what competitors are writing about, but they don’t have a systematic way to track it — how often competitors publish, which topics they’re doubling down on, where they’ve gone silent, and where the unclaimed territory is. That guesswork is expensive when content production is a significant operational investment.

The question every Content or Marketing Ops team should be able to answer in real time: what are our competitors publishing, and what are they missing?

The Solution

I built a live competitive content intelligence dashboard that ingests blog data from five major SaaS marketing platforms — HubSpot, Salesforce, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, and Mailchimp — via their public RSS feeds, classifies each post by topic, and renders the results as an interactive visual dashboard hosted on Railway.

The dashboard refreshes on demand. Every chart, heatmap, and insight reflects the current state of each company’s content operation, not a static snapshot.

⚙️ How It Works

The system has five layers working together:

1. RSS ingestion: A Python backend fetches live blog posts from all five companies via their public RSS feeds — no API keys required. Posts are parsed for title, date, category, and content.
2. Topic classification: Each post is classified into a topic category (AI/Automation, Email Marketing, CRM/Sales, E-commerce, Content Marketing, Customer Retention, Analytics/Data, Personalization, Strategy/Growth, SMS/Mobile) using keyword matching against the title and description.
3. Gap analysis: The system identifies which topics each company covers and which they’re missing — surfacing differentiation opportunities a content team could act on immediately.
4. Trend detection: A 90-day rolling comparison flags whether each company is accelerating or decelerating their publishing output — a leading indicator of product launches or campaign cycles.
5. Synthesized insights: The dashboard generates a plain-language competitive summary at the bottom — not just data, but actionable observations a content strategist or CMO could bring directly into a planning meeting.

🧠 What the Data Revealed

Running this against the five companies as of June 2026 surfaced several immediately actionable insights:

🛠️ Tech Stack

📊 Live Dashboard

🌐 Why This Matters for Content & Marketing Operations

Content teams without competitive intelligence are flying blind. They produce content based on internal priorities, editorial instinct, and whatever the last planning meeting decided — without a systematic view of what the market is doing around them.

This dashboard answers the questions a Content Ops or Marketing Ops lead should be asking every quarter: who is publishing most aggressively and on what topics, where is the competitive white space, and is our own publishing cadence accelerating or falling behind? It turns what is usually a manual research task — someone opening five browser tabs and taking notes — into a live, refreshable system.

The same architecture applied to any company’s real competitive set becomes an always-on content intelligence layer for the marketing team. The RSS ingestion, topic classification, and gap analysis logic are fully portable across industries and competitor sets.

💰 Hosting Costs

Total cost to run at portfolio traffic levels: negligible.