Effective competitive intelligence can positively impact every department in your business. Marketing will step up their market research and customer analysis, sales teams will improve their account planning and sales enablement, and leadership can make better and informed decisions.
Identify Your Competitors
In the modern world, it’s much easier to gain insights on the tactics and strategies used by your competitors. Whether tracking content adoption or competitive winning rates, a well established CI program can support your business by providing data that enables contextualized and data-driven decision making.
You’ll want to also pay attention to any new competitors, who may have just exploded onto the scene with innovative business models or new innovations that threaten established companies in their markets. These are usually the companies that you should give the highest priority in your analysis.
Once you’ve determined your direct and indirect competitors, you can start analyzing their marketing and sales activities. This is where you can use a number of competitive intelligence tools, such as the EyeOn app, which monitors your competitors and alerts you to their activity in areas such as social media and website changes. You can also get this information from your own CRM system, which stores information about your products and services.
While competitive intelligence aims to arm you with the facts about your competitors, it’s not really about gathering raw data and giving it to people who can’t make sense of it all. The most effective competitive intelligence programs extract meaning and context from the data they gather – and then share it with relevant stakeholders. Everyone from marketing to product design should be included, so that they can all have the information needed to take the right action at the right time.
Analyze Their Strategy
Once you’ve gathered data on competitors, the next step in competitive intelligence is to analyze it. Depending on your objectives, this could mean anything from studying their product offerings to understanding their marketing campaigns. The goal is to gather data that will help you refine and develop your Go-to Market strategy, so that you gain a competitive edge.
Be clear about the information you want from your competitors to get the most value out of your competitive Intelligence efforts. It’s important to also know which stakeholders will be crucial to analyzing and using this information. While competitive intelligence is beneficial to all departments, high-level managers are the ones who can make the most of it. They will be able use the information to identify opportunities and threats for their company.
By monitoring your competitors, you can gain a better understanding of their motivations and capabilities, which will enable you to anticipate market shifts and develop proactive strategies to maintain or advance your business position. Two key factors are their management assumptions and their drivers. The drivers include their goals and strategies, corporate cultures and backgrounds, values/mission, leadership, and corporate cultures. Management assumptions refer to the beliefs and assumptions they have about their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.
You can also identify market gaps by analyzing the strategies of your competitors. You can then create or adjust your products and services to fill those gaps and capture a larger share of the market.
You can also examine your competitors’ activities by examining their customer satisfaction and level of loyalty. This can be done by surveying their customers or by tracking and analyzing social media posts. You can use the information to improve your customer experience and attract more customers.
You can also look at the ad campaigns of your competitors to see which keywords they are bidding on, and how their ads perform. You can use a tool called Advertising Research to see the actual ads that your competitor has on Google Ads, as well the keywords that trigger them.
Monitor Their Activities
Monitor competitors to gain a competitive edge. A successful competitive intelligence plan involves keeping track of your competitors to determine the best way to respond.
This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Some companies will simply search the internet to gather information, while other may use frameworks such as SWOT and PEST. In most cases, both methods will be needed to gather as much competitive information as possible.
It is possible to do manual analysis, but the best way to stay on top of a competitor’s activity is to use a platform which provides a comprehensive overview of all the information in one place. This will allow you monitor things like post frequency and volume, hashtag usage and audience growth to see how your competitors compare.
Once you’ve gathered a lot of intel, now is the time to share it with your team. This can be achieved in a variety of ways, for example by creating competitor profiles or battlecards that give a quick snapshot of each competitor’s relevant information. This will help ensure that everyone on your team has the intel they need to make informed decisions and take action.
Staying ahead of the competition helps businesses not only identify opportunities, but also avoid threats. By identifying the risks that exist in their markets, businesses can develop contingency planning to minimize any negative effects and keep their business on top of things. CI can also reveal what new products or services are in the pipeline from competitors and provide an opportunity to gain market shares.
Regardless of what industry your company is in, a competitive intelligence strategy will always be an important tool to have at your disposal. Implementing a comprehensive set processes and utilizing most useful resources will allow you to effectively collect and analyze competitive intelligence and leverage it for your advantage.
Take Action
Once the data is gathered, it needs to be analysed and disseminated. The best competitive strategy involves clearly defined objectives and identifying key stakeholders who will receive information. Often, intelligence reports will be sent to marketing departments, product development teams, and sales teams.
Competitive intelligence is a way to gain insight that will help your business improve or maintain its market position. This could mean adjusting your Go-to Market strategy, creating new products or services, or creating strategic partnership.
By using the right software, you can reduce the time it takes to find the important data. By establishing clear goals, you can identify competitors that are worth monitoring closely and prioritise the gathering of relevant information. This saves valuable time and resources.
The most effective tools for competitive intelligence are those that provide a variety of options for presenting and analyzing data. Your team can then tailor the information according to their working style. Some teams prefer battle cards whereas others find visual reporting breakdowns more useful.
You can determine the most important information by going back to your goals in step 2. Look for sources that support those goals. If you want to improve your marketing message, for example, you should pay attention to the websites of competitors, social media posts, and whitepapers.
You may also want to monitor competitor performance in order to determine how they are performing on the market. This can give you an idea of their strengths and weakness, which you can then use to your advantage. For example, if you notice that your competitor is using expensive materials in their product but yours are made from recycled materials, you could advertise this fact to entice consumers to purchase your products.
