Competitive intelligence is a broad term that means different things to various departments within an organization. For example, it may be used to support business strategies and help sales teams win new customers.
Competitive intelligence generally involves gathering information from sources that are publicly available and legal (not hacking into competitors’ databases or listening to their phones). It also includes insights from customers.
Identify Your Key Competitors
Your business has competitors, no matter if it is a local shop or an international corporation. You must know who your competitors are, what they do and where they are located, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. This goes well beyond the cliche of “knowing your enemy.” Competitive intelligence helps to understand how competitors’ strategy can disrupt eachother, how they might target customers differently, and how many events can affect them.
You can do a competitor analysis internally or partner with a market-research agency that specializes in this type work. While there are many benefits to doing a competitor study in-house, it may not be feasible or possible for businesses to collect the data required to extract useful insights and use these to their advantage. Many businesses partner with a CI firm or hire an in-house CI expert to perform this type analysis on their behalf.
Before you begin to analyze and use the vast amount of data, you must first establish your objectives. These goals will inform the types of data you need to collect and how that information is analyzed. If you want to know where to invest your resources to build customer loyalty, for example, you should prioritize researching competitors who are already established in the area you wish to expand into.
This will also help you to understand the demographics of your existing customer base and how it compares with that of your competition. A competitor analysis could also include a review of your competition’s product lines, pricing strategies, and promotional tactics.
Benchmark Your Competitors
You need to know the current status of your competitors in order to develop and implement strategies that will drive efficiencies. To achieve this, competitive benchmarking is essential. This practice compares the business practices of your company to those of your competition in order to identify weaknesses, strengths, opportunities, and threats. This allows you implement the best business practices from your competitors to increase your performance and profitability.
Consider the businesses closest to you, both in terms of size and performance. These are your most direct competition and will provide you with the most useful insights. It is important to include a variety of competitors to get a better understanding of the industry landscape. For example, it would be beneficial to include competitors that are located in different regions, market segments, and business models to ensure you have a broad spectrum of comparisons.
Moreover, you can include competitors who have a positive customer perception in your research to learn what is working. This information can help you create messages and products that resonate well with your target audience, and improve customer experience.
Conducting competitor analysis and benchmarking takes time and resources. In addition to gathering your own data, you will need to identify the key competitors, create a list of their marketing and business practices, and collect and analyze this information. This process can be automated by using competitive intelligence software, which streamlines the collection and analysis of competitor data.
You can also use public data sources to find benchmarking metrics and analyze your competitors’ performance. These include reports from Google Ads and SEMrush. In addition, you can leverage social media analytics and contact professional networks to stay up-to-date on competitor data and news.
For competitor analysis, it’s important to set clear benchmarking objectives and choose reliable data sources. You should be ready to adjust your strategy if new insights from your competitors or the competitive landscape change. You can also set measurable, achievable, and time-bound improvement actions with clearly defined objectives and metrics.
Track Your Competitors
Successful competitive intelligence relies on a consistent and well-defined method for collecting, organizing and analysing competitor information. It’s important to stay on top of your competitors by using a dedicated tool for tracking them. This will save you time and keep you informed.
After you’ve gathered all the competitor intelligence, it’s vital to separate the signals from the noise. To do this, centralize your data, either by implementing dedicated competitive intelligence software or a well-structured spreadsheet. Categorize your information and tag it to make finding and retrieving it easier. Use tools such as Klue’s triage mode to quickly review, prioritize and assess new information.
Many businesses aren’t sure where to begin when creating a competitive intelligence strategy. While the internet makes it easier to access competitor information, they don’t know how to get started. The good news is that there are a variety of automated tools available to help you track your competitors, monitor for changes in their marketing strategies, and identify opportunities to get ahead.
Once you have a process for gathering, monitoring, and reporting on competitor intel in place, it’s important to measure the success of your program with benchmarks and KPIs. These should include everything from the time your teams spend reviewing competitor content and using it to the competitive win rates, revenue impacts, and overall sales confidence.
Monitor Your Competitors
To effectively use competitive intelligence, businesses must develop a full picture of the market to anticipate changes in the market, understand competitor strategies and identify opportunities and threats. This will help them make informed strategic decisions. A comprehensive strategy for competitive intelligence requires the collection of information from diverse published and unpublished sources. These include news media, interviews with customers and competitors, industry experts, tradeshows and conferences, government records, and trade show and conference attendees.
Performing a competitor analysis will allow you to recognize your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and marketing tactics. It can help you to better leverage your resources. It can be difficult to stay ahead of the competition when there are so many tools, methods, and techniques. This is why implementing competitive analysis as part of your CI plan is crucial.
Reviewing your competitors’ online presence is a good place to begin. Included in this is their website, social media pages and email communications. This information can be used to evaluate their digital efforts, such as SEO, paid advertisements, content strategy, etc.
