Competitive intelligence transcends the simple cliche “know your enemy.” It is a comprehensive analysis that helps businesses uncover market requirements and anticipate future trends.
Gathering competitor information will help you improve products and services. You can use Ahrefs for website traffic analysis or software aggregator websites like G2 for reviews.
Identifying your competitors
Competitive intelligence is the study, analysis, and monitoring competitors to learn how they achieve success and what you can learn from them. The goal is identifying your top competitors, those who offer a comparable value proposition to yours and have a significant share of the market. Then, you can focus on assessing the marketing and sales strategies and products, as well as services, to find the best growth opportunity.
Oftentimes, competitor analysis is a to-do item that gets done once or twice per year. Competitive intelligence (CI) can provide valuable insights into the way counterpart teams at a competitor’s business manage their businesses. This can influence your marketing strategy for many years.
You can begin by identifying the competition through a thorough analysis of their websites, social networks, and SEO activities. Then, you can narrow down your list to a few key competitors, and create a detailed list of their strengths, weaknesses and opportunities. This is what a competitor analysis should look like — think of it as a one-page profile for each of your top competitors that you can reference and update as needed. You can then use this information to monitor your competitor’s marketing activities, including content marketing, events, social media, messaging, and A/B tests. The information should be shared with your teams, and centralized into an easily accessible location such as a shared folder or internal portal.
The benefits of competitor analysis are many. CI helps your business identify opportunities for product and marketing growth while mitigating risks by proactively identifying and creating contingency strategies to address potential competitive threats. It can also improve your customer insights through analyzing competitors’ interactions with customers and their engagement to gain a deeper understanding of their wants, needs, and preferences.
To get the most out of your competitor analysis, it’s important to keep the process ongoing and consistent. For this reason, it is best to partner with a specialized competitive intelligence and market research agency that can provide the technology and expertise you need to stay on top of your game.
Identifying market opportunities
Knowing what your competition is doing can often be the best way for you to gain an edge in the marketplace. It is for this reason that competitive intelligence services can be so valuable. You can see the big picture, and identify new business opportunities based on data you collect about your competitors. A thorough competitor analysis, for example, can reveal gaps in the market you can exploit with your marketing or product development strategies. It can also help you better understand your customers and identify trends that may impact your business.
You can perform competitive analyses using a variety methods, including SWOT (strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats) or Porter’s Five Forces. These tools can be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competition and highlight areas where you can improve your marketing, sales, and success programs. This information will also help you create a more targeted Go to Market strategy that resonates well with your target audience, and helps differentiate your product from your competition.
It can be difficult to develop and maintain a competitive intelligence programme. It takes time and effort for you to collect competitor data and analyze it. You need to ensure you’re using accurate data and providing the most valuable insights to your team. Creating a repeatable system to deliver market, customer, and buyer insights to your staff can help you realize the benefits of Competitive Intelligence quicker.
A CI analysis may lead to information overload. It can be difficult to understand the data and identify useful insights if you are analyzing too many competitors or focusing on your own company. To avoid this, you must focus on the main drivers behind your competitors’ actions and decisions.
You can leverage this information to accelerate your own sustainability efforts, for example, if you see that your competitors are investing in renewable energy technologies. Similarly, if your competitors are launching new products that meet a growing need in the market, you can leverage that information to position your product as an effective alternative.
Identifying threats
The competitive intelligence process can reveal threats to your business and future challenges. It can help you develop strategies for overcoming them. CI helps you stay in the loop with your competitors, industry trends, customer preferences, and technological advancements.
Information gathered through competitor analysis may also reveal gaps in the marketplace where your product could fill a need. This insight can help create marketing strategies to position your product so that it stands out among competitors and is more appealing to potential customers.
Using competitive intelligence to identify your competition can help you plan better, avoiding risks and threats that could negatively impact your business’s profitability. You can, for example, take steps to protect yourself against price wars by making sure that your products are unique. You can use this information to predict changes in the industry such as new regulations and changing customer preferences.
Whether you decide to conduct competitive intelligence in-house or work with a market research agency, it is crucial to make it a core part of your company’s operations. You can achieve this by integrating it into the workflow of your company, communicating with everyone, and integrating your strategy. This will ensure the intel that you gather and analyse is aligned to your company’s goals, giving you a clear edge over your competition.
To stay ahead of the competition in any industry, you need to develop a comprehensive strategy for competitive intelligence. You can develop successful strategies by combining the efforts of your competitive intelligence team with your marketing and sales teams. You will be able to identify and capitalize on market opportunities, identify potential threats, and develop a winning plan that will propel your business to new heights of success.
Developing a strategy
There are many ways to use competitive intelligence, but the most important thing is to know what your goals and objectives are. Competitive intelligence can be used to help you reach your goals faster. Determine your purpose to help you focus the most important information and data.
Once you have figured this out, your next step is analyzing and interpreting your findings and comparing them to the objectives of your company. Here is where competitive intelligence can be very powerful. The analyzed data will help you create strategies to support your business goals. You can also share the insights you gain from your analysis with other departments in your organization.
This can range anywhere from a quick win like interviewing both new and old customers to get qualitative feedback to reprioritizing your product development efforts. Ultimately, it’s about giving other departments the ammunition they need to succeed and stay ahead of the competition.
If you want to get the most from your competitive intelligence program look for a vendor that offers customization. This will help you to get the most relevant and useful data for your needs.
Consider how the data will be presented and analyzed to your stakeholders. People are more engaged with data when it tells a story and ties into their goals and challenges. This could be as simple as changing the order of your slides or the way you present key data points to keep your stakeholders’ attention.
A strong competitive intelligence program will be the foundation of any successful marketing strategy. It enables companies to learn from their competitors, and the results are better campaigns that deliver stronger business performance. With the right partner you can transform a little research into valuable insights to help your marketing team become more agile and effective on the market. This will give your brand an edge over the competition and leave you well on your way to achieving your marketing objectives.
