You don’t need to be a large corporation to use Competitive intelligence. Companies of all sizes and industries can collect and analyze reliable data at scale.
Effective CI requires the collection and analysis of legal, ethical information about competitors. It allows businesses to make better decisions faster. This process frees decision-making from “HIPPO”, and reduces the time spent deliberating.
Gathering Information
Competitive intelligence reveals competitors’ strategies, weaknesses, and strengths and allows businesses to develop more effective business plans. It also helps companies capitalize on emerging market trends and customer behavior by tracking competitors’ responses to those trends. This helps companies create strategies to help them differentiate from their competitors, such as filling a specific niche or offering a service they don’t provide.
Competitive intelligence is a big part of gathering data from outside the organization. This can include competitor websites and social media, blogs and podcasts, as well as e-books and white papers. It’s difficult to keep track of all the data and teams have to spend time filtering irrelevant information. In addition, a lot of the information isn’t easily accessible and could be hard to digest without specialized software.
There are many tools that can streamline this process, and provide insights that are easy to understand and useful. Creating a system for organizing external competitive intelligence is a critical first step to successful CI, as it makes it easier for teams to stay on top of new information.
A second important way to gain competitive intelligence is by leveraging internal sources. This can include everything from off-hand remarks salespeople hear during calls to customer feedback on products and services. It’s also a good idea to interview internal subject-matter experts and even your sales and customer success reps for a better sense of what’s going on with competitors and customers.
As more businesses go digital it is becoming more important to use technology to track information about competitors. Many platforms like Reddit, Quora, and Slack allow users to share question-and-answer format discussions in a public forum that can be useful for competitive intelligence. It’s a good idea to share with your team the knowledge that your competitors have certain features and pricing options that your customers like.
Analyzing Information
Competitive intelligence (also known as CI) is the process of collecting and analyzing information about competitors, markets, and technologies in order to make contextual business decisions that help achieve a competitive advantage.
Planning is the first step in CI. This helps to ensure that your team will have the resources necessary to collect the data needed. This includes defining the scope and objectives of your project as well as identifying what key competitors, markets, and technologies you need to monitor. This includes deciding what tools and methodologies you will use to collect and analyze the data.
The next step is to collect the actual competitive intelligence data. This will likely include different data points, such as competitor’s websites, blogs and social media. It will also include information on market trends, potential customers, and other market research. You will then need to analyze this data in order to identify key insights and themes that you can leverage to inform your business strategy.
It is important to consider both the big picture and the details when analyzing data. If you are monitoring the website of your competitor, it is important that you see how often and what kind of content they produce. This can give you a good indication of how quickly your competitor will respond to new opportunities.
A second way to analyze these data is by looking at the themes which are repeated in competitor marketing materials. This can be done through analyzing specific keywords and messaging in their advertisements, promotional campaigns, or customer reviews. Review Insights from Klue’s AI suite provides this level analysis at scale, allowing businesses to uncover key patterns in competitors’ customer experience across 1000s reviews in only a few clicks. When presenting this data to stakeholders, it is also important to tell a story. This will keep your audience interested and help them understand the importance of this information for their organization.
Information Is A Powerful Tool To Make Decisions
The key to competitive Intelligence is not just gathering data, but also collecting high-quality data. This is why you should use the right tools to suit your needs. If your business is only online, you don’t need to waste time or money on gathering information about physical stores of competitors. Instead, focus on the digital marketing strategies your competitors are using to target their audience and market their products.
A competitor analysis is also a useful tool. These models provide a way to compare different pieces of competitor-related data and can help you identify opportunities for your own company. By making it easier to analyze and make decisions based on competing information, such models can save you time and money.
For example, a competitor model could highlight a competitor’s advertising budget or a competitor’s customer demographics. Then, you can tailor your strategy based on the information.
Competitive intelligence’s ultimate goal is to develop strategies that are more effective and will lead to growth and success for your business. By gaining a thorough understanding of the strengths and weakness of your competitors, it is possible to create strategies that take advantage of emerging trends within your industry. Competitive intelligence can also help you spot and seize new opportunities, from adjusting pricing or market positioning to launching a new product.
It’s also important to remember that competitive intelligence is not a one-time exercise. It is a continuous process which requires constant monitoring of the activities of competitors and their results. You may be able to take advantage of this opportunity if, for example, your competitor says they’re trying out new marketing techniques.
Implementing A Strategy
Once you’ve gathered a mountain of information, it can be hard to separate the signal from the noise. Having the right tools in place can help. You can make better sense of the information you receive by using competitive intelligence software such as Klue. It allows you to centralize and organize your data, create a system to tag and categorize it, and triage it. This will save you time and resources, so that you can focus on the important things — creating a Go to Market strategy that will help your business win in the long term.
Once your data has been analyzed, you can share it with stakeholders so they can use it to support their work. This can improve team collaboration, especially among those who are working on different parts in the Go-to Market Strategy. It also helps everyone stay on the same page about what you’re trying to accomplish and how it will help your business beat out competitors.
Competitive intelligence can also be used to identify opportunities your competitors are not taking advantage of. For example, if you find that one of your rivals is offering a new service that your audience wants but you haven’t yet, that can be an opportunity to steal a march on them. It’s also a great way to learn what your competitors do to lose market shares so you can prevent that from happening.
The more regularly you collect and analyse competitive intelligence data, it will become easier to anticipate the next moves of your competitors. You’ll be able to use your archive of past performance in order to predict their future strategies. You might notice, for example, that your competitors tend to offer certain services during certain times of the calendar year or that they have a large promotional sale right after Christmas. You can identify assets that don’t perform well, such as “dogs,” or those that might be able to achieve success with a different strategy, such as “question marks,” that are best abandoned.