Competitive intelligence, unlike industrial espionage and other illegal activities is a legal way to gather competitor information. It can include everything from trawling through the Internet to interviewing competitors’ suppliers and logistics partners.
A well-developed competitive Intelligence program can benefit your whole organization. It can impact everything from product marketing to content strategy.
1. Know Your Competitors
You can create a winning strategy by knowing your competitors and their strengths and weaknesses. This can be done by studying your competition and analyzing their pricing strategies, customer service policies and marketing campaigns. You can gather this information from a number of sources including online directories, business listings, review sites, social media posts and ad campaign. You can also gain valuable insights by asking questions about your competitors. Additionally, it’s a good idea to regularly update your competitor analysis to account for changes and new entrants in the market.
The key to success in any competitive intelligence initiative is to make sure that the deliverables you’re focusing on support your overall goals and objectives. This can be challenging, especially if your team or you are a single individual with limited resources.
Decide which competitors to focus on, and what type of data to collect to determine their strengths. This will allow you to prioritize which departments and content you’ll produce.
Depending on your industry and the type of intelligence you need, it might be worth bringing in outside experts to perform this research on your behalf. You can still gather a lot of the information yourself using primary sources like directories and search engine. This information can be used to create a competitor list and analyze their product offerings and prices.
Attending industry conferences and tradeshows is another great way to observe your competitors. This can provide a wealth of insight into how they’re positioning themselves in the market, what their brand messaging is, and the tone of voice they use when communicating with customers. This is also a good opportunity to see the types of products and service your competitors offer, which can be used to enhance and differentiate your own offerings.
2. Identify Your Strengths
Competitor intelligence is a way to identify strengths and weaknesses in your company. Then, you can make better decisions to improve your market position and increase profits.
The key to competitive intelligence is not just gathering and interpreting the correct data, but also knowing what makes your product or services unique. Customers are always drawn to new products and services that are not available anywhere else. It’s part of the consumerist culture.
You can develop a powerful and effective marketing plan by conducting unbiased research on your competitors. You may discover that your competitors’ marketing strategies are ineffective or that their pricing structure is particularly attractive. This can be an opportunity for you to set yourself apart by creating a more innovative campaign.
Identifying the strengths of your company will allow you to develop and refine your go-to market strategy, making it as effective as possible. You should be aware that competitor analysis is time-consuming and labor intensive, despite its importance. It’s often a good decision to outsource competitor analysis to a third party provider, such as a market-research agency. They can save you time while providing you with high-quality data.
The answer to the question “How often should companies conduct competitive intelligence?” is not definitive. It depends on the industry you are in and your business objectives. If you work in a sector that is rapidly evolving, such as technology, then it’s often best to conduct competitive intelligence more frequently to keep up to date with the activities of your competitors and their product developments.
When it comes to competing intelligence, the most important thing is to be able to quickly make sense of the information you receive. You will be the one who is best placed to spot a new development that could be either a threat or an opportunity, and it’s your job to ensure that all other departments are up-to-speed on these changes so that they can take appropriate action. Using an internal competitive intelligence Slack channel or a centralized spreadsheet for recording competitor intel is an excellent way to ensure that all of this information can be easily accessed by other teams.
3. Identify Your Weaknesses
Once you’ve gathered a good amount of competitor information, it’s now time to analyze that data and uncover opportunities. If you do not engage in corporate espionage activities (such as hacking competitors’ phones or cracking their database of customers), competitive intelligence is a completely ethical research method that can be conducted from a wide range of sources. These include customer reviews, competitor press release, announcements and social media posts. Competitive intelligence tools can streamline the process even further and help you to stay on top of reliable, relevant data. Browse our directory of tried-and-tested tools.
It’s also important to be brutally honest with your competitors about their weaknesses. This will allow you to compare your strengths to theirs and see how much of an advantage you have. If your competitors’ products do not fully address a particular pain point, but your product does, you may want to consider changing your marketing message to emphasize that feature.
It’s also worth noting your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses as you identify them, so you can keep an eye on any developments and make decisions quickly if the need arises. It’s important to update your competitive intelligence regularly because the market and your competitors are constantly changing.
Once you’ve identified your competitors’ weaknesses, it’s time to turn this data into an action plan. You will need to ensure all stakeholders are aware and have the necessary information to create strategies that are in line with the competitive environment. This can be done by establishing a regular schedule for delivering competitor intelligence.
4. Identify Opportunities
Competitive intelligence is the research you need to make informed business choices, whether you’re trying to enter new markets or fine-tune your existing market strategy. CI can help your business identify emerging trends and new technologies that could impact the industry, providing an opportunity to take a first mover advantage. It can also provide insights into potential risks which could affect your bottom line and market share, allowing you take swift action in order to mitigate or combat those threats.
As competition increases in the marketplace, it’s important for businesses to stay on top of their game. Online, there is a lot of information. It’s very easy to get lost and miss out on important insights. Kompyte is a tool that can help your team monitor, organize, and analyze data from across your landscape more efficiently.
Having a competitive intelligence process in place is essential to the success of any organization. It’s important, because a team of competitive intelligence analysts only has so many hours to work in a given day, to prioritize the tasks and priorities. Start by identifying the competitors you will closely monitor and assess, as well as companies that are high-potential market entrants. Create a process to allow you to gather this information and distribute it to your teams, so they can be as efficient as possible.