Identifying stakeholders is the first step to creating a competitive intelligence (CI) program that will have an impact. While every department in your company can benefit from https://www.aqute.com/competitive-intelligence, it is important to focus on the groups that will consume and act on your intel.
Information about competitors can be gleaned from customer reviews, industry publications and social media posts. Other intel includes product updates, marketing campaigns and sales data.
Definition
Competitive intelligence is a process of gathering, analysing and disseminating data that allows a business to make better decisions. This information may come from both outside and inside the company. The information must be accurate and useful. If not, this will only add more data to the already cluttered market.
Understanding your competitors is the key to competitive intelligence. Understanding your competitors’ services and products can help you decide which ones will be successful. Meanwhile, a competitor’s strategy for marketing can reveal how they attract clients and promote their brand. Understanding your competitors’ customers will help you to determine the types of businesses that they serve and what specific needs they satisfy. This information will help you to create more targeted customer personas and tailor your own marketing messages to match.
In addition to identifying your competitors, it is necessary to understand their business strategies and operations. This can be achieved by analyzing their financial statement, revenue growth, margins, and cost. It can also be helpful to identify the key drivers of their success and failure. Competitive intelligence also includes keeping track of technological advances and innovations.
While many departments in a company can benefit from competitive intelligence, it is important to focus on the most relevant departments for your CI program. Depending on your business, you may want to focus on customer service for insights into customer behavior and purchase patterns, HR to learn about hiring trends and competitors’ recruitment strategies, or even IT to get an in-depth look at your competition’s technical systems.
It is important to keep in mind that if your team is small, competitive intelligence might seem more like an item on a list than a business function. To be effective, competitive Intelligence requires a dedicated resource who can handle a lot of work while still delivering valuable insights. It is also important to define what the goals and metrics of your competitive intelligence team will be so that you can measure their performance and improve over time.
Sources
The most common sources of competitive intelligence include websites, social media, and marketing research reports. Although these are valuable tools, a complete CI process needs more than just the information they provide. By aggregating all of this information into one place, a tool like Meltwater Media Intelligence Suite helps businesses stay ahead their competitors.
Once you have your list of potential sources, it is time to identify any competitors. It can be a difficult task, but it’s important to have all the information you need to accurately assess the performance of your competitors. It’s important to identify your direct competitors as well as indirect (companies that offer similar services or products but do not compete directly against you for customers) and perceived (companies that may come up in a sales discovery process but do not compete directly against you for business).
Prioritizing the data is important. This will help you determine which insights are the most valuable to your business. It will depend on the goals of your business, which can range from refining your marketing tactics to identifying best strategic partnerships. You should, in general, identify any risks associated with the strategies of your competitors and create contingency planning to mitigate them.
A strong CI program can also help you learn from the mistakes of your competitors. Learning from the mistakes of your competitors can help you improve on your own strategy. While it is always better to avoid them in first place, it’s still a good idea to learn from their mistakes. For example, if your competitor has struggled with customer acquisition, you can use this insight to refine your own marketing efforts.
A strong CI program will also give you the data that you need to create strategic partnerships for your business. For example, if you notice that a competitor is having success with a specific channel, you can use this insight to find partners in that same channel and leverage their relationships to your advantage.
Methods
Competitive intelligence is not a new concept. However, it has become more popular as businesses have realized the value of analyzing marketing strategies of their competitors. The first step in gathering competitive intelligence is to define your competition. Having a clear picture of your competition will help you develop and execute your own competitive marketing strategy. This will also ensure that your company doesn’t miss any opportunities to grab market share or grow its business.
It’s important to remember that competitive analysis and corporate espionage are not the same thing. It doesn’t require trench coats or disguises, and it’s not as secretive. It’s about collecting information from a variety of sources, including the news media, online forums, trade shows and conferences, public filings, and more. This information is analyzed in order to identify patterns and trends that can be used as a competitive advantage.
Once you’ve a good grasp of your competition, it’s time to prioritize your research. It is tempting to monitor every competitor. However, focusing on the top competitors will produce the best results in your competitive intelligence research. Focus on the marketing strategies of competitors you believe are the biggest threats to your company. You can also use this information to determine the type of customers that your competitors attract. This will help you develop more accurate buyer personas, and align your strategy with the needs of your target audience.
You can also leverage competitive intelligence by providing your team with a framework to interpret competitor data. This could include competitor profiles or sales battle cards, which will allow your team to quickly reference the most important information about a particular competitor and use it to inform their selling techniques. A competitive intelligence framework can also help your team to track the impact of its work and demonstrate how much value it adds to the organization.
It is important to have an in-depth understanding of your competitors. However, it is also essential that you are able communicate this information effectively to your colleagues. It’s a best practice to dedicate some of your time to ensuring that the right stakeholders see and consume your competitive intelligence deliverables so that it can be leveraged to drive action.
Analysis
The right competitive intelligence tools (CI) allow your company to analyze your competitors and business environment in order to make strategic decisions. This can be done using a variety analysis models. The goal is to use CI to minimize your company’s risk and capitalize on opportunities.
Understanding how to interpret the collected information is a key aspect of competitive intelligence. It’s not enough to just know your competitors; you need to understand their motivations and what they are trying to achieve in the market.
The goal of analysis is to transform raw data into something useful that can be used to inform and drive the strategy and tactics of your company. For example, you can use the insight gained from observing that your competitor launched a new advertising campaign with a messaging that differs from yours to create an effective marketing message.
Often the analysis component is driven by a desire to address a particular issue or opportunity on the market. It can also be used to support the overall CI process by identifying potential threats and opportunities that might have been overlooked by your competitors.
Tactical CI is a type of analysis that focuses on the shorter-term needs and actions in the marketplace, such as changing pricing strategies or refining marketing campaigns based on consumer response data. Tactical CI is the type of analysis that most businesses will employ regularly, as it can be quickly and easily implemented.
Other forms of CI include comparative bench-marking, identifying risk and opportunities in the market, and pressure testing plans against market responses through “business warfare.” These types of analytical techniques can help companies make better decisions about their product offerings and market.
Determining your CI goals helps you to focus on the most critical aspects of your market. This ensures you collect only the most valuable data, resulting in better-informed and more successful company decisions.
