CI tools such as aqute.com are designed to streamline the process and make it easier for you and your teams. They allow you to set alerts for specific topics and/or competitors.
For competitive intelligence, it’s important to collect high-quality information. It’s important to gather relevant and reliable data, not just as much as possible.
1. Analyze Your Competitors
Although a competitor’s analysis may appear to be a daunting task, you can break it down into manageable stages. It is important to only collect relevant data that will help you understand your industry and competitors. This can help all departments in the company to make better decisions. Sales teams can adjust their pitch according to competitor claims and weaknesses, or product teams can plan their roadmap based on a competitive feature or blindspot.
The first step in any competitor analysis is to identify the competitors you want to analyze. These are the companies that most closely compete for your audience and offer products or services similar to your own. They should also fit well with your business model. This step can also be accomplished by using SEO tools such as Ahrefs and competitor websites to learn more about their marketing strategies and service offerings.
You’ll want to know how big your competitors are. While this may be hard to gauge for small and private businesses, it can be helpful to know how many employees they have, as well as their revenue streams. This can provide you with a sense of their resources and whether they are likely to out-maneuver you in a market shift.
After you’ve identified the competitors, it’s important to dig deep into their strengths and weakness. To do this, you’ll need to understand their business models and products in depth. For example, if you’re a software company, look at your competitors’ pricing pages and compare the features they advertise to those of your own. This will help you to determine what makes your products unique and how to position them so that they stand out for your customers.
You should also look at the marketing efforts of your competitors and their customer reviews. This can help you pinpoint any areas in which your own marketing could be improved and provide you with inspiration for new initiatives. You can then use the competitor analysis to perform an abridged SWOT analysis. This will identify your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your opportunities and threats.
2. Identify Your Strengths
In today’s fast paced business environment, keeping track of competitors can be difficult. But understanding and assessing your competition is vital for building effective strategies that will help you gain a competitive edge. It is here that competitive intelligence comes into play, but without tracking the right KPIs it can be hard to know how your CI programme is performing. Competitive Intelligence KPIs evaluate the effectiveness of your CI program in supporting strategic decision making, and improving competitive positioning. They can be qualitative or quantitative in nature and focus on different aspects of your CI program. Some of the most significant ones include market shares, brand perception, customer happiness, and sales data analyses. The best way to measure these is through a framework like SWOT or PEST, which can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.
While identifying the strengths and weakness of competitors can be helpful, it’s also important to search for opportunities that could positively impact your business’s growth and its success. This can be achieved through market research, customer survey, and analysis industry events, amongst other activities. For example, a competitor might have a strong online presence, but it might also have limited resources or outdated technology that could be an opportunity for your company to leverage to gain a competitive advantage.
Influenced revenue is another good metric. This can be a high level metric to determine the overall impact of your CI programs, and is often easier than net new business rates or customer retention. Tracking influenced revenues can also help you convince senior stakeholders that your CI program is worth it.
It’s important to note that the measurement of CI KPIs can be complex, especially when it involves collecting and analyzing large amounts of data. Investing in a CI tool that streamlines your entire process and allows you to track and identify the most relevant data is the best way to go.
3. Identify Your Weaknesses
Competitive intelligence is the process of analyzing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. This analysis will help you to develop a strategy that will allow you to outperform your competitors.
Unlike traditional market analysis, which relies heavily on secondary data such as advertisements and press releases, competitive intelligence focuses primarily on gathering and analysing primary data. It also involves an in-depth understanding of your industry and your company’s unique position within it.
Competitive intelligence should not only identify your competitors’ strengths, but also their weaknesses. It should also focus on identifying opportunities for growth. These opportunities can include new trends or technological advancements, as well as new customer segments. The key is to recognize and capitalize on these opportunities before your competitors do.
Small and medium businesses (SMEs) are especially in need of competitive intelligence. These companies are less resourceful and often less able adapt to market changes. SME’s can improve their operations by using competitive intelligence.
To be successful in competitive intelligence, you must ensure that the data collected is accurate and relevant. Incorrect or outdated information won’t provide you with valuable insight and could even harm your company. When conducting competitive intelligence, it is essential to use an accurate source of information.
Manual analysis is still a valuable tool in competitive intelligence. However, it’s best to invest in an automated tool that can streamline the process and produce more insightful data. Sprout Social has competitor analysis tools built in that allow you view all of your competitors’ social media activity on a single page. You can see their post volume, frequency, hashtag usage and audience growth.
In addition, a tool like AlphaSense can help you understand how your company compares to competitors in real time. This is useful for rebranding campaigns, marketing campaign plans, restructuring, and other short term decision making. This type of competitive Intelligence is called tactical CI, and it uses real time data and direct observation in order to gather insights. It’s a quicker and more responsive form of CI than strategic competitive intelligence, which is more long-term in nature and requires deeper research and analysis.
4. Analyze Your Opportunities
A well-rounded strategy for competitive intelligence includes not only identifying threats and weaknesses of competitors, but also looking at opportunities within your own market. This is where competitive intelligence can help you to grow your business and stay ahead of the competition.
You might decide to match, or even beat, the price of your competitors on a popular item to attract new clients. If you notice that your market is shifting to a particular type of product, then you could launch a brand new product in order to take advantage of this opportunity.
But be careful to not over-rely on competitor intelligence data. This could lead your company into a more reactive mode than a proactive. It’s crucial to combine audience research, competitor research, and market trend analysis to get an overall view of your markets and identify your opportunities.
Be sure to also consider your own capabilities, such as your workforce, your technology, and your finances. It’s easy for you to get excited when a new opportunity arises, but you need to be realistic about how well you can capitalize on it.
Update your competitive intelligence regularly. Your competitors’ strategies are constantly changing, as the world continues its rapid evolution. If you wait to long between updates, then your insights may become outdated, and this could hinder your decision-making.
The benefits of competitive intelligence can be seen in the end: By identifying the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, market trends and customer preferences, companies can create marketing and business strategies more effective, which ultimately lead to sustainable success and growth.