The right competitive information can improve short term decisions, like responding to disruptions in supply chains. It can also help to refine marketing campaigns.
Using primary sources is a great way to gather accurate and reliable information. Customer conversations are often overlooked as a primary source. Competitive intelligence can provide such data.
1. Customer Research
Customer research is at the heart of competitive intelligence. It provides you with the context in which your competitors’ strategies are implemented. The patterns you identify in this stage can help you predict future industry movements. This will enable you to make more informed operational, strategic and tactical changes, ahead of the competition.
This type of research seeks to understand the customers of your competitors. This includes knowing what makes them buy and why they choose your competitor’s product over yours. Customer surveys are a great tool to gather this type of information.
To get to know your marketing competitors, you need a complete list of their products. It’s then a matter identifying their target audience and how they market to them. This includes any specific features that they’re promoting and how they’re positioning them against yours.
This process can be lengthy, and it’s easy to go down rabbit holes without a defined set of parameters. This is why it’s important to create a clear strategy and understand what insights you want to achieve at the outset. By defining these in terms of internal business goals, you can prioritize the most valuable information.
It’s important that you set regular intervals for reviewing your results as you continue to collect this data and analyze it. To gain a long-term advantage, it’s crucial to take a step away to evaluate your competitors and identify any gaps within your own strategy.
2. Websites
Visit the websites of your competitors to get an idea of who they are targeting, what they’re marketing and what products they sell. All of these factors are important when deciding how you want to approach your target audience and market.
While all competitor data technically falls under Competitive intelligence, you must prioritize what you collect. Otherwise, you will have too much information. Start by identifying your objectives and then focus on sources that will help you achieve them. For example, if you want to gather insights on how rival products are performing in the marketplace, look for reviews on review aggregator sites like G2.
If your business operates primarily online, you might collect competitor website information by monitoring their search engine performance (with tools like Semrush). Alternatively, you could also monitor social media posts, which offer insight into your rivals’ customer sentiment.
You can optimize your strategies by using competitive intelligence to identify trends and react to them. This can streamline your decision-making process and enable you to take advantage of opportunities, or mitigate threats and challenges more quickly. There are two types: strategic and tactic. Strategic competitive intelligence informs a company’s broad direction and focuses on long-term objectives. Tactical competitive intelligence is based on real-time information and helps businesses respond to immediate challenges. Both forms of competitive intelligence are essential for guiding your business toward success. But they’re most effective when used in conjunction with one another. This ensures that you’re analyzing relevant, reliable information at scale. And, making informed, confident decisions. The result is an agile and profitable business.
3. Press Releases
Many people think of press releases when they hear the phrase Competitive intelligence. Press releases can provide valuable information on your competitors. It could be anything from a brand new product to upcoming events. Having access to this type of information can help you to develop business strategies that will allow you to outperform your competition. It’s important to use your competitors’ press releases strategically.
This means analyzing their information and looking for ways to differentiate your business from theirs. In addition to analyzing the information provided by your competitors, it is important to also consider broader industry trends and how they may affect your business. This is important, as it allows you to plan ahead and see the big picture.
One of the key elements of a successful press release is to create a headline that is relevant and interesting. A well-written and interesting press release will make the job of journalists much easier. The headline should also be concise and should resemble a newspaper headline so that it is likely to catch attention.
Newsjacking, or tying your announcement to current events, is another way to add value. You can announce, for example, that you have partnered with a music event if you’re a video creator. This will grab the attention of your current audience and potential ones. You can also increase the impact of your announcement by adding evidence that shows why it is relevant to this event.
4. Customer Reviews
Online reviews provide a wealth information about the experiences of customers with brands and products. They often reveal what they love and don’t like about rival products, which provides competitive intelligence analysts with insights into gaps in the market that can be exploited for a competitive advantage.
In addition to analyzing customer reviews, you can use SEO tools to monitor competitors’ website changes such as pricing changes, new product launches, rebrands and more. This enables you to stay ahead of the competition and anticipate your competitors’ moves so that you can react quickly with a counterstrategy, such as introducing your own product with similar features.
Sprout Social is a competitive analysis tool that allows you to analyze and report the social media performance of your competitors on one platform. You can track post volume and frequency, hashtag usage, post type, performance metrics, audience growth, share of voice and sentiment with a single tool that’s easier than doing manual analysis on each platform.
Sprout Social premium analytics will also allow you to compare the performance of your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn competitors. You can view historical data to see the evolution of your competitors’ strategies over time.
Sentiment analysis is another feature of competitive intelligence tools that allows you examine customer feelings and opinions regarding your own brand, competitors’ products, campaigns and industry insights. These insights can inform a range of marketing activities including product development, content strategies and paid advertising. Sentiment research is an important part of competitive intelligence because it can alert to any negative sentiments which may negatively impact on your business.
5. Call Recordings
One of the most valuable tools in a competitive intelligence team’s arsenal, call recordings are an excellent source of real-world customer examples and insights. They provide a deeper understanding of customer pain points, expectations and preferences than surveys, and are more effective at helping businesses identify issues and opportunities for improvement. When implemented correctly, a library of call recordings can also save teams time and effort in gathering competitor information by eliminating the need to interview customers or review survey results.
Another great way to use call recordings is for coaching and training. Especially for new hires or low performing agents, they provide an invaluable resource to learn how more experienced reps are handling conversations with their customers. Call recordings are also a great training tool for managers. They can listen to calls to identify areas of improvement, such a building rapport, handling objections, or connecting with customers.
Win-loss interviews can be a valuable part of any program to enable competitors and are often overlooked as a source for intelligence. Sales and marketing leaders gain valuable insight during these discussions into the specific drivers, management assumptions and factors that influence competitors’ decision-making processes. By leveraging the insights gained, businesses can create a more targeted message and positioning which resonates with customers.
Internal message channels are a goldmine for collecting competitive intelligence, according to virtually every compete pro we talk to. By creating an internal #competitiveintel messaging channel, companies can encourage their reps to share information and gain insights that they might not have otherwise gathered. Additionally, leveraging this data source allows for the collection of granular information, like pricing strategies or common buyer objections, which can be hard to collect through other sources.
