Competitive intelligence is the process by which you gather and analyze information about your competition, target market, and industry, in order to make context-driven business decisions.
Tactical competitive intelligence from www.aqute.com provides insights designed to improve shorter-term decisions. These can include pricing strategies, marketing campaigns or operational efficiencies.
1. Market Research
Market research is a core component of competitive intelligence. It involves gathering data and information on your competitors to help you better understand how to market your product or service to existing customers. Ideally, it should also enable you to seize new market opportunities.
Researching competitors often involves a mix of qualitative and quantitaive methods. Qualitative methods can include competitor interviews and customer feedback in social media or other forums. Quantitative methods for competitor research can include route to market analyses, competitor pricing analyses, substitute product analyses, and market growth predictions.
Technically, all information that is publicly available about your competitors can be considered competitive research. However you should prioritize and focus on the sources of most valuable insight. For example, a competitor’s social media posts, website content, and whitepapers can all be useful sources of competitive intelligence. You may find that asking your customers more specific, targeted questions (such as a survey about how they would react if a competitor changed their logo or an open-ended inquiry about improvements to the buying process) is more effective at gaining valuable competitive insights.
The most successful CI program maintains a constant, ongoing monitoring of the competitive landscape in order to identify any new opportunities or threats that may arise. This requires a dedicated team within the company who are committed in sourcing, monitoring, and acting on competitive information. As your company grows and evolves, it’s a good idea to regularly revisit the competitive intelligence model to make sure that it’s still relevant to your goals. In addition, you should be flexible and adapt your research model as necessary to reflect changing market conditions.
2. Industry Analysis
Competitive intelligence is more than just the cliche, “know your enemy”. It also includes a thorough analysis of how competitors execute their business plans and the markets in which they are active. It reveals the impact of a variety of events on them, as well as how distributors and stakeholders may be affected.
Conducting industry analysis as part of your competitive intelligence program requires a combination of specialized tools and techniques, public sources (websites, press releases, financial reports), direct observation (trade shows, store visits), surveys, interviews and social media monitoring. It also involves a mix of methodologies, such as data mining and data visualization, statistical modeling, pattern recognition and benchmarking.
CI modeling, regardless of the specific method, is essential to deliver measurable insights and understand how your data is being used. The goal of building a model is to provide data-centric insight on relative market dynamics and/or competitive performance. Often, models are updated on a regular cadence to keep the insights relevant and meaningful.
The type of intelligence that you gather, and how it is used, will vary greatly depending on the needs and objectives of internal customers. Some CI programs are more tactical and focused on short-term needs and actions, such as pricing strategies or marketing campaigns. Others are more strategic and focus on gaining a leg up over the competition, such as cultivating unique market positioning or a specialized customer base.
To effectively use and implement competitive Intelligence, you must first identify your primary competitors. This doesn’t necessarily mean the largest companies in your industry. Your ideal customers are the ones who would buy from them if you weren’t available. Once you’ve identified your competitors, it’s important to monitor their activities regularly.
3. Customer Research
Customer research is a method of identifying the needs and tastes of current or future customers. It can help define who a company will market products or services to, also known as identifying a target market. It can also help identify customer segments which are underserved or offer growth opportunities. It can be conducted a number of ways, such as one-on-one interview, ridealongs, and field visits.
When conducting customer research, it’s important to have clear goals and objectives to guide the process. The key is to get beyond the “what” and focus on the “why”. Unstructured and semi-structured interviews are especially useful in this regard. Respondents may provide insights that you would not have thought of had you followed a predetermined set of questions.
Customer research combined with competitive intelligence provides a comprehensive view of market trends and the landscape of competitors. This approach allows businesses a better understanding their competitors’ products and pricing strategies, marketing techniques, and overall market positioning. It can also be used to help companies create customer personas, as well as foundational documents such a message architecture and value statement.
The benefits of a competitive intelligence strategy are multifaceted, transforming everything from strategic decision-making to campaign effectiveness and even helping companies to identify opportunities for growth or disruption. Traditionally these processes were time-consuming and manual, but now that a range of CI software is available, it’s possible to automate and streamline the collection and the analysis of critical data. This ensures that the most important insights are delivered to the departments who need them at the time they need them.
4. Sales & Marketing
Depending on what the business wants to accomplish with competitive intelligence research, different teams will focus on the most relevant data. Marketing research teams, for example, will examine how competitors communicate with their target audience. They’ll also look at the keywords and messaging that they use and what products and services they are pushing. These insights will allow them to refine their messages and tailor them to the needs of their customers.
The teams in charge of sales and marketing will also be looking at how their competitors present themselves to potential clients. They’ll compare their product offerings to any new features that competitors advertise. In addition, they’ll consider what products or services a competitor used to have but no longer offers and try to understand why they decided to discontinue them.
This analysis allows for the team to identify possible opportunities. For example, they can launch in a market that is untapped or improve product features by using customer feedback. It helps them to identify potential threats that may impact their business. For example, a disruptive new competitor could emerge in their market.
It is important that all employees are informed of the results once the research has been completed. They can stay informed by creating deliverables such as infographics and charts. Sharing them regularly in meetings and via email will ensure the information is incorporated into daily business decisions. Over time, everyone will be able to consider competitor strategies when forming their own. This will help the company maintain its competitive edge regardless of market conditions.
5. Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis is a critical component of business intelligence. It involves evaluating competitors to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This information can help you develop and refine your marketing strategy. You can also better market and sell products or services if you know how your competitors are positioning themselves on the market.
This data collection can be the most time consuming part of competitive Intelligence. It requires a range of tools and methods, such as social media monitoring, financial statement analysis, and attending industry conference. Using these data points can help you identify gaps in the market and find ways to fill them.
It is important to know what you are looking for when performing competitor analysis. This will allow you to avoid collecting and analyzing irrelevant data. This will make it easier for you to understand the results and use these to guide strategic decisions.
There are many different ways to gather competitor data, including through your competitors’ websites, press releases, annual reports, and social media accounts. Customer feedback, market research, and interviews with industry experts can also be valuable sources of competitive intelligence.
Once you’ve gathered your data, it is important to organize it and analyze it. A spreadsheet that lists the data points to be compared and your competitors on the one side is a popular way to create a competitor matrix. This will allow you to quickly identify key trends and patterns.
Competitive benchmarking is another useful tool to assess your competitors. It compares your product or service performance with that of your competitors. This can be an effective way to determine which competitors are performing well in a particular market and which ones could be better served by being purchased or exited.