Your business will not always stay ahead of the competition. No matter how excellent your products are and how unique is your selling proposition, other companies will always compete for customers in your field.
As the competitive landscape in every industry continues to evolve, more firms are investing heavily in competitive intelligence to help give them a winning edge.
Knowing your competitors’ projects gives you the advantage to continue improving, so you can set your company apart.
Organizations with a clear understanding of the competition take advantage of market research. They put themselves at a significant edge compared to those not keeping up with market intelligence.
This article will help you understand competitive intelligence, its examples, and how to incorporate it into your overall business strategy.
What is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is the ability to gather, analyze, and use information collected on competitors to use as the business’s competitive advantage.
It also helps companies to understand their competitive environment, opportunities, and challenges.
Competitive intelligence practices involve ethical and legitimate research. It also comprises information-gathering, such as studying a company’s social media posts for specifics that might reveal the timing of a product launch.
How does competitive intelligence work?
Competitive intelligence assembles actionable information from collected published and unpublished sources.
Competitive intelligence follows ethical standards to prevent legal issues as this is used as a systematic tool to monitor competitors’ actions and behavior.
Organizations analyze data and information to develop effective and efficient market strategies.
For example, suppose your competitor is buying raw materials overseas. In that case, you may emphasize to your clients that you are using “locally sourced” materials as a theme for your next marketing campaign.
The goal of competitive intelligence is to make informed decisions and enhance organizational performance by discovering the company’s risks and opportunities.
Five basic examples of competitive intelligence
Companies must obtain customer trust by providing exceptional customer experience and high-quality products. To do this, a firm must have a driven team to deliver excellent service.
Customer intelligence is the key to saving time and money. Collecting information about customers and competitors lets businesses know what to do and expect in the marketplace.
Here we have the five basic examples of competitive intelligence:
Customer reviews
Assessing reviews of competitors’ brands is one of the competitive intelligence strategies.
You can see your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses by tracking their customers’ opinions about their products and services.
Monitoring the reviews of your competitors’ brands gives you a picture of your threats and opportunities.
This competitive intelligence strategy enables you to stay on top by providing customers what your competitors fail to offer in the market.
Employee reviews
Much like customer reviews, this is one of the essential parts of customer intelligence.
Employee reviews can provide incredible insights into where a given company is not making suitable investments and has poor management issues.
Positive employee reviews of other companies can be just as informative. You can adapt your business rival’s good employee experience and incorporate it into your company culture.
Job postings
Analyzing your competitors’ hiring activities lets you see where they focus their resources.
It can help you develop better business strategies by revealing details about your competitors’ technologies, systems, and processes.
Tracking your competitors’ job postings can also give you operational insights as they often describe specific knowledge, skills, or certifications that a candidate must possess.
Content updates
One efficient way to use competitive intelligence is to pay attention to your competitors’ content updates.
Tracking their different content strategies and platforms, such as blog posts, video content, guides, and webinars, allows you to see if they have a specific range of target audiences.
News coverage
Having a scope of news coverage of your competitors gives you a competitive edge. This competitive intelligence can signal a strategic shift.
For example, if the news covers a competitor undergoing a data breach, you can use this information to promote your organization’s superior security.
Top five competitive intelligence tools
Excellent competitive intelligence is essential for the success of businesses of all sizes.
Business owners and marketers must understand their competition and be equipped with particular tools for a successful transition.
Here are five competitive intelligence tools must-haves:
Kompyte
Kompyte is an AI-driven competitive intelligence software. It uses machine learning to collect, analyze, and organize data to help teams generate and share actionable insights in real time.
It has fully automated workflows and an easy-to-use architecture, making it simple for multiple groups to respond to rapidly shifting market dynamics.
This competitive intelligence tool is helpful for a broad audience within an organization, including sales, marketing, revenue, and executive teams.
G2 Crowd
G2 Crowd offers tools to help gather overall market intelligence, identify competitors, and understand the competitive landscape.
This competitive intelligence tool allows you to see a layer of the competitive landscape and better understand various organizations’ market positions.
Market Explorer
Market Explorer is a Semrush product. This competitive intelligence tool enables you to investigate the whole market with a single domain entry.
Market Explorer develops a list of the relevant industry participants and organic competitors. It also displays market competence and market share by competition.
Traffic Analytics
Traffic Analytics allows you to check website traffic and analyze company marketing efforts.
It also details other companies’ strategies and gains information that can assist in identifying potential business partners, affiliate programs, and backlink providers.
Owletter
Owletter is a top competitive intelligence tool that monitors email campaigns and evaluates them. It also notifies you of any particular trends you have set the tool to detect and alert you on.
It also allows you to study competitors’ email marketing strategies.
Understanding your firm’s competitive position
Competition is always present, and market strategies change depending on the situation and people’s needs.
Predicting your competitor’s behaviors in an ever-changing market can give you the winning factor. However, apart from gaining information and analyzing your competitor’s marketing strategies, you must also identify where you stand in the competition.
Having excellent competitive intelligence can help you improve your marketing efforts, and it can also help you make better business decisions.
