Stakeholder interviews are a good way to gather data on competitors that can be used in the creation of an effective Competitive intelligence program to enable competitiveness.
Benchmarking
When a new competitor enters the market, benchmarking helps companies to understand how their rival performs. It allows businesses to identify strengths and weaknesses as well as set realistic goals. The benchmarking process is applicable at all stages of the product lifecycle, including during research and development as well as years after launch.
A business must have a clear process in place when it comes to creating benchmarks for competitive intelligence. This includes determining the benchmarking goals, how they will achieve them and who will be responsible for each step of the procedure. The benchmarking team will be able to determine the data that they will need to collect and how often. This will help them decide on the tools they need to achieve their goal.
It is possible for teams to gather data manually. But using the right tools makes the process more efficient and easier. In many cases, businesses will need to invest into a competitive intelligence product (CI) that makes it easier to find data and identify insights. This can be a great win for the employees who are assigned with this task, as they will have more time to do other things.
A business should focus on three key types of intelligence to stay ahead of the competition: customer, competitive and technological. Customer intelligence includes analyzing the demographics and purchase patterns of competitors’ customers. This information can be used to develop a better strategy for your business. It is important to keep an eye on the financials of competitors in order to understand how profitable they are and what strategies their employ to grow their revenue. Lastly, technological intelligence is important to keep track of, as it can inform a company’s own technology roadmap and ensure that they are ahead of the curve.
The final step in competitive intelligence is to act on the information gathered. This could include implementing changes to internal process, investing in new technologies or training staff. It is important to remember that a competitive intelligence analysis is not a one-time exercise, as the landscape for every business is constantly changing.
Monitoring
Competitor monitoring is a key element of competitive intelligence that includes identifying your competitors, tracking their strategies and activities, and measuring their impact. This process can help you identify growth opportunities for your business. The best competitor monitoring tools help you gather and analyze data in real-time. They provide insights into your competitors’ marketing campaigns, sales efforts, operations, and more.
Understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses is essential to developing a strategy that will help you outsmart them. This information is crucial to developing a winning strategy and establishing your brand as a leader. Effective competitor monitoring increases brand loyalty and customer satisfaction, while also increasing revenue.
The first step to competitor monitoring is to identify who your competitors are. This can be challenging, as newcomers to the market may enter your space or mergers, acquisitions, and closures might remove businesses from the landscape altogether. Using data can help you determine who your actual competitors are by evaluating factors like traffic, engagement, and keywords. Then, you can focus on what you need to do to match (or even surpass) them in the marketplace.
Understanding your competitors’ goals and how they operate is important once you have identified them. Understanding their marketing and competitive strategies can help develop your business goals. This should include achieving an advantage and driving revenue.
It can be difficult to keep up with your competitors manually, but the best competitor tracking tools make it easy. These tools will allow you to monitor your competitors’ websites, videos, social media updates, and news mentions. This allows you to track their marketing and sales efforts and stay informed about industry trends.
Once you’ve gained a thorough understanding of your competitors, it is important to share this information with key stakeholders. You can use this intel to create competitive analysis reports and competitive dashboards that showcase your findings and how they might apply to your company. In addition, you can use this intel to prepare sales enablement materials that help your team prepare for competitive objections and answer features questions.
Analysis
Competitive intelligence can be time-consuming, especially when analyzing competitor data and information. It requires deliberate, careful research into products, websites and teams, announcements, contents, and more. This step involves analyzing what your competitors are doing, why they do it, and identifying ways to outmaneuver or outperform them.
A key benefit of competitive analysis is enabling marketers to develop and/or adjust their Go-to-Market strategies so they can reach their target customers more effectively. This can help marketers gain a deeper understanding of the market dynamics by learning from mistakes made by their competitors. In addition, thorough CI can help marketers identify and fill knowledge gaps in their customer profiles and in their own product positioning and messaging.
For example, a comprehensive competitive analysis might uncover that one competitor’s product features aren’t meeting the needs of their ideal customer profile, and thus, are not being utilized. This is a great opportunity that your company can take advantage of. Offer similar functionality to try to capture the customer segment.
This type of competitive intelligence can help you make decisions as a leader that will lead to measurable and tangible results. Individual teams use tactical competitive intelligence often to refine their strategy in response to competitor performance. This can include operational improvements such as adjusting pricing to respond to price reductions or refining marketing campaigns based on competitor insight.
Generally, the most profitable companies are those that concentrate on their core competencies and niches. This is why it’s so important for competitive intelligence to be a regular, ongoing process in your organization. It will ensure that you can stay on top of your competition and protect your market share.
Developing a culture of competitive intelligence can be difficult, especially if stakeholders don’t fully understand what you’re doing or why. It can be easy to confuse competitive intelligence with traditional market research, or to assume that it’s just a waste of time. But, with a proper plan and the right tools, competitive intelligence can be a powerful tool to help your team make confident, data-driven business decisions.
Insights
Insights are what competitive intelligence professionals find in the data they collect, and how they help their teams understand what that data means for their strategy. As a manager in charge of competitive intelligence, you can provide valuable insights to your team by sharing relevant information at the appropriate time.
You can give your sales team battle cards to highlight the new features that your competitors have on their websites and compare them with yours. Similarly, if your competitors are reporting a spike in foot traffic to their retail locations, you can share that information with your sales teams so they can plan accordingly.
The competitive intelligence managers should also share how their competitors are positioning their products in the market, based on what they are discussing on their blogs and social media posts. They can also provide insight into the topics that they cover on their podcasts, videos, e-books, and podcasts. You can also gain insights into how their competitors are positioning their offerings by comparing the key words and phrases that they use in their marketing material to yours.
It takes a lot of time to gather and monitor competitor information, but it is crucial for the success of your competitive intelligence program. Without strong competitive intelligence, your organization can’t effectively position against the competition and drive growth.
This part of your work will vary in time depending on the number of competitors and their priorities, but should be a regular part of your schedule. It’s best to set a regular schedule — weekly, bi-weekly, monthly — so your team knows when they can expect updates and reports. The more often you conduct competitor research, you will have more competitive intelligence to fuel your strategic initiatives.
