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It is essential for businesses to stay relevant and stay ahead of the competition. There are different practices and tools that can help a business set the right prices for its products and beat the competition. Competitive intelligence analysis can create a strong impact on the marketing and communication strategy of a business. It can be used for creating an informed and effective strategy. Keeping an eye on the competitor’s prices, strategies, marketing, messages, and offerings will help in keeping you a step ahead of the competitors regardless of the market situation or trends.
What is Competitive Intelligence Analysis?
Competitive intelligence is the strategic process of data gathering on the competitors and market trends. It offers an edge in business performance and decision-making. It consists of the competitor’s social media presence, pricing strategy, brand positioning, product tiers, recent job postings, etc. Competitive intelligence analysis is the results of individual data points combined into a picture of the competitor’s strategies.
Competitive intelligence and analysis play a crucial role in mapping out the next move. With the help of real-time data, a business can predict where the competitors are heading and how successful they will be. With strong competitive intelligence tools, a company can strengthen its strategies.
Techniques/ Steps of Competitive Intelligence Analysis
It can seem to be quite daunting to implement the competitive intelligence analysis technique. However, a comprehensive plan can simply be the process. Here’s a look at the four steps that to establish the competitive analysis program:
1. Identify the Competitors
It can be tempting to keep an eye on every competitor in the industry but focusing will help in fetching the best results from the business competitive intelligence analysis. It is important to just focus on the top 2-3 competitors and let go of the others in the market. The top competitors are the ones that your customers might choose if they didn’t buy your product. These competitors have similar products, value propositions, comparable offerings, and a significant market share. Your major competitor might not be a large business in the market, but they are the biggest threat to your business.
2. Set Goals
With competitor intelligence analysis, it is easy to keep all the aspects of your business informed. However, going overboard might make the data less useful. For kickstarting the strategy, pick some focal points. It is essential to set some goals. Do you wish to refine the marketing strategy or want to develop new products/ features? Do you wish to refresh your sales strategy? When a business has a strong goal, it guides it in the direction where it needs to deep dive in and where it needs to stay at the surface-level.
3. Gather Resources
Every piece of information about the competitors that is available to the public can be considered as competitive intelligence. However, not all data is created equal. Not prioritizing will leave you with too much information to process and take action. It is here that you must go back to the goals set in the previous step. Look for the right resources for supporting these goals.
For example, to refine the marketing, focus on the competitor’s website, social media pages, ads, and whitepapers. Job descriptions can be considered important, but they rarely offer the insight you are seeking.
4. Competitive Intelligence Culture
It is essential to create a culture of competitive intelligence in the organization. It is not a specific department’s job! It should be a normal part of the decision-making process to take into account the competitor’s strategies. The idea is to start by regularly sharing competitive intelligence. Share crucial moves of the competitors, scheduled updates, and overall landscape with all the departments. The competitive intelligence analysis findings should be an inevitable part of the routine conversations. Over time, it will become natural for the team to refer to competitive intelligence on a regular basis.
Importance of Competitive Intelligence Analysis
It is a brainer that data rules everything regardless of the industry. Data sources offer valuable insights for marketer’s decision-making. Competitive intelligence analysis can be significantly impactful if used correctly.
1. Improve the Market Understanding
Every business performs market research considering that their competitors have some information that they don’t. With competitive analysis, a business can improve its customer understanding and discover something new. It can help analyze the competitor’s message and product positioning to understand the customers and their pain points. A business can work on its value statements and message along with identifying the blind spots in its own strategy. This type of technique proves to be effective for competitors that share an ideal customer profile.
2. Set the Benchmarks
Competitor performance will give an insight into how to evaluate your performance. Let’s have a look at the competitive intelligence analysis example. Competitor X has good engagement numbers on a social media platform. These numbers set a benchmark for you to know how your posts should perform on that social media platform. Their data can be used as a guide for your strategy. On the other hand, if a competitor is spending time and resources on a platform that is not performing well, you must learn from their mistakes. If their strategies and posts are great but not rendering results, it is a reflection that it is not the right channel for you.
3. Informed Decisions
Every department in the business can benefit from competitive intelligence like pricing research and competitor analysis. Your sales team can adjust their pitch depending on the competitor’s weaknesses and claims. The marketing teams can customize their messages to stay competitive with others in the market. Product teams can come up with a roadmap to develop product features around the competitor’s products considering their blind spots. Efficient competitor intelligence can empower a team to make stronger decisions.
Competitive intelligence analysis is the smart move a business needs to make to stay ahead of the competition and relevant in the market. It is the difference between ordinary strategies and brilliant strategies that work wonders for a business in the long run.
Dominate the Market with Competitive Intelligence
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