Competitive intelligence involves collecting and analyzing information to inform a business’s overall strategy, maximizing opportunities and avoiding threats.
Interviewing stakeholders plays a crucial role in any competitive intelligence program. These interviews will allow you to identify the competitors who are a threat and understand what customers think of these companies.
Defining Competitive Intelligence
Competitive Intelligence is the process of gathering, analyzing, and using information about your competitors to inform your business decisions. It’s one of the key aspects of marketing, business strategy, and product development. High-performing businesses thoroughly understand their competition and the market trends to make decisions that drive success and growth.
While it is a common misconception that only large businesses use competitive intelligence, this approach is used by companies of all sizes across virtually every industry. Even small startups, with limited budgets and resource, can benefit from CI to establish themselves in the market.
In the CI process, defining your goals for a competitive analysis is a crucial first step. This allows you to focus your efforts and ensures that the results of your CI are aligned with your overall goals for your company. It’s also essential to clearly define your target audience and competitors as it will influence the type of data you collect, how you analyze the data, and what insights you draw from it.
When conducting competitor analysis, you’ll want to identify the competitors that pose the greatest threat to your business. They are not necessarily the largest competitors, but rather those that are most likely to drive customers away from your product or service. You’ll also want to look at the products and services that your competitors no longer offer, as this may indicate a change in their strategy.
You might notice, for example, that your competitor’s new advertising campaign has a different message from yours and is well received by their audience. This information would be useful to you so that you can modify your own message accordingly.
You’ll also have to decide which specific metrics you want to track and compare against your competitors. Marketers, for example, track share of voice in conversations by identifying how many mentions of their brand are compared to the competition. You will want to compare these data over time to not only see how your brand performs, but also to identify trends which may indicate future challenges or opportunities.
Identifying Your competitors
Identifying your competitors is the first step in competitive analysis. The goal is not to collect information about every competitor, but to focus attention on those who pose a direct risk to your business. Depending upon the goals of your CI group, this may include anything from analyzing rivals’ customer service to looking at their products.
You should use a model for competitor analysis to achieve this (available from the Strategic Consortium of Intelligence Professionals). These models will give you a framework and vocabulary for organizing your information so that it is useful and actionable.
There are a variety of competitor analysis models. You can pick the one that fits your needs best. These models differ in their complexity and depth of evaluation. The models may also differ on how they rank competitors. Some may rate them as “dogs”, “question mark” or “stars”. A “star” is a highly profitable asset in the market that has a solid brand image and can be easily replicated by other companies. A “question mark” is an asset that isn’t doing well in the market and may need to be abandoned. A “dog” is an asset that isn’t profitable at all in the market and is likely to be discontinued.
Once you have decided on the type of competitor analysis model or models to use, then it’s time for you to begin gathering information. It is important to note that the goal for a good competitor analysis process is not to collect as many data points as possible. Rather, it is to gather relevant, high-quality data which provides valuable insights into your market, competition and target audience.
In the future, you should highlight your competitor’s advertising campaign if it resonates well with your audience. If your competitors are adding features to their products that you do not offer, then this should be a wake-up for your R&D teams.
Gathering Information
There’s a ton of information about your competition. To make sense of all this information, you’ll need a way to separate the signal from the background noise and find patterns that may give you a competitive advantage. Having the right tools for research can be helpful.
You can use a framework for competitive intelligence to identify your main competitors, collect relevant data and turn it into actionable insight. These insights can be used to create and implement marketing campaigns that give you an advantage.
Information you gather to support your competitive intelligence efforts must be as relevant as possible to your business. This means not only focusing on your direct competitors, but also considering indirect competitors. If your company sells goods or services in another country, it is important to collect data on those markets.
You can find out a lot about your competitors from publicly available sources such as their websites, social media profiles, and financial reports. You can also gather information by attending industry-related events and collecting customer feedback via surveys or interviews. You can also use search engine optimization tools in order to track the online activity of your competitors, such as their website traffic or keywords they use.
As you gather this information, it’s important to keep in mind that competitive intelligence is not the same as corporate espionage. While it is sometimes necessary for you to spy on your competition, you should only do so in a legal and ethical manner.
It can be difficult to know where to begin after you have gathered so much data. To ensure that your intel is focused and relevant, you should have a system for categorizing and tagging it so you can easily find the information you need when it’s needed. This will help you separate the signal from the noise and make more informed decisions about your marketing strategy.
Regularly updating and refreshing your information is another important part of an intelligence program. This will allow you to have the most current information and respond quickly to any changes.
Analyzing Information
Once you have all this information about competitors, it is time to analyze it. What you do depends on the goals of your business’s competitive intelligence program. It is generally a good idea, however, to build an analysis model based on the goals identified in step 2. This will help you organize the data gathered by comparing metrics that are relevant to your business goals.
Once the data has undergone analysis, it is crucial to note any trends you notice and use that information in order to make strategic decisions which can give your business a competitive edge. One of the key advantages of competitive intelligence is that it helps you understand how a variety of events can impact your competitor’s businesses, from changing market conditions to new products or services.
It is also useful to identify any potential risks that your competitors may face, and make sure to be aware of these issues in order to mitigate them or respond quickly if they do become an issue. Competitive Intelligence also helps your organization by giving you the information necessary to better understand the needs and expectations of your customers. This allows you to develop more effective campaigns and improve the experience for your customers.
One final aspect of competitive intelligence that is worth noting is the fact that it should be a continual process. The frequency of the reports will depend on your needs and your competitors’ size. However, leaving it more than once a week is not a good plan, as markets can change quickly and competitor behavior may also.
Using competitive intelligence as part of your overall business strategy can be an extremely beneficial process for all companies, regardless of industry. The key is to make sure that you are identifying the right competitors, and gathering only high-quality data that will be relevant to your needs. Once you’ve done this, analyzing your data will be simple and valuable. You can make sound business decisions based on the insights you gain from this process.
