Starting a business today is easy. Having it fail due to a lack of foresight is no different, yet preventable. Successful companies have long since embraced competitive intelligence, the practice and fine art of gaining the upper hand in the competition by gathering and analyzing information on them.
Find out more about CI and how you should approach it in this handy guide.
Why Is Competitive Intelligence Crucial?
Your company doesn’t operate in a vacuum, so basing your strategy on your actions alone won’t cut it. Not considering competitors, customers, and trends can leave even market leaders blindsided. Such a lack of perspective can cause sharp drops in your market share or customer backlash if you appear out of touch.
Collecting and analyzing data about the competition lets you be proactive rather than react to others’ whims. The trick is to observe others’ long-term strategies, successes, and setbacks from multiple angles. The more complete your picture, the timelier and more appropriate your moves can be.
It would be a mistake to use CI to merely copy others. Rather, it’s the springboard that helps you innovate. Developing unique solutions to problems, new products, or novel marketing strategies ensures you stand out and keep competitors guessing. It also lets you make agile changes at the earliest signs of increased threat from others.
How to Conduct Competitive Intelligence Research?
Smaller organizations usually lack dedicated CI teams, so budget and time management are crucial factors. It’s tempting to keep tabs on the entire market, but a smarter approach, especially at the beginning, is to focus on key players and learn from them first.
You’ll then want to determine the most impactful metrics to track. These should align with your current growth strategy. Some companies will find monitoring competitors’ social media activities eye-opening. Others will focus on tracking prices or customer sentiment.
Once your focus is set, it’s time to gather data and analyze the results. It’s easy to lose sight of what’s important and amass millions of data points without immediately apparent value. The proper tools can connect the dots and identify patterns where humans only see static.
The final step is presenting the insights you gained through CI to stakeholders. You have to do that in a way that demonstrates why this information matters and provides guidelines on what actions to take for your business to grow.
Which Methodologies, Strategies, and Tools Should You Be Using?
There are many ways to gather intelligence about your competitors. Best of all, you shouldn’t and don’t need to resort to illegal or unethical means since so much information is available publically.
Methodology
Methodology refers to how you go about collecting intelligence and what sources you’ll use. Primary research would involve contacting the competition directly, which may lead to reluctant or partial answers. Secondary sources – like what others publish about a company or what it curates about itself – are more accessible.
Most of the available info will be open-source and come from readily available sources. However, you can also take a more direct approach and reach out to competitors’ customers for their insights.
Strategies
Once you’ve settled on one or more methods, it’s time to lock in a CI strategy. These concern all the sources you’ll be monitoring. Some strategies require a more hands-on approach. For example, you may want to visit trade shows or conferences where you can ask poignant questions and observe rival products in action.
Less demanding but potentially more rewarding practices include exploring their social media, conducting market research, or accessing publically available financial statements.
Tools
Collecting information manually is slow and tedious. Plus, a human will likely miss revealing data points a more sophisticated tool wouldn’t. Data scrapers have risen to prominence as some of the most effective CI tools. This can include an e-commerce scraper as a primary one. Scrapers automate the gathering and analytics process, presenting you with actionable data in an easily digestible format.
Flexibility is data scrapers’ biggest advantage. You can set them up to collect everything from historical pricing information through a company’s social media activity to user reviews. Their built-in analytics capabilities simplify pricing strategy prediction or let you gauge the public’s feelings about a product.
Other tools aren’t as versatile yet can yield key insights. Some will tell you all about a competitor’s website – which technologies they use, the state of their user engagement, etc. Others let you uncover which keywords competitors compete for and whether their SEO practices are effective.
Conclusion
Competitive intelligence is indispensable for any company’s continued growth and market relevance. The approach – methodology, strategies, and tools may vary, but finding the most efficient solutions that bring the best results should be among business priorities. Find the best technique for your own CI efforts and start reaping the benefits.
