Effective Competitive intelligence from Aqute Intelligence is not just about collecting information about competitors, but more importantly about using that data to make strategic decisions. This requires identifying competitors, understanding their business strategies and positioning your own company in the marketplace.
1. Know Your Enemies
Competitive intelligence is more than a rehash of the old cliche, “know your enemy.” A successful program goes beyond that and digs deep into the business plans of competitors, their customers, and the markets in which they compete. The best CI programs cultivate the insight necessary to anticipate and respond before disruptions, market changes and new technologies become a major headache. This kind of intelligence is only possible by digging into a wide range of published and unpublished sources–and collecting them efficiently and ethically.
This phase of competitive intelligence requires that you set clear objectives for the research and analyses you will conduct. This will allow you to focus on the most important data points for your goals, and prevent you from wasting valuable time on unhelpful information. When it comes time to present your findings to company leaders, having a framework will help. The story format helps to engage stakeholders and make it easier to understand the importance of the data to your organization.
When you begin to dig into the specifics of your competitors’ business models, you will want to focus on two key areas: drivers and management assumptions. The drivers behind your competitors decisions are their motivations, whether they are trying to capture an opportunity in the market, manage existing assets, or respond to a potential threat. Management assumptions are the beliefs that your competitors have about their own strengths, weaknesses, and their ability to take advantage and deal with threats.
During this phase, it’s also helpful to identify what are called “dogs” and “question marks.” Dogs are assets that don’t have the potential to thrive in your competition’s marketplace. They might be able to turn a profit under different management, but it’s usually best to abandon them. Question marks, on the other hand, can be viable assets if you focus your efforts on improving and expanding them.
2. Know Your Customers
Competitive intelligence can be used to understand your customers. It is also useful for analyzing competitors and the marketplace. Knowing your customers will help you to target them with specific advertisements and provide them products that best suit their needs. This can increase customer retention and profits for your company.
To gain insight into the customers you serve, you can gather competitive information from a number of sources. These include competitor websites and social media profiles. Prioritizing these sources is important, but it should be based on relevance to your goals. It is not necessary to track all public information from a rival, as some sources contain more information. You should also limit how much data you collect to make it easier to manage and digest.
Competitive Intelligence data is useful for developing better strategies to drive growth. Understanding competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and trends can be used to create better strategies that drive growth. It can also help you stay ahead of the competition and ensure that your company is providing its customers with a great experience.
If you discover that your competitor uses cheaper materials than you, you can use the information to create a marketing campaign that highlights the benefits of your products. You can also use this information to identify opportunities for cross-promotion with other businesses in your industry.
3. Know Your Market
The more you know about your competitors and your market, the better position you’ll be in to formulate winning business strategies. You’ll be in a better position to predict what moves will be made by your competitors and how this might impact the market. By regularly monitoring your competitors’ activities, you can identify new opportunities for increasing revenue and growing your business.
It’s more important to obtain quality data than quantity when conducting competitive intelligence research. Many sources can provide you with a wealth of information about your competition, but most of it is not useful in forming business strategy. It might not be worth your time to gather information about the locations of brick-and mortar stores of your competitors if you are planning to do most of your business on the internet.
Moreover, it’s important to identify the top two competitors that are most likely to impact your business and focus on collecting data about them. This will give you an idea of what products or services are offered by your competitors, their target demographics and how they attract customers. You’ll want to look at the industry as a group and determine its size, current trends and potential for future growth.
You can also get a bird’s eye view of the competition in your industry, and understand how factors such as macroeconomic challenges, regulatory changes, and world events may influence the way businesses operate. This will help you to identify a market gap and create your unique competitive edge. If you notice that your competitors offer the same products or service as you, but at lower prices than you, you may decide to launch a price-matching program to lure customers from your competitors.
4. Know Your Competitors Strategies
Companies can use competitive intelligence to identify and address market threats and exploit the weaknesses of competitors. CI includes analysis of competitor products, services, marketing campaigns and strategies, as well as business operations and financial performance. It helps companies identify new product possibilities and develop better strategies for customers.
It is important to focus your attention on those competitors who are the biggest threat to your company. This helps to focus the research, and makes the analysis more manageable. CI will help you prioritize your competitors in your competitive marketing plan by analyzing the taglines, unique characteristics, target audience, and location. It’s important to analyze each of these aspects of your competitors so that you can learn from their successes and avoid their missteps.
Competitive intelligence also provides valuable insights into customer motivations. Include competitive intelligence in your customer interviews and survey to validate your assumptions about your prospects’ problems and uncover new information you may be surprised by. In addition, comparing competitor data to foundational documents like personas and value statements can highlight gaps in your own customer understanding that you can fill with further competitive research.
Having a strong competitive analysis framework empowers your company to build stronger, more evidence-based strategies that improve your business’s performance. This will not only improve your bottom line but also reduce the risk of costly errors by identifying your competitors’ weaknesses and how to counter them.
5. Know Your Business
Understanding your own business is just as important as knowing your competitors’ strategies. It’s important to know your company’s strengths as well as weaknesses, so that you can counteract the strategies of your competitors and weather any industry disruptions. CI can help you do this by providing valuable insights about your competitors’ operations. You can examine your competitor’s financial statement to see what their profit margins look like and how they allocate resource. This information can give you an edge over them when it comes to developing business strategies that align with your customers’ needs.
CI will also help you to identify new opportunities for business. You can, for example, use the information you gather to create your own product to capitalize on a demand. You can also identify emerging trends and opportunities in your industry by watching the actions of your competitors. This will enable you to develop a strategy to capitalize on these opportunities, and keep your company competitive in markets that are constantly changing.
Prioritizing sources is key to CI success. As a rule, only collect data that directly supports your business goals. Otherwise, you may end up with too much information to analyze and act on. It’s important, therefore, to have clear objectives. For example, what you hope to achieve with competitive intelligence, and what KPIs will be measured against.
