By Competitive intelligence services from www.aqute.com/competitive-intelligence helps teams within your business to understand the way that counterpart teams at competitors market their products, services, or win sales deals. It involves both secondary and primary research with a specific goal in mind.
You don’t have to be a big company or work in a highly regulated industry to use CI and conduct competitor analysis. Let’s take a look at some steps to get started.
1. Identify Your Top Competitors
Knowing your competitors is essential to competitive intelligence. This includes who your competitors are and what products and services you offer. It also includes their audience and how you can differentiate yourself. Without this information, it is impossible to develop a strategic advantage.
It is therefore vital that you identify and track regularly your top competitors using competitive analysis. This will allow you to understand what your competitors are doing well, and more importantly, what they’re doing wrong. This will also help you identify opportunities for your business, such filling a market gap that your competitor overlooked. This is what sportswear maker Admiral did in the 1970s when it spotted an unfilled market for team shirts.
It is important to make competitive intelligence a regular activity, not just a once-in-a-while thing. This means that you are more likely to catch competitors in the middle of their plans, when they change their strategy or introduce a new product. You will also be able to better understand your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses and how they are going to react.
It is also important to maintain a regular delivery schedule when communicating competitive intelligence findings with stakeholders. If you only deliver reports irregularly, the people who need the information may not be aware of it and act rashly, or out of context, without the information needed to make informed decisions.
2. Analyze Your Competitors’ Marketing Strategy
Taking the time to analyze your competitors’ marketing strategies can make the difference between your business standing out and going under. In addition, using a competitor analysis can help you identify areas where your competition isn’t serving their customers, giving you an opportunity to fill in the gaps.
While it’s tempting to evaluate every rival in your market, you should instead focus on two or three competitors that pose the biggest threat. These competitors may not be the industry giants. Instead, they are the businesses that your ideal customers would choose to buy if you didn’t have your product. Keeping an ear to the ground on your competitors will help you learn from their mistakes and capitalize on their success.
The best way to identify your top competitors’ marketing strategy is by analyzing their keyword rankings on Google. This will give you a glimpse into what types of keywords they are targeting and which ones are driving traffic to their websites. You can use this information to customize your keyword strategy and reach your target audience.
You can also track mentions of your competitors using social media monitoring tools. In addition to gathering information about your competitors’ marketing strategies, this type of CI can also provide insight into what their customers are saying about them. For example, you might be able to identify the most popular features of a competitor’s product by examining the topics that are mentioned in their online reviews.
It is not possible to say how often competitive intelligence should be conducted. However, leaving it too long can leave you behind your competitors. You can create a spreadsheet for competitive intelligence and schedule regular updates to your team or yourself. Some businesses find the format of battlecards to be an effective way of keeping important CI at their sales team’s fingertips.
3. Conduct A Win/Loss Analysis
While every piece of information your competitors produce is technically competitive intelligence, you’ll need to prioritize which sources will yield the insights you’re looking for. Think about the goals you set in step one and look for data sources that support those goals. For example, if you want to refine your marketing efforts, pay close attention to competitor websites, social media profiles and whitepapers.
Use a competitive intelligence platform for tracking the information you require, such as how well a competitor’s site is performing, their number of social media followers, and which keywords they are ranking for. The best CI tools have market experts curating and analyzing data to give you useful insights. They will also make the tracking, analyzing and reporting process much faster than what you can do yourself.
Once you’ve gathered the quantitative data, it is time to dig deeper and perform your win/loss analyses. Win/loss analyses help equip your team with the data-driven insights they need to improve their sales performance. Using this type of CI, you can understand why you are winning and losing business, identify potential alternative USPs and isolate what factors are driving your customers’ decision-making process.
Interviewing the decision makers involved in recent wins or losses is the key to a successful analysis. You’ll gain a wealth of qualitative information that you simply can’t get from a CRM alone. Studies show that companies who conduct win/loss analysis often see a 5% increase in quota achievement, and 12% more customer retention. Asking tough questions can help you uncover the insights needed to boost your team’s performance and increase revenue.
4. Conduct A Customer Satisfaction Survey
Customer satisfaction is an important metric in competitive intelligence. It can help you identify ways to improve your service or product. This can be achieved by qualitative research, like interviewing both new and old customers, or by quantitative analysis, such as tracking customer satisfaction on social media platforms.
You can use these factors to develop a list of actions that will improve your business. If you notice that your competitors are using customer service as a way to differentiate themselves and you haven’t, it might be time to invest more in training for your staff.
The process of gathering intelligence is often the most time-consuming part of a competitive intelligence program. Technology can make this step much easier. Kompyte, for example, allows you to monitor websites, teams and announcements of competitors, as well as social media engagements. You can also review content, receive reviews and more.
After you’ve prioritized and gathered competitor information, it is important to create a schedule of ongoing competitive intelligence monitoring. This will ensure that you don’t miss any changes, no matter how small.
The type of information you choose to collect from competitors will depend on your goals. Keeping an eye on competitor pricing, marketing strategies, and social media activity is critical to your success. But you can use competitive intelligence to identify trends, and to identify gaps in your market. This could be a great opportunity to create a product that no one is offering.
5. Conduct A Social Media Analysis
A strong competitive analysis is more than just a quarterly task; it’s a vital tool for tactical and strategy marketing decisions. If you’re B2B, or a B2C marketing team, competitive insights will help you stay ahead of your competitors in the rapidly evolving marketing landscape.
Using legally-acceptable competitive intelligence tactics, marketers gather data from multiple online and offline sources. These data points can include information on pricing and promotional strategies, new products, sales tactics and supply chain insights. These data points are then used to make informed business decisions that can have a direct impact on the success of a company’s marketing and sales efforts.
While manual analysis has its place, the best way to get a clear overview of competitor strategy is through social media analytics. Tools like Sprout Social allow you to see competitor activity in one place, including post volume, frequency, hashtag usage, and audience growth. These analytics are also useful for identifying new channels to explore and ways to improve your current strategy, such as adding evergreen content or testing new types of posts that receive high engagement rates.
After you’ve analyzed the marketing and communication strategies of your competitors, it’s time to act. Changing your own channels can have dramatic effects on your overall reach and bottom line. Utilizing the information you have gathered will help your team to better address objections of potential customers and create their own campaigns which outperform competitors. To implement competitive intelligence successfully, you must share your research with your entire team. This will ensure that it becomes part of your daily conversations. This will ensure that over time, your team’s decisions take into account competitor strategies.
