A good competitive intelligence program will combine a variety sources. These sources can include industry publications and social media channels as well as review aggregator sites.
The insights gathered are disseminated across departments (including sales and marketing teams) to drive strategic decision-making. The process can be automated with software that scans thousands of blogs, social media properties, review sites and job boards.
1. Social media
The competitive intelligence (CI) team from www.aqute.com/competitive-intelligence should have access to a variety of data sources to gather and analyze information about competitors and their strategies. This includes monitoring social media and their websites, following industry influencers, identifying potential new entrants to the market, tracking changes in consumer trends, and keeping up with technology advances.
As the world of digital marketing continues to evolve, CI teams need access to rich data and powerful tools that can help them uncover insights they can use to make better decisions and drive stronger revenue. In order to maximize the impact of a CI program, it’s important that companies set up a consistent schedule for gathering and analyzing competitive intelligence. This allows the company stay current and respond quickly to changes in the business environment.
The website of a company is a great source for competitive intelligence. In addition to product updates and announcements, the site can reveal a lot about how the company operates and positions itself to its target audience. For example, a company’s press releases may include details about new customers or partners or hints about future strategic initiatives, such as an increase in enterprise customer accounts.
Customer reviews can also be a valuable source of CI. They can be used to help the CI team better understand how buyers view the brand and its products and services. They can also be used to identify strengths and weakness. In addition, analyzing themes in reviews can help the CI develop targeted and efficient campaigns to engage potential customers.
While relying on internal stakeholder interviews is a valuable method of collecting competitive intelligence, third-party objective data should always trump subjective hunches. The best competitive Intelligence tools are those which can collect reliable historical and real-time information at scale. This will allow businesses to make better and more confident decisions.
2. Customer reviews
Customer reviews are an excellent source of competitive information. These reviews can be used by potential clients to learn how competitors’ products performed for others. This will help them decide if you have the right product for them.
Reviews also show how much your competitors value their customers. They will often respond to positive and negative feedback in a professional manner, which can boost brand trust. This can even make dissatisfied clients happy, converting them to recurrent customers.
Search engines give priority to fresh, relevant data. Reviews will also naturally include keywords that potential customers are searching. These will appear on search result pages, increasing the visibility of your website.
It can be time-consuming to keep track of competitive intelligence, especially if it is spread across multiple platforms and sources. To make the most of your time, it’s important to use a centralized platform to collect and store this data. By doing so, it becomes easier to analyse the intel and use it to optimise your business. The more data that you have, the better informed you will be in your decisions and the more successful you will be. This is why it’s important to make competitive intelligence a part of your organisation’s culture, encouraging people from different departments to collect intel on your behalf.
3. Press releases
A press release is used to announce important newsworthy events and information for your business. They can be distributed via social media, online news distributors or your own website. They are usually straightforward, neutral and objective, with a focus on accuracy and timeliness. Press releases are often accompanied by photos and videos, which see higher engagement rates with customers and journalists than text-only releases.
Press releases extend your reach far beyond your own owned channels, reaching journalist and media outlets with their audience of millions of readers/viewers who wouldn’t have otherwise seen your content. The key to creating a great press release is to be the first to share an exciting, interesting and relevant story that will appeal to journalists’ needs for a good article. This is why you want to make sure that the main point of your press release is clearly stated at the beginning and that your headline includes a strong hook.
You can use a press release to either create a positive image of your brand or to mitigate internal crises by providing factual information without any spin. You can also use your press release to drive SEO traffic, by including key search words in your headline and adding keyword to your release.
When writing a press release it is important to research your competition and understand their digital strategies. Semrush, a competitor analysis tool, can help you better understand your competitors’ digital footprints and key performance indicators. You can, for example, find out how their audience engages with their brand by analysing the volume of social media conversations about them. You can then compare these conversations with your own to identify peaks and troughs in your competitive share of voice.
4. Analyst reports
There are many ways to analyze competitor data, depending on the type of competitive Intelligence your company uses. It’s important to note that a robust competitor analysis program can be a major time investment. However, a strong program can produce invaluable insights that supercharge marketing and sales strategies for years to come.
A nimble company can use this type of information to identify strategic opportunities and threats before they have an impact. It can also help the company stay ahead of competitors by anticipating market changes and understanding the competition’s strategies.
A nimble business can use analyst reports about competitor products and pricing to see what they plan to do in response to upcoming changes within the industry. A nimble firm can also analyze the geographic location where competitors’ stores are opening and closing to assess their retail strategies.
5. Email marketing
Email marketing is an effective way to keep your brand in the consumer’s mind. It is also a valuable source of competitive intelligence.
With competitive intelligence tools you can see how much of the list of your competitors overlaps with yours, and also their new acquisitions as well as their churn rates. This will help you to develop a strategy for growing your list. In addition, the subject lines, creative and offers of your competitors’ mailings can provide insight into their merchandising tactics.
These data can be used to optimize your subject lines so that you are able to not only catch your audience’s attention, but also keep them engaged. In turn, this leads to more opens, clicks and conversions.
The best way to leverage email marketing competitive intelligence is to automate as much of the process as possible. It is time-consuming to track your competitors’ social networks, website updates and keyword rankings, product launches, etc. without the right tools.
You can, however, stay on top of the activities of your competitors with ease if you have the right tools. You can also make proactive decisions in order to keep up. This is why every marketing department should have a competitive intelligence program.
To make your competitive intelligence program effective, you must identify the key stakeholders who are vital to the success. From there, you can develop a strong strategy that enables your team to make strategic decisions for years to come.
