What is Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is a key ingredient in a robust market intelligence strategy that aims to bolster marketing performance, increase sales and improve product strategy. It’s the systematic collection of data from a multitude of sources in the ongoing analysis of the competition
Competitive Intelligence helps you to stay up to date with your competitors and your market, and inform strategic business decisions. A thorough understanding of your competition’s strengths and weaknesses will enable you to fine tune your approach to your market and capture the attention of consumers and increase your brand’s share of voice.
3 Things You Need to Know
- First Movers are brands that gain a competitive advantage, being the first to bring a new product or service to market. They typically build strong customer loyalty and establish powerful brand recognition.
- Learning from a competitor’s success instead of reinventing the wheel is smart, as is learning from their mistakes.
- Competitive intelligence can discover emerging trendsand white spaces for your next big product or opportunity.
Fast Facts
- Crayon’s 2020 State of Competitive Intelligence Survey found that 48% of respondents say their industry has become much more competitive over the past three years.
- Companies that update their competitor intelligence on a weekly basis are 2x more likely to see positive revenue impacts than those who update less frequently.
- 40% of marketing and sales teams believe data science driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is foundational to their success.
What is “Competitive Intelligence” for?
The aim of competitive intelligence is to gain insight into your competition’s brands, products and consumer engagements to make informed decisions. Keeping your finger on the pulse of the competition coupled with consistent trend analysis puts your brand in position to take advantage of gaps in the market before anyone else notices.
Use competitive intelligence to:
- Conduct competitive analysis
- Drive new business pitches
- Measure brand perception and share of voice
- Map customer reviews
How to gain better results with Competitive Intelligence?
Everything from marketing, product development, influencer identification and investment strategy can benefit from a comprehensive understanding of your competition’s successes and missteps.
- Understand not only what otherbrands are getting right, but what they’re getting wrong as well.
- Insights into the competition are evolving 24/7 through social media and online news publications. This creates an absolute need for brands to keep tabs on the competition or fall behind
- Operate on the presumption that the competition is monitoring you. Therefore, you need to know as much as you can about your competition so you can put that information to work in everything you do.
Competitive Intelligence Resources
Applebee’s Netnography
To write this netnography, we analyzed thousands of posts from consumers about Applebee’s and identified the top positive and negative themes. The large-scale analysis is performed by a natural language processing (NLP) engine, then refined by human sampling....
Outback Steakhouse Netnography
An Australian-themed steakhouse restaurant, Outback Steakhouse says on its website that “The Company’s strategy is to differentiate its restaurants by emphasizing consistently high-quality food and service, generous portions at moderate prices and a casual atmosphere...
What Difference Does Readability Make?
A wide range of individuals contribute to social media, and they write in a wide range of styles. Does it matter how hard or easy it is to understand what they write? You can easily score the readability of online text, but how is that information useful? Would you do...