Competitive intelligence programs exist to aid organizations in understanding their markets more clearly, making more intelligent strategic decisions, and eventually increasing income. But what exactly does using competitive intelligence entail for those just getting started using this discipline? What steps must they follow to create such processes?
Unfortunately, not everyone understands the competitive intelligence process efficiently. Our research revealed that many businesses handle it differently after discussing goals, KPIs, and resources for this process.
Competitive Intelligence: What It Is
What is competitive intelligence? Corporate intelligence (CI), often called competitive intelligence, involves gathering and assessing data regarding target markets, competitors, and prospective customer satisfaction to help make data-driven contextual business decisions aimed at creating or strengthening competitive advantages and remaining ahead.
Business intelligence does not employ unethical data collection practices like business espionage. You could use the information obtained to create an optimal pricing model plan and to maximize profit margins, for instance, by analyzing data that you compile yourself or is publicly accessible. Competitive Intelligence gathering involves reviewing both internally generated as well as publicly accessible information sources; gathering competitive intelligence could include activities like:
- Retrieve pricing information from competitors' websites.
- Ask potential clients what their budget would allow.
- Discover what is going on economically within each sales region.
Competitive intelligence is vital because it enables companies to make data-driven, rather than arbitrary, informed decisions that will allow them to stay ahead of competitors, meet market needs more easily and produce superior results. Furthermore, competitive intelligence helps businesses recognize market trends more rapidly to respond faster and identify obstacles or market demands quickly enough to maintain an edge over rivals.
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5 Strategies For Analyzing Competitive Intelligence
Primary data about your rivals' actions may not be helpful unless organized into an analysis model that helps your company recognize industry trends and themes to use to advance. Here are 5 strategies for analyzing competitive intelligence-
SWOT And TOWS Analysis
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis is often called SWOT analysis and involves viewing your company from four perspectives:
- Its strengths or differences from competitors.
- Areas in need of improvement.
- Opportunities and threats are seen through these prisms.
- Positive developments might occur through new ventures or threats that threaten future endeavors.
You could then perform a TOWS analysis using these findings, asking how your business can take advantage of opportunities while lessening risks by strengthening weaknesses while capitalizing upon existing assets to take full advantage while mitigating risks by augmenting lessening risks by increasing vulnerabilities while expanding strengths while simultaneously exploiting weaknesses through strengths-leveraging vulnerabilities while strengthening vulnerabilities while simultaneously strengthening weaknesses/leveraging strengths thus shifting its focus and creating opportunity.
When discussing its source, motivation must consider two aspects: drives and management assumptions. Drivers refer to your competitors' objectives, tactics, corporate cultures, leadership experiences, missions and values. In contrast, management assumptions refer to your impression of their advantages/disadvantages and capacity for seizing opportunities or mitigating threats.
An Examination Of Value Chains
Value chain analysis provides another form of competitive analysis. It takes a more in-depth approach by considering the financial, time and human resource costs associated with each stage in product launch creation or provision and contrasting those costs with any benefits gained by end customer behavior as part of this endeavor.
Consider carefully what makes your business unique from competitors and how best to maximize it to meet its value proposition. Also, they take time to assess their competitors' offerings to complement their unique strategies as much as possible.
Growth-Share Matrix Of BCG
The Boston Consulting Group developed the BCG growth-share matrix as an aid in making business decisions, which compares market landscape competition against success for company product offerings or services. Assets may be classified into four groups based on this matrix: dogs (low success/low competition), cash cows (high success/low competition), stars (high success/high competition) or question marks (low success/high competition). To categorize assets according to competition: low success vs high competition.
Companies usually seek to focus on their "stars". These dependable sources of revenue should invest their money in other similar stars who require significant resources to compete effectively against similar product developments or services offered by competitors.
"Star" assets should often be divested, yet "question marks" could prove beneficial given appropriate pricing strategies. They provide significant returns quickly while undercutting established competitors, which requires substantial resources - making these question marks ideal assets to focus competitive intelligence upon and assess if sustaining is worth continuing alongside "question marks."
Conducting Scenario Analyses
Scenario analysis allows one to predict how a company's finances might change during a specific time period as a result of certain key events taking place or not taking place. This marketing strategy is often used as part of risk management strategies to create and prevent hypothetical worst-case scenarios that arise as responses to unexpected occurrences.
Scenario analysis involves four steps. First, it identifies critical events that might negatively impact a business's financial status within an allotted period; next, assumptions are made as to their likelihood either on their own or as responses to another occurrence; finally, potential impacts for each event on corporations is estimated depending on if additional ones may take place; finally, this type of analysis theories possible outcomes using concepts from mathematics and statistics.
Computer simulations enable the rapid processing of many outcomes; when conducting such analyses, it's crucial that bias is minimized and comprehensive business intelligence—or competitive intelligence, in case your model predicts rival behavior—is provided; otherwise, your conclusions could prove entirely incorrect. Employ internet research & data processing services for your business model.
PEST Evaluation
PEST, which stands for Political, Social, Technological, and Economic factors, is an analysis framework designed to understand external elements that impact a company's ability to compete effectively in its market conditions. Other forms of PEST that focus on other elements include SLEPT for legal considerations, PESTLE for environmental/ecological impacts, and STEEPLE, which includes ethical considerations.
Legislative changes about corporate taxes and employment regulations could severely hinder a company's competitiveness in one nation or region; such regulations might affect corporate taxes and employment regulations, foreign trade connections and economic variables that impact competitiveness (national interest rates and exchange rates, supply/demand issues for goods/services provided, economic growth/lack thereof and inflation are examples) all having a significant bearing on competitiveness in another region or nation.
Social media presence factors, including shifting cultural attitudes and lifestyle trends, can enormously impact a corporation's competitiveness, while target audience size may determine their significance. Finally, technological advancements made by an individual business or society as a whole might also affect market competition, as could national government investments in this regard.
Read More: Internet Research: 8 Techniques For Maximizing Data Collection Impact!
How To Develop An Effective Competitive Intelligence Strategy
Here are step-by-step guidelines for designing an effective competitive intelligence process and competitive strategy, along with their benefits to your entire company. Let's review these key components.
Determine Who Your Competitors Are
Locating rivals is the foundation of competitive intelligence. Start by identifying your five closest rivals; from there, identify perceived, aspirational, and indirect competitors as well as direct ones in addition to direct rivals who may or may not compete for clients with you directly; also, aspirational rivals can offer valuable lessons and lessons learned that could be applicable within your sector; finally, aspirational competition provides access to industry leaders that may help strengthen or even grow your own company over time.
As part of your sales discovery process, one final group you may encounter during the discovery phase are perceived competitors--those businesses you do not directly compete against for business. Your competitive landscape can further be divided by sales vertical, industry focus and solution type. When conducting competitive analysis to understand your marketplace and competitive environments, identifying competitors should be the initial step taken by businesses conducting one.
Determine What You Should Search For In Digital Footprints Of Competitors
After you've identified your rivals and people you wish to analyze, it is time to select the main focus areas for gathering intelligence about them. Consider all available internet data and internal staff data as sources for data if necessary. In terms of processing this intelligence more efficiently, it would help if it focused on specific forms that you find most intriguing--for instance, data points supporting ongoing projects or intriguing intelligence forms available, such as competitive intelligence, that offer some clues for starting the analysis process. Take some of these fascinating forms as inspiration if needed.
Compile Your Intel
The time-consuming stage of competitive intelligence research may be gathering information. According to The State of Competitive Intelligence, 36% of the time is dedicated solely to research activities; here, you must dedicate some of that marketing effort towards studying rival announcements, product teams, product features, websites, social media interactions and content to gain more actionable insights about them and make sense out of this data. To extract maximum value from it all, you must gather as much detail about them as possible before compiling and analyzing this data.
Construct A Competitive Evaluation Report
Your competitive intelligence manager or analyst will sift through all available material by dissecting it into manageable pieces and extracting key trends and details before organizing their findings to share with other marketing team members easily. There are two approaches for conducting competition analyses; benchmark or baseline studies provide one method by which information about competitors can be gathered quickly for the creation of profiles of each one of your rivals.
Competitor profiles or battle cards provide an effective solution for keeping track of each competitor's research in one central document and for analyzing competitive information continuously in real-time. Though creating profiles may help, monitoring rival movements more closely by setting alerts for product modifications, potential customer reviews, or news references is essential to staying ahead of your rivals' activities and keeping your squad equipped with up-to-date intelligence on them.
Interact With Intel
Failing to utilize your competitive intelligence would be disastrous, so make sure it gets passed along and used by critical parties. This data should help improve your marketing tactics and make an impactful statement about you as an organization. According to the State of Competition Intelligence survey, 64% of companies hold meetings, 28% use internal chats, and 78% exchange them via email.
Many find Slack an efficient platform for sharing intelligence. Instant Messaging makes sending out competitive intelligence across an organization easy. Still alternatively, an intranet or business wiki are great places for keeping comprehensive rival profiles up-to-date and accessible for coworkers to locate.
Create Value From Data By Converting It Into Outcomes
After you've identified rivals and acquired intelligence on them, studied information about them, and presented your conclusions, the next step should be making your data actionable for use within your overall company plan. You can employ multiple business strategies to make data actionable across each of your stakeholder groups and apply conclusions as appropriate.
Conclusion
Competitive intelligence in internet research provides people with a complete picture of competitors' goods, services, competencies, vulnerabilities, and value propositions. Similar to competitor analysis techniques but more comprehensive in scope, CI provides specific details regarding market environments in which competitors differ significantly and allows speedy decision-making to occur with ease. It should be done efficiently to provide an accurate ranking; reports detailing legitimate measurements collected with reliable technologies should also accompany it for improved accuracy of rankings of rivalries.
