According to nearly every competitive enablement professional I’ve talked to, internal messaging channels are a goldmine for competitive intelligence.
1. Social media
Comprehensive competitive intelligence services can help businesses gain a variety of insights, ranging from the obvious (what their competitors are doing on social media) to those that may be less obvious. This includes analyzing customer feedback and competitor marketing efforts to find out what your audience wants from your product or service.
While many competitive intelligence initiatives focus on finding out what competitors are doing right, it is also important to discover how they are doing wrong. Through this, marketers can learn from their competitors’ mistakes and avoid repeating them.
Social media listening tools are a critical part of a comprehensive program of competitive intelligence. They allow you to track brand mentions and competitor advertising campaigns, as well as the performance of your own content. This helps marketers assess the effectiveness of their content strategies and identify opportunities for improvement.
Social media monitoring can be especially helpful in evaluating the effectiveness of an organization’s customer support strategy. It’s possible to gain valuable insight into how competitors respond to customer questions, which can help improve your own support team’s response time and overall performance.
As more companies share their competitive intelligence data on social media and websites, it becomes easier to collect global competitive intelligence. This information is so vast that it’s easy to miss important details such as changes in market conditions or new players entering an industry.
With tools such as software for competitive analysis, marketers can delve deep into this ocean to pinpoint shortcomings in their competitors and new needs on the marketplace. They can also determine the best way to address these issues. For example, a study of a company’s press releases can reveal which products or services they are emphasizing and why. It can also highlight “dogs” — assets that aren’t performing well and may be better off being dropped, as well as “question marks” — assets that could succeed with the right strategy and resources.
Establishing a schedule – preferably weekly – for the distribution of competitive intelligence reports is essential so that marketers are always up to date with industry news and buzz about competition. Keeping on top of this will ensure that your business isn’t missing an opportunity to get ahead.
2. Websites
If you’re not leveraging internal data and competitor research, you’ll be missing out on valuable insights that can supercharge your strategy. The goal is to gather high-quality competitive intelligence that helps you anticipate market trends and take action to improve your performance.
Online forums, community websites and social media platforms, such as Reddit and Quora, can provide valuable competitor information depending on your industry. While they may not be a reliable source for spotting competitive intel and product launches, they can provide you with a good understanding of your competitor’s target audiences, marketing strategy, and brand sentiment.
Another key piece of competitive intelligence is knowing what your competitors are doing at a local level. You should also be analyzing their social media and website activity. For example, if your competitors have a brick-and-mortar store near yours, you can get insight into their traffic patterns, what kind of foot traffic the area receives, and what kinds of space requirements they have for their stores.
While all publicly available competitor information can technically be considered competitive intelligence, you should focus your efforts and prioritize the information that will assist you in achieving your strategic goals. Otherwise, you’ll have too much information to manage, making it more difficult to turn that data into actionable insights.
It is best to encourage the entire team to gather competitive intelligence. This should be everyone’s responsibility. When you build a competitive intelligence culture, your team will start to naturally consider the needs and goals their competitors as they make their daily decisions. This can include mentioning research findings during meetings or conversations. This will ensure the research is always at the forefront of the team’s mind and that it is more likely to be used as a basis for their daily decisions. It will make it easier to identify strategic growth opportunities. Scheduled reports and alerts, like those available through Semrush, can make it easy to keep up with the competition and get your team on board with competitive intelligence analysis.
3. Press releases
When done right, a press release is an effective tool for distributing news about your business to your target audience. It can be used for announcing a new product or event, a milestone in the company, or other noteworthy news. A well-crafted release will not only grab the attention of the media but also encourage direct engagement from potential investors and customers. Press releases that include multimedia content such as photos, infographics or videos tend to have higher share rates across social platforms.
Press releases are one of the main tools that tech startups use to generate media coverage and expand their reach, and they are an important element of any competitive intelligence strategy. While it’s easy to find a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of grabbing data from competitors, the real value of competitive intelligence lies in gaining an understanding of how your competitors are driving their success, what’s driving their customers and how you can leverage that knowledge to improve your own business.
This type of intelligence is critical to making decisions that support your overall marketing and growth goals. It can help build more effective strategy and achieve better results. If you don’t have the right tools, collecting and analyzing information about your competitors can be time-consuming.
To get the most from competitive intelligence, you should invest in a tool that monitors media. This will provide you with a comprehensive source of data that helps you to understand your competition. Prowly is a great tool to help you stay ahead of your competition and identify growth opportunities.
A good media monitor should not only help you track your competition but also provide detailed information on the audiences of your competitors’ websites and social media channels. This will allow you to create buyer personas that are specific, so your marketing and sales teams can develop business strategies that align with the needs of your ideal customers. This type of data will also help you develop more targeted campaigns that will generate more leads and sales.
4. Call recordings
Call recordings can be a valuable source of competitive intelligence. They can be used to evaluate how well your team follows call flows, builds rapport, and cross-sells products. They can be used to evaluate agents, and identify areas for coaching and training.
Focusing on your top two to three competitors is the key to a successful CI effort. Hone in on your top two to three competitors and let the others go. This will help you to narrow down your analysis and develop more effective, targeted, and actionable business strategies.
You can also get a better understanding of your team by using a call-recording platform with AI-based scoring and listening. You can create frameworks that are used to score calls, so managers can see at a quick glance what areas need to be addressed during coaching or training. You can even use conversation snippets to identify buyer sentiment, helping you understand how buyers perceive your product and brand – valuable insights that will inform any new iterations of sales and marketing programs.
It’s crucial to organize all the competitive intelligence you’ve collected so that it can be consumed and used by the right people. You can achieve this by setting deliverables like weekly meetings or internal chats to ensure that key stakeholders consume and act on the information.
The worst possible outcome is that your competitive intelligence sits on a bookcase or in an unopened folder. It must be actively put to use, whether it’s by the marketing team using data to develop an approach that is more strategic to customer acquisition or by the sales team creating stronger value propositions for prospective customers.
