In marketing strategies, Competitive Intelligence means the ability of any entrepreneur to collect and use any information on several factors affecting their competitive advantage in the market place. This marketing strategy is legal and allows any organization to raise needed data or information to develop efficient and effective business practices. With this marketing tool, entrepreneurs can quickly and efficiently identify potential business risks and other opportunities. The marketing tool is suitable for any entrepreneur and not limited to executives and managing directors.
Benefits of Using this Marketing Feature
One advantage of Competitive Intelligence is that it allows users to make informed decisions regarding their brands. They make these decisions based on how the business environment looks and how their competitors are handling the market. You will improve on several aspects of your brand when you have a brief idea of what your competitors are doing in terms of projects and research. This marketing tool allows you to monitor your competitors while at the same time gathering the necessary information. Through these constant monitoring, you can effectively plan for your company’s future.
Also, Competitive Intelligence gives you deeper insights into your market intelligence as well as the ideas and the next moves of your competitors. The marketing practice gathers information about your competitors, and you get an insight into the new product or service they might be launching. You can get a team of experts who will help you collect data about your competitors’ projects. In the process, you can save time, money, and energy, and use the time and energy to focus on your business goals. By understanding what your teams of competitors are doing in the market place, you can plan, and focus on filling gaps in the market place.
Apart from helping you focus on your competitors, this tool will also allow you to better understand your company. You can identify various strengths, weaknesses, and gaps that need filling to propel your enterprise in the right direction. You can work with an agency which will give you more detailed information about your company. Competitive Intelligence makes use of a variety of tools that allow easy tracking of competitors in the business world. These tools will enable the monitoring of competitors’ footprints in terms of product pricing, product reviews, product positioning, news and events, and social media strategies. For your brand to get a niche in any of the competitive tools categories, you need to assist brands in collecting and analyzing products, marketing strategies, customers, website changes, and strategic investments.
Steps to Designing a Competitive Intelligence Process
You need to identify your competitors
This is an essential role of this form of marketing strategy. You need to compile a list of your most significant competitors. You should have a list of direct, indirect, and Inspirational competitors. You need to note that direct competitors do not compete with you directly for your consumers. Inspirational competitors keep you informed on what you can do to improve your brand.
- Identify the tools you can use to keep track of your competitors’ moves
This means that you should focus only on significant areas about your competitors’ products and services. You should probably narrow down on data that conforms to the current goals of your company.
- Take time to gather your intel
It would help if you focused on gathering relevant data about your competitors. This means that you should look into areas such as websites, content, social media engagements, and products.
- Create a competitive analysis
Once you finish collecting relevant information about your competitors, you should then carefully analyze the data. After this, you should share the information pertinent to your team of employees and various stakeholders in the company. The final phase includes turning the information gathered data into results.
NetBase Quid
This is one of the Competitive Intelligence tools in the market. The tool helps in monitoring and analyzing relevant information about business competitors. Such knowledge comes from company profiles, scientific papers, survey responses, and product reviews. NetBase will also allow customers to make the right decisions about a product by giving them real-time actionable results of a given company.
