Competitors gather your company’s competitive intelligence often and are always waiting for you to up your game in CI gathering. Being at the top of the competition is critical in any given context, and CI is what most companies use to know new competitors in the game and track how they load up. Read on to learn about CI and how it’s beneficial to your business.
Definition of Competitive Intelligence
CI is the collection, analysis, and use of information about your clients or competitors to look beyond market disruptions, anticipate competitive activities and develop a competitive advantage. It helps you know your competitive environment, available opportunities, and challenges and use the information well to establish achievable strategies. CI gives you insights into marketplace challenges and dynamics in an ethical, planned, and disciplined manner using published and non-published resources.
Importance of Competitive Intelligence
The market changes constantly, and you need to be on the watch. You can’t establish a successful business with assumptions and guesses. With CI, you get to know your competitors’ behaviors, attitudes, motivations, and objectives, which will help you shape your brand positioning, development, and pricing. CI is fundamental in your company’s strategy. The other benefits of CI include:
- It helps firms gather information about competitive products and services, the environment, industry, and their rivals and analyze them
- Recognize and analyze industry trends to help you plan
- Analyze weaknesses and strengths
- Enhance ROI
- Acquire insights and knowledge on expectations, technologies, and trends
- Make well-informed business decisions
- Forecast competitors’ steps.
- It helps you allocate resources effectively.
Types of Competitive Intelligence
CI’s main objective is to help businesses increase ROI, make well-informed and strategic decisions and understand the market. For that, businesses use these two types of CI:
- Strategic: handles long-term issues such as privileges a company can acquire and critical risks.
- Tactical: a short-lived process that helps contribute to the solution of issues such as increasing profits and capturing market shares
Different Competitive Intelligence Tools for Your Business
1. Social Media Management Platform
The tool helps in all social media marketing aspects, including scheduling posts, curating content, measuring ROI, and managing a team. One of the best social media management platforms is Hootsuite. It executes social media monitoring on different accounts, including tracking new followers, likes, mentions, and retweets. The tool also uses social listening to gather information about what people say about your brand and your competitors.
2. Competitive Monitoring Tool
Are you wondering what potential clients are saying about your brand and your competitors? Using a competitive monitoring tool will give you the answer. Monitoring your competitors’ social media accounts is essential to understand their websites, as independent review websites are effective sources of CI information.
Competitive monitoring tools are essential in your business as they effectively alert you of new mentions on the site. It also monitors audience mentions on the website, including newspaper articles, social media, blogs, and public forums.
3. Email Analytics Tool
Do you know the types of messages your competitors share with their customers and potential clients? Email analytics tool helps you study the email marketing strategies of your competitors. It monitors emails campaigns, assesses them, and alerts you on any trend you ask the tool to detect. You can identify general patterns and use opportunities untouched by your competitors.
4. Market Intelligence Platform
Comprehensive media coverage helps businesses effectively make data-driven and more intelligent decisions by gathering multiple pieces of information into a fully incorporated competitive intelligence platform. NetBase Quid is one of the renowned market intelligence tools that most businesses use to go through various social media posts and data sources to answer most of their business concerns.
NetBase Quid offers innovative data visualization in multiple formats to enable incomparable visibility into any background analysis like brand coverage, new privileges, and served industries.
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