What Competitive Intelligence is and How It Can Improve Your Marketing and Business Strategies
Let’s face it–we are all a bit nosey. We may not admit it in public, but most of us enjoy a little gossip or checking on the social profile of an old flame just to see what they are up to. But what if we told you that being a bit nosey when it comes to what your business competitors are doing can improve your marketing and social media strategy?
Sounds interesting, right?
What is Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive intelligence isn’t just being nosey. It’s simply collecting data and insights about your competitors, industry, market, and customers from multiple sources to help inform your business policies and strategies. Deeply understanding what your competitors are doing and your industry in general can help set your brand apart and help you to reach your target audience in the most effective way.
The Types of Competitive Intelligence
There are four different types of competitive intelligence: market, product, competitor, and consumer. Let’s break down what type of data you should be looking at for each of those.
Market Intelligence
This is data about factors outside of your business, including:
- Demographics in your current regional market (or a new one you want to enter)
- Current industry trends
- Current technology and events
- Market size, growth rate, and other key benchmarks
Product Intelligence
This is data that tracks how your products/services compare to that of your competitor’s in areas like:
- Features and performance
- Price
- Availability (e.g. in-store vs. online)
- Reputation and reviews
Competitor Intelligence
This is information about your competitors that can help you find new ways to differentiate your brand. This data includes:
- Knowing who the key players are in your industry and how their marketing efforts compare to yours
- Understanding your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
- Evaluating their strategies around visual branding, messaging, symbols, and position in comparison to your brand
Consumer Intelligence
This provides insights about your target audience or customers, such as:
- Demographics
- What your customers want in a product/service
- Understanding of the customer journey (e.g. how they found you, why they purchased)
- Shopping behavior
How to Collect Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence requires collecting data and information from across multiple channels and bringing it all together to get a more holistic view. This includes data from social platforms; your sales and customer journey; and analysis of your competitors, industry, and market. By combining data from all of these sources, not only do you get a better look at the bigger picture, but more data means more informed decisions!
Now there are quite a few ways to gather this information and data. Whether you use a third party platform that helps aggregate all the data or you do it manually, there are some strategies and tactics that will help you to collect the data that then needs to be aggregated.
This often includes using social listening to understand the sentiment around your brand, competitors, and industry; looking at engagement spike data on your socials; gathering demographic data from socials, sales platforms and the like; segmenting audiences to get a deeper understanding of the customer journey; spotting industry trends; and so much more.
Using Competitive Intelligence
Collecting data is just the first step. When it comes to using the aggregated data and information, it will look a bit different for each brand. Your data and information is unique to your industry and your brand! But the bottom line is that all the information and data should be able to help you make more informed decisions about what your marketing, sales, and business strategies look like going forward.
When you have a better understanding of the factors that influence the success of your brand, you can uncover key opportunities, such as gaps in your industry that your company can fill that can help grow your brand.
Does gathering and analyzing competitive intelligence sound overwhelming or too time consuming? Let the experts help! Tintero Creative has been helping clients and brands improve their online presence using marketing strategies that tell your brand’s story, while also working with your industry, digital trends, and marketing best practices. Schedule a free consultation to learn more about how we can help your brand shine online!