Competitive Artificial Intelligence: Why Is It Important for Marketers?

Many people never heard of the term “Competitive Intelligence”. Many stakeholders are not sure what a competitive intelligence analyst does. Some believe, these analysts just spend all their time on Google or YouTube. Or, sometimes they just ignore the competitive intelligence of their organizations.

Competitive intelligence (also referred to as Corporate Intelligence or CI) is the process of collecting and analyzing the data about your business competitors. But, it does more than that. It helps to link the information about your competitors to business decisions. It also helps businesses to understand how their competitors fit in the market and assists many organizations in meeting their objectives. Competitive intelligence analysts don’t just provide the provide information about the companies, they also take part in the company’s decision-making.

Through this guide, we will try to cover what competitive intelligence is and how to use effective competitive intelligence research as part of your overall business strategy. We will also try to share a competitive intelligence best uses to help you optimize your research process.

What is Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence mainly focuses on collecting and analyzing the data regarding your competitors, customers, marketing, and target. It helps you to make contextual, data-led business decisions. The main purpose is the create or enhance a competitive advantage.

However, Corporate Intelligence is quite different from Corporate Espionage. Unlike espionage, corporate intelligence does depend on unethical methods of data collection. It involves detailed analysis of easily accessible information and the information that you compile by yourself.

With the competitive intelligence, you could:

• Collect the pricing details from the competitor’s website
• Survey on targeted customers regarding what they are willing to pay
• Also, learn about the economic conditions in each sales region

the collected data will help you to set a pricing strategy that maximizes profit potential.

What is the Importance of Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is required for a business because it helps to make decisions designed to help them outperform their competitors based on the data. It helps in the decision-making process and generates better outcomes.

Here are some of the examples:

• Based on the competitor’s claims and shortcomings, sales teams will modify the pitches.
• It helps the marketing teams refine the messages to stand apart from their competitors
• Using competitive intelligence, the product team can strategize roadmaps around features their competitors overlooked

It also helps companies to identify and react to trends more quickly. Competitive Intelligence to capitalize on market demands and anticipate challenges.

Types of Competitive Intelligence

You will have mainly two types of competitive intelligence.

1. Strategic Competitive Intelligence:

It helps companies to understand and act on long-term changes, such as the marketplace, technological changes, and environmental shocks. This kind of information can help companies to plan out mergers and acquisitions.

2. Tactical Competitive Intelligence:

It is a short-term process that contributes to decisions about issues that can be measured in quarterly reports. These kinds of data can help companies respond to supply chain disruptions.

However, the real distinction of using the CI, is whether you use the method or not. Usually, most of the company connect the data but only use half of it to make business decisions.

How to Do Competitive Intelligence Research

Here is the step-by-step guide to doing competitive intelligence research:

1. Identify the Competitors:

Identifying the competitors is the main part of competitive intelligence. So, first, you have to decide which rivals to evaluate. We suggest you choose two to three rivals that pose the biggest threats.

It’s not necessary that they have to be industry giants. They are whoever your customer would opt for if the service or product you offer is available. And always try to choose more than one competitor.

2. Gather & Organize Data:

Gathering relevant and reliable data plays a very important role in competitive intelligence. It is not important to collect the data as much as possible. Collecting high-quality data is more important and will be useful to understand your targeted audience, competitors, and market.

Suppose, you have an online business and you are not wanting to open a physical store. Then, gathering the data regarding the rival’s physical location is just a waste of time. Instead, try focusing on collecting information about their online presence.

Another important thing is, where you get the data. If you collect updated, inaccurate, or incomplete data, that can lead you to false conclusions. Whatever the methods you choose, you should keep your data organized. It will make the analysis easier.

Here are some of the best practices that you can use:

• Use the descriptive file names, metadata, and tags, which will make the lookups simple
• Group the collected data by type, for example, folders for each competitor.
• You should use spreadsheets or purpose-built tools so that you can easily access the data
• Provide data access to the relevant decision-makers
• Make sure to keep records regarding your data collection methods

If you employ the above-mentioned best practices, you can easily organize your collected data.

3. Analyse Your Data:

The analysis is regarding transforming raw information into valuable insights. Let’s suppose, you have collected the product pricing data from your competitors. From that, you can check the highest-ever price data, average pricing, etc.

There are some competitive intelligence tools that you can use to analyze the process. They will help you by making calculations and drawing conclusions. You can use competitive intelligence tools, like Crunchbase, MOAT, Talkwalker, SpyFu, SimilarWeb, Visualping, and Owler.

4. Tailor Your Business Strategy:

Then, you have to use those insights in an action plan. By combining those insights, you will get a well-rounded view of opportunities and threats. Next, consider what you have learned about the context of your business goals.

For example, you might see there is consumer demand for a cheaper product due to economic conditions. So, you should try to beat your competitor’s prices while taking the revenue goals into mind.

5. Track the Results & Keep Adapting:

Don’t just create one CI report and rely on it forever. To maintain the business group, you should regularly check:

• Your performance metrics
• Competitor activities
• Market trends
• Consumer habits

Based on the resources, you can do this once a month. You can also use some third-party tools that will send reports and alerts automatically.

Ways to Gather Competitive Intelligence

There are five reliable ways to gather the competitive intelligence for your digital marketing campaigns:

• Stay on top of social media:

In this process, the customers will help you to gather intelligence for you. Customer comments on the post you shared on social media. From there, you can learn a lot about how they think about your products as compared to your competitors.

• Read competitor reviews:

From the customer reviews you can check tell what customers like about your product and what they don’t. Sometimes, customers also share the strengths and gaps of your competitors.

• Use specialized tools:

Several third-party tools can help you to perform a competitive analysis on your behalf. This way, you can learn about the changes your competition enacts and become ready to respond proactively if they start to position themselves with your customer base.

• Analyze a competitor’s website:

You can gather a lot of information from your competitor’s websites, such as their products and services. They are the best source to collect updated information about your competitors.

• Leverage search engine optimization:

By using SEO tools, you can determine how much of your competitor’s traffic depends on certain keywords. Some SEO tools also help to monitor changes in their page rankings.

How to Use the Competitive Intelligence in Your Business

We hope, that now you have some basic understanding about the Competitive Intelligence and how it works. Identify your competitors, gather data with your research tools, and use the collected data to identify important trends. Make sure that every decision-maker of the company has access to the data you collect and use it to make proactive decisions for a competitive edge.

Stay One Step Ahead of the Competition with Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence can help you stay ahead of your competitors. You have various ways to gather valuable information from your competitors in your industry to provide you with an advantage and increase your profile. For example, you can invest in CI tools that conduct research or spend time manually reviewing a competitor’s social media and website.

Once you find out what your competitors are doing, you can get help from the Rendement to create an effective marketing campaign. We have digital experts who can help you with competitive intelligence.

 

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