Competitive Intelligence Strategy
Regardless of your business and industry, competitors are just par for the course. Especially in this technology-laden modern world, people can start a business that competes with yours with just a laptop and an internet connection. Therefore, you need to consider a competitive intelligence program to stay on top of the challenge.
If your competitors are like weeds constantly popping up in the driveway, you’re going to get some much-needed advice in this guide!
Five Steps to a Competitive Intelligence Strategy
Why should you even consider the competition in your marketing strategy? Are other services in your niche really that important? Yes. We believe that it’s important to keep one eye on competitors because it allows for better decision-making while also providing the business with the impetus it needs to generate more revenue.
However, competitive intelligence isn’t just something that we can do once. Instead, you need a reliable competitive intelligence strategy that offers continual measurement. To achieve this, we believe that you need to follow five steps.
1. Assess Your Existing Competitive Program
Before anything else, you need to consider your existing program and the motivation of the leadership team. Naturally, you’ll need to make sure that the leadership team buys into this area. If you don’t engage the stakeholders, everything else in this area becomes an uphill battle.
When encouraging the leadership team, why not treat it like trying to convince a customer? Focus on their pain points, talk about how competitors are impacting the business, and discuss how competitive intelligence can give your business the upper hand it needs to thrive this year.
If they have prior experience with competitive intelligence, focus on overcoming their challenges and what didn’t work well in the past. Soon enough, stakeholders will understand the importance of competitive intelligence and you’ll have the permission you need to get started.
In the early stages, consider the competitive threats faced by the business. Not only will these convince the leadership team that you need competitive intelligence, but they will also serve as a guide throughout the process.
Furthermore, consider setting objectives at this stage since these will also act as a guiding light for the business. In terms of performance measurement, you’ll find quantitative and qualitative methods. For example, some businesses use interviews and surveys as feedback. Meanwhile, others gather data from social and search platforms.
2. Perform Competitive Research
With the leadership team buying into the competitive intelligence strategy, nothing is stopping you from getting started. Therefore, it’s time to collect some intel on all the other services in the niche. While this might sound simple, it comes with its own challenges. For example, what data should you track? What information will help you progress the competitive intelligence strategy toward its goals?
Ultimately, the data you extract depends on your goals. Once you gather the most important pieces of information, you can review the areas where your competitors are excelling and where they’re struggling. After identifying weaknesses, you suddenly have areas for your own business to focus on in the coming weeks. Perhaps lots of customers keep complaining about the customer support team of your competitors; if this is true, make sure your customer support system is welcoming, friendly, and helpful. Then, other services will pale in comparison to yours.
3. Sales Battlecards
At this stage, you’re making great progress. Yet, you still need to go further because you want to understand how competing services are presenting their businesses. How are they using ad campaigns? What messages do they use online? The more information you have about the competitors in your market, the easier it becomes to outperform them at every level. You’ll understand your competitors as living, breathing organisms, and you’ll find yourself predicting their next moves.
One brilliant strategy that will impress your customers and propel your business ahead of others is the use of battlecards. Essentially, these are detailed profiles of customers/leads that are available to the sales team. These days, customers appreciate being valued — they don’t want to repeat everything about themselves whenever they contact a company. By creating sales battlecards, you provide every member of the sales team with a cheat sheet on each client. Now, the customer gets a more enjoyable experience even if they speak to different people each time.
If you’re to get battlecards right, however, you need to ensure that they’re continually updated — the last thing you need is to reach out to customers and embarrass yourself with the wrong information. Also, don’t include too much information. If possible, come up with a format that works for your sales team so that they have access to all the pertinent details even while on the phone with a customer.
As well as customers, you can also create battlecards for competitors as part of your competitive intelligence ecosystem. Create short profiles for each competitor with their strengths, weaknesses, and potential ways to overcome the challenge.
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4. Content Distribution
Obtaining information on competitors is a great start, but it’s useless if you’re not going to put this information to good use. Consequently, we recommend reaching out to stakeholders on their preferred communication channel. For example, the leadership team might prefer email while the sales team uses Slack.
If you use a communication tool that no party prefers, you’re taking them out of their comfort zone, and this can have ramifications for the competitive intelligence strategy. In their preferred tool, they feel more comfortable. Ultimately, the most important detail is that you distribute the competitive intelligence.
To generate the best insights, you need to feed the system with high-quality data. The better the data, the better the insights. After going to all the effort of the first three steps, the worst thing that can happen next is that all your incredible insights with the power to change the business sit unread and unloved in inboxes.
5. Engagement
With the previous step in mind, we’re going to come full circle and return to stakeholder buy-in. In our experience, the very best competitive intelligence programs are the ones that engage all stakeholders. If possible, communicate with stakeholders and consider their biggest challenges. If you can sell competitive intelligence in a way that alleviates their pressures, it won’t be long before you have the full support of the business.
Choosing Data Sources
You’ve seen the five important steps, but let’s address some smaller questions about competitive intelligence. Firstly, what data sources are most important? From the outside, it might seem difficult to obtain the information that you need on other services. However, there’s more freely available data than you might think.
Here are just some of the areas that will help in your competitive intelligence journey:
Pricing, Packaging, and Product
Firstly, consider the products of your competitors. When comparing your own products or features, do you spot a unique selling point? Does your product have a feature that makes it inherently better than the product of your competitors? As well as using the sales team to highlight these differences, this information is also important to the marketing team as well as the product development department.
News and PR
Additionally, keep an eye out for news articles that mention the names of competitors. Simultaneously, check for press releases from the companies themselves. By doing this, you learn what the industry is saying about these companies and this intel could help your own brand. As well as following in their footsteps for the positive areas, you can avoid their mistakes in the negative areas.
Social Media and Content
Every year, businesses are told that content is king. So, how do your competitors produce content? What content do they provide? How does this link in with their social media strategy? Do they produce eBooks and whitepapers, or blog posts and articles?
Customer Reviews
Although they’re often forgotten, customer reviews are one of the most valuable resources that you’ll find this year. Customer reviews offer a clear insight into the brand’s reputation and customer opinion. What does the target market think about your competitors? What are the target market’s biggest issues with the company?
Of course, don’t just choose reviews on the websites of your competitors because these have been cherry-picked. Instead, look at third-party review websites, Google reviews, Facebook reviews, and more.
Hiring Procedures
Additionally, some companies get vital data from assessing the hiring procedures of competitors. Where are the positions located? How quickly is the business growing? What roles do they want to fill? What salaries do they offer? Who are the people leading the business? What is the personnel turnover? What do ex-employees say about the company? You can find answers to this last question on various employer review websites.
Even after this, you could look at the advertising campaigns and promotions for information. So long as you feed your competitive intelligence strategy with high-quality information, the insights you get on the other side will be worth implementing. Good luck!
