What Is Competitive Marketing Intelligence?
Competitive Marketing Intelligence (CMI) focuses on marketing data and insights. It informs marketing strategies, campaigns and optimisation but also broader business and product innovation efforts.
CMI allows small business to learn from the success and failures their rivals. This can help them refine and improve their marketing approach. It can help with product development by identifying untapped markets or new opportunities.
Analyse Your Top Competitors
A business must understand their competitors, what they’re doing and create strategies to combat them in order to improve the overall competitiveness of the company, meet consumer needs, and close more deals. To do this, teams within the business need to be aware of their counterparts’ marketing strategy, sales techniques, and product development. This will enable businesses to stay on top of the curve.
This can be difficult for a company that doesn’t track competitor insights consistently. There is no definitive answer to how often businesses should conduct this analysis. But it’s crucial that they don’t leave it too late. The landscape of their competitors is always changing and it’s best to stay ahead.
The best way to analyze your top competitors is to use a SWOT analysis, which looks at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that your competitor poses to your company. It’s a great way to determine the best ways to improve your marketing, sales and product strategy, allowing you to beat your competitors and increase market share and sales success.
You can also monitor competitor announcements on their website or through social media, which will allow you to be prepared for any changes that may affect your market. Keeping up with customer reviews on your competitors’ products can also be a valuable source of information, as it can give you insight into the pros and cons of their products and how they compare to yours.
While it may be tempting, you will get the best results by focusing on the top two or three competitors and letting the rest go. This will allow you to collect the most actionable and useful data, allowing your business to grow.
Using multiple sources of data for your competitive intelligence can also help ensure that your findings are as accurate and detailed as possible. This includes a wide range of online tools and resources such as industry reports, social networks, news websites, and competitor tracking apps.
Analyse Your Ideal Customer
When a business is looking to create positioning and messaging to help it gain market share, they need to know what the target customers are searching for. Marketers can discover what their target customers are looking for, the information that appeals to them, and messages that will resonate with them using competitive marketing intelligence. This is valuable information that can help companies create campaigns that are highly successful.
CMI is also useful for B2B brands in tracking competitors’ pricing models, sales strategies and customer relationship practices. This information is invaluable in identifying the most efficient ways to gain new clients and increase market share.
The most effective way to use competitive intelligence is to set goals that guide the intelligence-gathering process. This ensures the team’s focus is on sources that provide insight into the goals they have set. If you want to understand the marketing strategy of your competitors, your CI team will focus on their websites, blogs and landing pages. They should also look at social media channels, downloadable content, and competitor blogs.
It can be tempting to focus on tracking every competitor in your industry, but a small number of focused competitors will yield the best results for your research. This allows your CI team to spend more time analyzing the data and less time sifting through irrelevant information.
While many marketing activities fall under the umbrella of “competitive Intelligence”, there are two types of competitive intelligence that are especially useful for marketing teams. Strategic intelligence is geared more towards long-term plans and involves understanding competitors’ moves, market trends, and potential industry shifts. Tactical Intelligence, on the contrary, is more oriented to actionable insights which can be used to enhance day-to-day activities.
With the right tools for competitive intelligence, you can create assets that give your team the insight it needs to deliver positioning that will increase their win rate. HG Insights allows you to track and analyse competitor tech usage, adoption, and spending. This allows your sales team the ability to deliver a tailored message that resonates and addresses the true pain points of your audience.
Analyse Your Messaging
Competitive intelligence helps businesses to understand the messaging of their competitors. It’s important to position and communicate the value proposition of your business in a way which resonates with your ideal customers. You can do this by analyzing the positioning and messaging of your top competitors and then tailoring your own marketing collateral to reflect the most promising differentiators in your offering.
Create assets such as battle cards and whitepapers to help your sales reps educate their customers about the differences between your product and that of your competitors. You can also use HG Insights’ competitor tech adoption data to gain insight into what your competitors are using. This will allow you to expand your opportunity to rip-and-replace by proving that you have the best solution for their problems.
When used effectively, competitive intelligence can have a significant impact on your business. In addition to providing insights that can directly inform marketing decision-making, competitive intelligence is also valuable across departments including sales, product development and innovation, and overall strategic business decision-making.
To begin, set a clear goal for your team. As an example, say Amore, the high-end bag company wants to learn about its competitors’ marketing strategies – namely their messaging and campaigns. This will help your team to focus their efforts and create a plan for collecting intel. This could involve tracking their websites, pricing pages and social media. Once you have collected your information, you can compile it into reports that are tailored to your team. Your sales team, for example, may prefer a visual breakdown of their competition while your marketing department would appreciate a list with their key messages and campaigns.
Analyse The Social Media Presence Of Your Business
When you’re launching your business, it’s critical to understand the competition. Competitive Marketing Intelligence can help you gain a better understanding of your market and ensure brand loyalty by outperforming competitors.
CMI can help you identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, market position, and business strategies. This information allows you to anticipate competitor actions and craft a strategy that will give you a competitive edge. CMI can also help you optimise internal processes and resource allocation, ensuring that you’re utilising your resources effectively to achieve marketing goals.
Analyzing the social media presence of your competitors can also provide valuable insights about what customers think about your competitor. This can help you better understand their value proposition, and create more effective messaging that resonates well with your target audience.
CMI is a vital tool for small businesses to stay ahead of their competition and drive growth. By analysing advertising campaigns, positioning in the market, and customer acquisition strategies, you can develop a better marketing strategy to outperform your competitors. CMI can also help you identify new opportunities and trends in your industry by tracking consumer sentiment and market dynamics.
CMI is a vital tool for both B2C and B2B businesses. B2C companies may focus on consumer behavior and competitor marketing campaigns. B2B businesses can use CMI for analysis of their competitors’ revenue models and sales strategies, and develop an effective sales strategy to maximise their ROI.
Having an understanding of the differences between competitive intelligence and marketing intelligence can make all the difference in your business. While both practices involve gathering and analysing data about your competitors, marketing intelligence is more client-focused, and often involves understanding your clients’ behaviours to help you create user personas and deliver more targeted messaging. Competitive intelligence, on the other hand, is a broader approach that provides a more holistic picture of the market landscape. It can be used by many strategic decision makers.
Adopting a competitive intelligence culture will help you build a business that is more informed and agile, ready to face the challenges of today’s marketplace. With the right Competitive Marketing Intelligence for your business, you can stand out and accelerate your growth with confidence.