Competitive intelligence develops your competitive strategy
Competitive intelligence is important for many reasons besides needing insight. Without it, your products are not isolated from other products. And you will clearly see the other options available and how they are ready to fulfil your consumers’ demands better than you can. To prevail over your competitors, your products must outperform theirs. Many consider making the best product possible to be their mission. But what does “best” mean? You must know where your product stands in the competitive environment to develop the best marketing and positioning strategies. Not just in relation to the customer and their needs.
Customers tell you what they want
When you lose to competitors, you only get half the story when speaking to your lost clients. You will learn nothing at all if you dont talk to those who went elsewhere. A competitive intelligence programme is driven by a desire to understand the customers, and you must understand what the market wants before you can provide it.
However, simply communicating with prospective customers only takes you so far, mainly if you are behind and losing customers to competitors.
Competitive analysis helps you understand why customers leave and why you lose business.
Thanks to market research, understanding your competitors, what they offer, and what customers like about what they offer puts you in a better position to win competitive deals. Having a look through your insight may be a pleasant surprise. Your customers might be surprised to learn that a feature that has been a part of your offering for some time has been forgotten.
It’s as bad as not meeting your customers’ needs if you don’t communicate that your product does.
What is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is the finding & critical analysis of information to make sense of what’s happening & why. Predict what’s going to happen & give the options to control the outcome. The insight to create more certainty & competitive advantage.
Knowing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses is crucial
Position yourself as the answer to your competitors’ shortcomings by knowing where they are weak.
No one can be excellent at everything. No matter how big the competition is, you can use your position as the little upstart to your advantage. After all, who doesn’t like an underdog? With no insight into your competitors, you will never know their strengths and weaknesses. If you know where they are weak, you may position yourself as their solution. Knowing where they are strong tells you which battles you cannot win in advance. Where it is smart to conserve your energy and where it is worthwhile to make a stand.
It is pretty useful, right?
A clear view of the competitive landscape makes it obvious where your products should sit, and market intelligence provides that clear view. Improved positioning, a more compelling offer for customers, and increased revenue are all possible due to this enhanced customer experience.
What drives them to buy?
A clearer picture of what drives buyers will help you understand them more deeply. Having multiple primary and secondary data sources minimises the influence of the outliers of your insight. Indeed, numbers don’t lie, but neither do customers. Prospects may not be aware of the driving factors behind their own decision-making, and customer interviews may not yield accurate information if the data does not reflect reality.
Having a complete picture of your prospects’ motivations is where competitive intelligence comes in. Using information about your competitors in addition to your own data gives you a better view of your prospects’ motivations. Customer surveys can be inaccurate, causing concern next time, and you will have peace of mind. Using competitive intelligence ensures objectivity and encourages you to speak to people rather than sending a written survey.
Seeing yourself from the customer’s perspective lets you objectively evaluate what adjustments are necessary to win more customers. Your product positioning, messaging, and content marketing strategy, no matter what they are, can benefit from seeing yourself from your customer’s perspective.
Investigate fresh market trends and possibilities
Competitive intelligence should be collected continuously, and staying abreast of the market’s latest developments is hard. Keeping up is impossible if you’re behind in the modern competitive market. Gathering competitive intelligence day after day is difficult as it is impossible to catch up on the latest happenings.
A successful competitive intelligence program allows you to spot emerging industry trends and opportunities as they arise. When your product does not offer a sought-after feature, you should prioritise developing it if your target audience begins to migrate to products that do.
But remember, without analysing the data you collect, all you achieve is a lot of data followed by more data. And lists of things that have happened. The analysis allows you to look ahead.
Competitor’s next moves
Having a strategic intelligence programme helps you predict your competitors’ future moves. Awareness of emerging risks and market trends is as important as identifying emerging market opportunities. Having your finger on the market’s pulse makes it possible to anticipate your competitors’ next moves.
You’ll be able to neutralise your competitor’s strategies as soon as they come up with them if you are one step ahead and capitalise on their weaknesses.
Indeed, you cannot predict everything. However, this will help you stay one step ahead of your rivals when new products and services capture your customers’ attention.
Have distinct capabilities
A firm can create a durable competitive advantage by developing distinct capabilities. Defending your advantage against attack is crucial to making it sustainable. Begin by establishing a baseline of competitor behaviour. A competitive advantage puts you in an excellent position to win more customers than your competitors. However, your competitive advantage is negligible in a highly competitive environment, and your competitors will work around the clock to replicate your advantage and diminish your lead.
How do you make your advantage permanent?
A baseline of competitor behaviour is established through data collection. If they deviate from this norm, you will be able to tell. Competitors may be forewarned if you exhibit behavioural shifts before they make a move to your advantage. Competitive intelligence can help you pinpoint your competitors’ strengths by revealing opportunities for improvement. An in-depth look at your competitors’ activities can give you valuable insights into how they are positioning their brands and the opportunities they are and are not exploiting, as well as providing you with ideas for new opportunities and advantages you can seize for yourself.
Make smarter decisions
Quality competitive intelligence can help you to prioritise, which will have a huge effect on revenue. Competitive deals can have a huge impact on your organisation’s bottom line. There is an infinite amount of work in every organisation, and you will never be able to accomplish it all. Prioritisation is crucial because of time constraints.
A better understanding of your company’s performance can help you make smarter business decisions.
By identifying your customers’ most valuable priorities, you can eliminate competitive battles you cannot win. You are left with
(i) areas where you are already excelling and
(ii) areas where a minor adjustment or two might have a significant effect on your company’s bottom line, for better or for worse.
A few persuasive points in your favour could mean thousands more prospects choosing you over a competitor, even if it’s a close-run thing. They can only pick one. Depending on your average deal size, these are enormously leveraged opportunities to impact your organisation’s bottom line.
Competitive intelligence develops your competitive strategy
In conclusion, competitive intelligence develops your competitive strategy. A tremendous competitive intelligence strategy will influence many other strategies across the business. All aspects of your product positioning strategy to your content marketing strategy, including your pricing and brand messaging, can be improved when your competitive intelligence program begins. Competitive intelligence drives a stronger product, a better customer experience, more won deals, and increased revenue.
