This article offers our thoughts on Market Intelligence: profiling the competition. We explain what profiling is, how to do it, and what you can do with it.
Competitor profiling starts with identifying your significant competitors and researching their sales, products, and marketing strategies. Then, using that information to create better business strategies and improve your performance against them, you can develop a deep understanding of each competitor by isolating what you are doing well and what opportunities you could be missing.
Profiling the competition structure
Regular competitor profiling should consist of at least one of the following four areas:
- Isolate gaps in the market
- Create opportunities for new products and services
- Uncover market trends
- Ensure your sales and marketing is more effective
Firstly, you need to determine who your competitors are and what their products/services are. Dividing the competitors into the following:
- Direct – companies which offer products similar to yours
- Indirect – provides a product which is not the same as yours but solves the same customer problem
How to define direct and indirect competitors
Like all good Intelligence, it comes down to asking good questions. Questions like, are their customers precisely the same as yours? No minor differences? Keep looking because indirect competitors can become direct competitors overnight.
What products do your competitors offer your customers?
What products do they offer your customers? Take a look at your competitor’s product and analyse the quality, pricing, market share, how they sell and what they say about their offering. Also, what channels and resellers are they selling through?
Determine if they are selling on price or quality and how many they sell. Do they offer bulk discounts? What needs are they fulfilling? What is their pricing, and does it differ on and offline?
Who are their customers?
- B2B – Who are their key customers? What do they think of them?
- B2C – What sort of people are attracted to them?
How do they get their products to their customers? Who do they use, and is it efficient? Are they growing or suffering? What are their sales targets, and how do they compare to their actual sales performance? Who are their best salespeople?
It is not good for your sales team to talk to their prospective customers and bring up a competitor’s name in a conversation. Then, the salesperson is off to their next meeting, and they do not note down any information gleaned, which can’t be analysed centrally. Also, salespeople are great at asking the what, when, where and how questions. But finding out why a customer is considering purchasing from you and not the guy down the road is also incredibly important.
Likewise, when you lose a customer to a competitor, it is vital to find the reason why they have moved on. It is not usually an “it’s me, not you.” situation. There’s always a reason.
Analyse how your competitors market their products
Looking at your competitor’s website is an excellent place to start. What are they saying about themselves and their product? And what are they not saying about themselves and their offering? It’s equally important to understand how are they communicating with their audience. The same with their blogs, whitepapers, webinars, analyst calls, case studies, videos, press releases, slide decks, product data sheets, brochures etc. etc. Again, read between the lines to find out what they are saying – and not saying.
Moreover, is what they are saying about themselves, the product, and the service true? Look at the photos they use. What do they portray? Do they have a consistent tone of voice? Do the images reveal anything of interest? Look at the background and the back-end data.
Social media
Also, look at social media and determine who follows it, what sort of person interacts with it, and what the content is about. Is it positive, or are they fielding complaints? Are they engaging with their prospective customers?
Then, take a more in-depth look at their website, advertising, and promotions. Look at the keywords and image text tags. Have they missed anything? How does this compare to yours? Do some analysis on them. Nothing complicated. An in-depth SWOT analysis is a great start. Yes, it is simple, but when done properly, it is often very powerful.
Conclusion
In this article, we offered our thoughts on Market Intelligence: profiling the competition. Competitor profiling can show you strategic weaknesses in rivals that you can exploit. Being proactive with profiling will allow you to anticipate what your competitor will do next. What are their planned strategies, and what are your competitor’s ultimate goals? How do they plan to counter changes in your market environment? This knowledge will make you more agile and be able to go on the attack armed with Intelligence to exploit opportunities and maximise your strengths. You can also stop your competitors dead in their tracks if they try to go for your weaknesses.
We are Octopus. The Global People-Powered Competitive Intelligence Agency.
Outsmart your competition. Make the unknown known. Octopus helps you gain clarity in complex markets. With clients and tentacles around the world, we deliver sharp, actionable competitive intelligence through a blend of deep primary (HUMINT) and secondary research. If you’re looking to make smarter decisions, beat the competition, and reduce uncertainty, we’re the partner you want on your side.
