Practicing Competitive Intelligence on a Regular Basis
Most of the organizations are on the same page of following and benefitting from Competitive Intelligence practices but very less know how to do it right. So, in this article let us delve into the right practices of Competitive Intelligence monitoring.
Organizations aim at conducting competitive analysis monthly, quarterly, and even, annually but as the right process, it needs to be inculcated in our daily practice. When it is done as a daily activity, it helps our long-term goals with actionable insights that are structured and aggregated (not piled up for weeks). Every day it is just 15 minutes of investment of time.
Let us see how!
- Structuring your Competitive Landscape
To begin with, one can make a list of their competitors to get a 360-degree view of the landscape. You can make it in any order like horizontal, service-specific, or vertical. Then research a bit about their focus areas, strategy, geography, and even target audience. This step is crucial as here you would get the idea of your tier 1 competitors and all other tiers which will help you in structuring the hierarchy to see if their features overlap with yours and to what extent.
Close competitors would be tier 1 having the same audience base, product type, industry vertical, and geography. These are the ones you should focus the most on. The next step is to monitor tier 1 group of competitor more than others and you can designate the type of monitoring you would want for other tier competitors like market research, finance, and news updates.
1. Leveraging AI-based Competitive Intelligence Solution
The Competitive Intelligence Platform you use should be a trusted one because your entire competitive analysis is taken care of with the reliability of competitive intelligence software. Automating the monitoring of competitive insights helps one better manage their time and produces quality results. This helps strategy teams to focus on their core functions and analysis by reducing manual research to the bare minimum.
Organizations using competitive intelligence platforms use dashboards, newsletter services, or even both. They set the relevant alerts for tier 1, tier 2, and other competitors accordingly. The dashboard is a filtered version of newsfeed with competitor insights in the order relevant to you which saves you the scroll time. It is preferable to set tier 1 competitor alert for in-depth analysis including areas of product launch, messaging updates, marketing campaigns, etc. One can also set different update systems from different competitor players to reduce irrelevant junk on your dashboard.
The newsletter feature of the AI-based Competitive Intelligence platform helps the alerts or updates land up in your inbox with a marked level of relevancy as filtered by you. The algorithms choose and pick updates related to your industry in general too like government take around it, recent news, or acquisitions. So, different alerts would be relevant for different purposes as marked by your area of requirement.
2. Analyzing the Updates
The automated updates and your customized dashboards help you to work on further things smoothly. The trick is to keep up with the updates now and then, at least 15 minutes a day to filter the ones essential for your short-term or long-term goals.
The analyst then takes out time to analyze the updates, every week. The task is to dig into these alerts and see if any of your competitors are performing new launches or changing essential strategies or just trying something new as a market campaign. You can get ideas for your strengths and weaknesses while evaluating these factors and hence, this can lead you to design and plan your long-term goals. It can be noted that you might not get big alerts on an everyday basis or even weekly, but the art of competitive analysis is being regular with your competitor monitoring.
3. Strategizing the actions further
Finally, on finding meaningful insights, you need to act accordingly. Some leading organizations create competitive resources compilation in a centralized repository. So, you can compile competitive insights for different divisions in a repository for other stakeholders to interpret the insights as well. Sometimes, the insights you get are not valuable for what decisions you are responsible for in your organization. In that case, to collaborate effectively as a team player, you share the insights with the designated stakeholder. For example, if you receive a new marketing campaign for a competitor, you share it with your marketing team to note.
Some organizations also believe in collaborating such functions in different ways by having monthly discussions of all stakeholders to assess competitor and market developments. If the insight is not important, you can save them for such monthly discussions for long-term planning.
Conclusion
The key to strategize competitive intelligence is to incorporate these activities by booking 15 minutes of calendar time every day in your schedule. The importance of this can be visible in long-term outcomes as these insights become the base for taking strategic decisions. Lastly, choosing everyday practice would save your hefty monthly analysis of competitive monitoring and replace it with easy tracking through AI-enabled Competitive Intelligence Solution.
