Why Is Competitive Intelligence So Hot in Today’s Market?
Businesses everywhere are turning to competitive intelligence professionals to keep them ahead of their competition. This article will help you understand how important competitive intelligence is for your organization’s business strategy to make sure you stay ahead of the curve.
What Does Competitive Intelligence Mean?
Companies have always been gathering information about their competitors to stay ahead. If you want your business’s strategies to be successful, they need to be responsive to your industry’s market conditions. The best way to make sure that happens is to start analyzing your competitor’s behavior, trends, and results to see what you can learn from them.
The competitive intelligence professionals at Archintel pride themselves on their informative research and insightful strategies to keep your business up to date. They gather market information from a variety of sources. This gives you a comprehensive picture of where your industry is headed. These can include social media posts and trends, competitor websites, patent databases, customer review sites, online forums, recruitment listings, and interviews with competitors and those that interact with them.
Each of these sources can provide a different perspective on the competition. For example, your competitors may post updates on social media about featured promotions or deals. These can help you learn what the competition believes is appealing to customers and how they have structured their marketing strategy.
Recent updates to patent databases can signal incoming products or novel technology. Competitive intelligence helps you foresee innovation in your industry before it arrives. Meanwhile, online forums and customer reviews of competitor products can give you critical insight into how customers feel about your competitors’ products.
Competitive intelligence is a critical tool to upgrade your business plan to meet the demands of one of the most competitive markets in history. You don’t want to start falling behind. The professionals at Archintel are ready to take your business to the next level.
Top 5 Advantages of Competitive Intelligence
In today’s market, businesses are eager to do what they can to stay at the top of their industry. In fact, one survey found that 94% of businesses have turned their attention to competitive intelligence as a way to optimize their business strategies. Wondering what it can do for you? Here are five of the key advantages that an investment in competitive intelligence can bring about for your organization:
Predict the competition’s next move
The surest way to stay ahead of the competition is knowing what they’re going to do before they do it. With competitive intelligence, you have the power to foresee your competitors’ next moves before they make them.
For example, based on their social media trends, marketing strategies, and new product releases, you can get a more complete picture of the direction your competitor is headed. That means you can better prepare your own business for changes in the market or an evolving industry.
You don’t want to be the last to hear about what the competition is planning. The competitive intelligence professionals at Archintel work hard to make sure you always wake up to high-quality insight.
Refine your marketing strategy
The best competitive intelligence turns into concrete action that improves your own business. That means that insight into your competition should transform your own marketing strategy to make it as successful as possible.
Has the competition in your industry started engaging more directly with customers on social media? Did they launch a particularly memorable advertising campaign? Are they trying out a new product?
These questions should help get you thinking about the competition. You should be able to identify what the competition is doing successfully to inform and optimize your own marketing strategy.
Identify successful keywords
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the main ways that businesses can get noticed online and boost traffic to their site. Using precise, relevant keywords can help your business surface to the top of search engine result pages when customers search topics related to your business.
Although, sometimes it can be hard to identify which keywords most closely fit your business. Competitive intelligence can help you hone in on the words that others in your industry have found to drive the most traffic. If your competition uses SEO in their own blog posts or social media updates, you can use that information to guide your own word choice.
SEO is an incredibly popular and effective tactic to keep your content at the forefront of search engines. Don’t let your content trail behind the competition. Competitive intelligence can help you pinpoint the strongest keywords that your business should be highlighting.
Get a clearer picture of customer sentiment
Evaluating online forums and customer review sites should give you a better idea of how customers feel about your competitors. You can better understand what is most disappointing or frustrating to customers, what they really value and appreciate, and their level of satisfaction with what your competitors are already doing.
This information is incredibly valuable to you. Customer satisfaction is one of the most important variables when it comes to business. If your competitor is always meeting customer expectations, you can find out what’s working for them. On the other hand, if customers are consistently disappointed by a particular product feature, website failure, or customer service issue, you can figure out areas where you might have some leverage over the competition.
Fuel your own brand’s innovation
Creativity often requires inspiration. If your business is stuck in a rut and doing the same things over and over again, it might be time to branch out. A comprehensive review of the kind of innovation your competition is driving can help your own team think outside your industry’s traditional box.
Doing the same thing over again without efforts to stay up to date can be damaging to your business. Insight into what the competition is developing can inspire your own innovation and progress and keep you ahead.
Competitive intelligence is so hot in today’s market because it gives your business the information it needs to be successful. You want to stay ahead, satisfy customers, and know up-to-date information about your industry. Contact the professionals at Archintel today to get started!