Before you dive in, take a look at our simulated brand report demonstrating how Tesla used competitive intelligence to measure and analyze its share of voice in the auto industry.
If the communication silos in your organization aren’t broken up, insights will be lost. If your teams are stockpiling data and keeping it close to their numerous chests, you’re losing your competitive advantage and not fully understanding the importance of competitive intelligence.
Crayon’s 2018 State of Market Intelligence shows that the success of competitive intelligence relies on having total coverage of that digital footprint. 77% of businesses said intel on every aspect of a businesses’ marketing, products, sales, services, customers, etc., is vital if you’re looking to outsmart your competitors.
Use a tool like Quick Search to check out your competitors. Comparing market impact, you’ll see if you’re missing any opportunities to grow your online community.
Tesla competitive intelligence report - Twitter channel comparison (simulated report).
Harley, Indian, Triumph - big, gas guzzling motorbikes dominating the US market. Honda, looking to expand its business to the US, used competitive intelligence to analyze the competitive market and found a niche it could fill. Small bikes. Honda’s success in Japan, meant it could increase output and reduce costs. Its small, affordable, fuel-efficient bikes were a hit with US youngsters looking for a cheap alternative.
Competitive intelligence is the process of monitoring, gathering, analyzing and sharing intelligence about competitors, products, customers. Similar to competitor analysis, but CI goes deeper. It's a way to improve the competitiveness of your business, relative to its entire domain - competitors, technologies, customers, distributors, and macroeconomic data.
It's assumed that competitive intelligence and competitor analysis are the same thing. This would be an inaccurate assumption.
The definition of competitive intelligence is the act of describing, gathering, analyzing, and sharing intel related to competitors, products, customers. Anything that will help when making strategic business decisions.
You're looking for the unknown. Things occuring outside your organization that could affect your business. Check out Porter's 5 Forces later in this post. While this is similar to competitor analysis, competitive intelligence does more.
You’re developing the competitiveness of your business, relative to its industry - technologies, distributors, customers, competitors. And macroeconomic data - unemployment, growth rate, gross domestic product (GDP), and inflation.
The insights you pull from this analysis should then be shared across your organization - R&D, marketing, sales, PR, strategic planning, HR, product - in order to make informed decision as one team.
Competitive intelligence cycle.
Your team can use your competitive intelligence program to stay current on the company’s strategy. Topics being discussed in your industry. User-generated content surrounding your products. Internal communication from customer-facing teams. Your goals.
We’re suffering from information overload. The amount of content being shared online alone, is overwhelming. Having a competitive intelligence program in place in every organization is the only way to tackle this heap of data. And, it should be used by all teams - R&D, HR, sales, PR, product, marketing, customer service - to help them :
In the 1970s, Japan’s automotive industry analyzed the US car market looking for a way to enter and compete. Analysis revealed that high gas prices and increased numbers of smaller family units, had created a demand for smaller, fuel-efficient cars. Japan used CI techniques and was able to base manufacturing decisions based on the results, successfully infiltrating the US.
A competitive intelligence program (CIP) is a formalized process that evolves. Used by brands to monitor and analyze the evolution of its industry. Tracking the behavior of competitors so as to maintain a competitive advantage.
Monitoring and analyzing competitors’ communication and performance, so as to understand their strategies and share of voice. Your marketplace and industry to stay on top of trends, topics being discussed, and new initiatives. Data sources can include the press, focus groups, social media, blogs, forums, review sites, etc.
Quick Search - Pepsi vs Coca-Cola for 30-days.
Coca-Cola have a 9.4% market share in South Korea, which Pepsi should target.
You must also listen and share internal comms from across your organization, collecting intel from customer-facing teams.
It’s market research of your competition.
Traditional market research would tell you what consumers think is a fair price for your product. CI market research identifies your competitors’ pricing strategies and margins.
It’s ethical research. You’re studying data that’s available to the public. Data about your industry, products. Data from customers, shareholders. Publicly available financial reports. Press releases, blog posts, social media channels, forums, government databases, public records.
Basically, your mum could find it.
From walking into a competitor’s bricks and mortar shop to online multi-channel monitoring, it’s all about collecting intel on your business rivals.
Plenty of companies put in the hours collecting data, but have no clue what to do with it. Here’s a simple process to get you started:
While I’m sure you know how many and who they are, you have to do regular checks. I do mean daily. Are there newbies starting up? Ones you’ve missed?
Keep up to date by chatting with your team and customers. Monitor social media, industry press, set up Talkwalker Alerts and be notified in real-time.
Keep things in proportion. If you’re running a small bookshop just launching an ecommerce site, is it realistic to consider Amazon as a competitor? A competitor may not even be in the same industry as you. Remember, you’re competing for page ranking in search engines for your chosen keywords.
Keep your metrics simple at the start. Don’t track all the traffic hitting your website. Segment into traffic coming via organic search, social media, referral, email, etc. Then, you can fine-tune social into traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. Other metrics could include:
Clean it. Organize it. Consolidate it. Having all your data in one place means you can categorize, compare, and pull out valuable insights.
Create charts and visuals so your data is easier to understand and analyze. Live data - share of voice, search data - can be displayed on dashboards that update in real-time. Time to fire up your command center so you can track multiple data sources - your competitors’ and your own.
If the data never leaves your desk, it won’t help anyone. Share it across your organization so the entire team can benefit from your competitive strategy. Knowing and understanding your competitors’ - past, present, and future plans - is vital. This knowledge will fuel sales pitches, long-term marketing strategies, product development. Again, your command center should be displayed throughout the company so you’re all on the same page.
Battlecards ready. Product launch competitive intel completed. Now you have to measure, prove that your CI program is working. What does the sales team think of your marketing content? How is it used? If not, why not? What’s its impact on sales performance?
Whether you trying to improve your existing CI program or build a new one, you have to understand your baseline metrics. Following are the metrics you’ll need to comprehensively evaluate your competitive intelligence.
What does the sales team think of your competitive material? Helpful? Is it working? Are they even reading it? Which battlecards have proved successful and closed a deal? Talk to them and collect their feedback. You need to understand the following:
Sales teams are customer-facing. This means that often, their intel is more current than yours. Use the sales guys as part of your competitive intelligence program.
Time to evaluate the accuracy of your intel. I said above that sales often hear news about competitors first. Confirm that you’re collecting intel from the right data sources, and that reporting is done in real-time. Chat with the sales guys and compare notes - competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, wins and losses. If there are discrepancies, you’ll need to find better sources of data. And, include sales in your competitive intelligence program.
Win rates. What are they? Which of your competitors are most present? These are questions that sales will have to help answer, as it’s not always apparent who you’re competing with in a deal or RFP. You’ll need to be able to identify:
Measure how long it takes for the average sales cycle length. The goal of your competitive intelligence program would be to reduce the time it takes to close a deal.
A good CI program will have discovered how your competitors pitch to prospects and what prices they’re quoting. This intel means you can push your value, increase or reduce your prices. Your average deal size will increase with a comprehensive CI program as you’ll retain contract value.
If you can identify the average discounts offered by your competitors, the sales team can minimize discounts and dodge pricing battles.
Track how much revenue has been brought in for the deals where your competitive material has played a part. At what point during the sales cycle was your content used. This will give you an idea of what content proved successful. If you can’t prove the value of your CI program, why should your company’s board support it.
In the past, competitive intelligence was collected manually from newspapers, journals, etc. Now, with the mass of online content, there are new sources for CI data. There’s a huge range of tools for CI because there are so many different metrics to track, and so many places to look.
Using social media analytics and listening means you can track and analyze conversations online and find out what consumers are saying about you, and your competitors. You can track specific brand names, sentiment, audience demographics, topics, trends, hashtags, specific accounts, websites, etc.
Competitive intelligence - compare multiple competitor brands.
Quick Search is a powerful social search engine that will help you find content ideas, discover new influencers, understand consumers, spot new trends, and… it’s the best competitive intelligence tool on the market.
Quick Search competitive intelligence of Nike, Adidas, and Reebok showing share of countries.
Prospects, experts, competitors - more than you can shake a stick at.
An excellent way to find out what your competitors are up to is networking at industry events. Establish what you want to find out before attending, and target the relevant people. Chat to competitors, their customers, grab their marketing material, attend their presentations. But remember, they’ll being do the same to you.
This depends on the industry, but if possible visit the bricks and mortar location of your competitors. Check their prices and product promotions. Look, listen, learn. Failing this, Google. Check out every detail of their website, their social media accounts, their support site.
Major airlines are constantly updating their fares. We’ve all seen it, comparing prices over several sites. Return to your first choice and the price has increased. Why? They’re monitoring their competitors, who are upping prices for certain routes, days, time of day. They have to follow so they can secure higher margins.
Airlines also identify and track users who repeatedly search and book the same flight - regular trips. Overtime, the price will increase because they know that the traveller will keep coming back.
Sign up for your competitors newsletters and get on the mailing list. Every single one. There’s a heap of competitor intelligence to be found - new promotions, marketing strategy, tone of voice, company updates, events. Download all the reports they publish, sign up for their apps, use their RSS feed, follow all their social media accounts.
Google - undisputed king of the search engines - is driving traffic to your website. Use Google Analytics to track your traffic and identify where it’s coming from, where users are landing, what pages they’re looking at, how long they’re staying, and where your conversions are happening. You’ll get a feel for what content is working, what content is sending users to sleep. CTA placement, conversion rate, bounce rate, and more.
Google Analytics - find out what’s working on your website and what isn’t, then compare.
Ahrefs - SEO auditing, content marketing analysis, keyword ranking.
You can only use Google Analytics on your own site. To track your competitors, you’ll need to use tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush.
Use competitive intelligence tool Moz to perform an SEO audit on your rivals’ sites.
SEMrush will show you your competitors’ organic search results and AdWords campaigns.
You’ll learn how they rank on search engines, the levels of their traffic, what keywords they’re using and ranking for.
Good or bad coverage, you need to know what’s being said about your rivals. If they’re getting good press, why? What did they do? How did they do it? Can you replicate? Use this information to improve your own strategy.
Bad press? Is it possible to exploit the situation with targeted content?
Talkwalker Alerts is a free tool and the best way to track brand mentions. Your mentions and those of your competitors. Set up alerts and you’ll be notified in real-time of potential risks and opportunities related to your brand and your competitors’.
Talkwalker Alerts - real-time tracking of potential risks and opportunities.
You can pump your own customers for competitive intelligence, and your competitors’. Getting them to answer your questions isn’t always easy, so use tools like Google Forms and SurveyMonkey to create surveys and questionnaires.
SurveyMonkey - extract and share actionable insights with your team.
Google Forms - responses automatically collected with real-time response info and charts.
To identifying intel about your competitors means knowing where to look. Starting with the obvious, check these types of competitive intelligence:
Check them regularly, follow, sign up, download...
Find the motivation behind purchasing decisions by interviewing new customers. Plus, if possible, prospects that you lost to the competition.
What did they expect from the product? Why did they choose your brand? Why didn’t they choose your brand? If - meh, it happens - they chose one of your competitors, ask them why. Nicely.
Check out:
Your team know all about the competitive landscape. Encourage them to share their intel - market trends, discussion topics, competitors’ behavior, new products emerging.
Contact external industry experts too - bloggers, influencers, public speakers, journalists - for industry gossip.
All the information that you collect must be stored in a database that’s accessible to your entire organization. This data is crucial for launching new campaigns, developing products, answering RFPs, etc. It has to be kept up to date, to be of any use.
Do not ever be tempted to call your competitors and pretend to be a customer, prospect, student, or researcher. It might be a quick way to find out their pricing, roadmap, technology, but it’s a real no no.
Industrial espionage or theft of intellectual property will see you in court.
Forrester, Gartner, etc. - data collected from industries and vendors - you and your competitors - that analyze strategy, rate products and services, monitor market share and growth.
Review sites are a great source of content shared by consumers about your and your competitors - G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, etc. SWOT from consumers, you’ll read great reviews and not so great. Be strong and learn from them.
Porter’s Five Forces.
Heard of it? It’s a business intelligence model created by Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor. Originally published in 1980, it still holds water. Porter believed companies should look beyond competitors’ actions and examine other factors with the potential to impact the industry. He found five forces with the power to shape every market and industry in the world. The forces can be used to measure the intensity of the competition, attractiveness, and profitability of an industry or market.
Competition in the industry
New entrants in the industry
Power of suppliers
Power of customers
Threat of substitute products
Understand and use this methodology. Then adjust your business strategy to work more effectively and generate higher earnings.
Ask yourself the above questions and add your answers to my free competitive intelligence template.
Download Porter’s Five Forces template.
You’ve done it for your business, and it’s a great place to start when evaluating your competitors. SWOT - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats - an analysis that identifies internal and external factors that determine a team’s future performance. Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors. External factors are opportunities and threats.
SWOT analysis - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.
Looking at your competitors’ SWOT will help you understand their businesses. How can you exploit their weaknesses? Make like you’re one of their customers and ask yourself:
SWOT analysis should be done hand-in-hand with TOWS.
SWOT is a way of auditing and analyzing. TOWS is for strategy generation and selection. At the start of a planning process, you’d perform a SWOT analysis, TOWS helps you decide how to move forward.
TOWS analysis.
There are four TOWS strategies:
TOWS is subjective - results depend on how honest you’ve been with your data.
STEEP analysis measures how the external environment will impact your company’s strategic plan, while remaining competitive. It brings insights into the past, current, and future during:
It’s not unusual in business that a decision has to be made super-fast. Using STEEP analysis gives you a detailed overview on how external factors are driving trends. The results will also predict what may happen in the future - how the market will react to changes in particular elements.
STEEP analysis - impact from external environment.
Surprisingly, there are many brands that aren’t monitoring and analyzing their competitors. The Crayon 2018 State of Market Intelligence report stated that 93% of respondents claim to monitor their competitors’ websites, only 14% do it every day.
A comprehensive competitor intelligence program can:
Download this awesome, simulated brand report about Tesla and its share of voice in the automotive industry. Drive your brand to success!