Introduction
Sometime it seems like some companies are always ahead of the market regardless of the changes happening during certain times. This is mostly because they use competitive intelligence insights. Competitive intelligence is a formal and legal process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting specified data sets that may be used to improve your business core competencies.
Competitive intelligence tools available to businesses
Competitive intelligence is not just your ordinary research into the tactics and methods that make other businesses great, but rather, it is a deep dive into detailed analytics and metrics of specified company strategies that make them stay ahead of the competition. To conduct this deep research, you will spend an extremely large amount of time in analyzing market intelligence. Nevertheless, there are various free and enterprise related tools that you can use to help you with your market intelligence analytics. Some of the top competitive and market intelligence research tools include:
- SpyFu
- SEMrush
- Moat
- BuzzSumo
- Rival IQ
- Brandwatch Analytics
- Similar Web
- TrackMaven
These tools use SEO and specified content marketing insights to gather appropriate data for your research.
How to use competitive intelligence tools
As a general rule, there is no particular stipulated process of conducting competitive intelligence. You will find that in order to have competitive insights. You will also probably look into a series of domains, topics, and target market elements that offer an in-depth understanding of what you are supposed to know with respect to a specified industry. Interestingly, the findings arising from todays competitive research might as well be the insights of tomorrow. As such, there are a couple of target domains in every business that will give you an appropriate approximation of the topics areas that you are looking to learn from:
Social listening
Market intelligence
Personnel and culture insights
Partnership and vendor insights
Media attention
Consumer insights
Sales insights
Product and service insights
Advantages of using competitive intelligence
So, with all this in mind, you might be wondering what the fuss about competitive intelligence is all about. You will find that this method of insightful comprehension of business aspects is beneficial in a number of ways:
For starters, you will have gleaned competitive insights. The various methods used to gather information of CI will unearth a lot of qualitative and quantitative data on business activities that allows organizations to look at their businesses from new perspectives.
Furthermore, you will be able to track your industry trends and predict concurrent outcomes of business models and activities. In essence, the valuable insights that you acquire will guide your organization into making tomorrow much better than it is at present times.
Yet another advantage of using CI is that you will be able to improve the decision-making, return on investment policies and tactics. With a load of information on the business activities that are most profitable within an industry, you will be able to tell which of your business models need re-structuring or which areas need to be explored further to facilitate a profitable business.
Choosing a platform that best suits business needs
Conducting competitive intelligence is a long and involving process and thus, most companies outsource this function to other companies that deal exactly with improving your business core competencies. For Instance, NetBase Quid is a CI company that helps you analyze current trends, finds out your business drives, manages business crises and protects your brand. The company uses consumer and market intelligence to offer foresight into the direction that your company should be taking within the specified industry. Some of the major industries that it deals with include health, technological and consumer goods.
