How to carry out effective competitive intelligence?

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Competitive intelligence encompasses all the activities you undertake to understand your competitive environment for marketing and sales purposes. It can focus on your competitors' overall strategy as well as specific aspects (products, communication, pricing policy, etc.). It thus becomes a tool to help you make strategic decisions based on the analysis of the competition's practices (good or bad).

Why carry out competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence isn't about copying what your competitors are doing; quite the opposite. It's about analyzing their marketing and sales practices and using them to sharpen your competitive advantage .

Carrying out competitive intelligence can therefore be used to:

Define best practices in your sector of activity (common to your main competitors),
Anticipate your competitors' upcoming activities that could have an impact on your business (launch of a new product or service, opening of a point of sale, website redesign, etc.)
Analyze the competitiveness of your brand in this competitive environment (e-reputation, consumer preferences, top-of-mind, etc.)
Carrying out competitive intelligence, yes, but for whom?
The reasons for conducting competitive intelligence must also take into account the question "for whom?" This guides the actions you will take to analyze your competitors' strategies.

Effective competitive intelligence should be a tool for your employees (sales, marketing, management, etc.). It should help them implement appropriate actions to sustainably position the company and distinguish it from its competitors.

Where can I find information for effective competitive intelligence?
In this article, we will focus on white information . This is all information that is freely available, generally on the web. This term, business intelligence, is opposed to gray information, the result of an investigation or indiscretion (employee, supplier, distributor, etc.), and black information, obtained illegally (industrial espionage).

To find information to conduct competitive intelligence, you can:

Analyze your honduras phone number data competitors' digital communication media (website, social media, newsletters, etc.): you can use platforms like Similarweb (freemium offer) for an in-depth marketing study;
Use specialized sites to obtain information on the structure of the competing company or its financial health (e.g. societe.com);
Browse customer review sites (e.g. Trustpilot) or employee review sites (e.g. Glassdoor);
Use Social Listening software (e.g. Hootsuite, SEMrush, etc.);
Create feeds or alerts linked to your competitors’ digital activity (Google Alerts, Feedly, etc.);
Use mystery shoppers to carry out in-store visits;
Buying competing products or services…
To save time, you can also call on a marketing agency and entrust them with this essential monitoring work.

5 steps to effective competitive intelligence
Define competitive intelligence priorities
Before you launch your competitive intelligence, you must first define your priorities. Your goal is to collect relevant information that can be used for your business. This assumes you know what to focus on. Monitoring can, in fact, apply to a specific aspect of your competitors' marketing strategy. You could, for example, study their pricing policy (price monitoring), the launch of new products, or the growth of their community on social networks . Competitive intelligence is above all a tool to serve your own objectives : you must use it as such.

Getting to know your target
To leverage your competitive intelligence, you need to correlate it with your customer knowledge. You need to put yourself in their shoes and understand what they expect from you. In other words, ask yourself the right questions to understand your potential buyers' motivations . Competitive pricing, influencer recommendations, website ease of use, positive customer reviews ... Explore all possible avenues to identify why a target consumer would choose one company over another.