The arena of digital marketing today is engulfed with stiff competition. Be it search engine optimization i.e. SEO or social media optimization i.e. SMO, almost all businesses, big and small, are gradually making their entries into this digital game. It is not a question any more that how many brands and businesses are engaging themselves in this digital marketing game, but the real question lies on which tactics are they relying and how much amount of money are these businesses investing in their course of digital marketing. Creating an edge and carving a niche is tougher than it was ever before; and this exercise of digital marketing has never been as challenging as it is now with so much competition around. It is now must to have the knowledge of the digital marketing exercises your competitors are taking up in order to be one stay ahead of them.The stack of competitors that you have is a sort of a treasure trove of out-of-the-box ideas and innovative digital marketing tactics. You can make use of these to optimize your ad copies, to find new sales channels, to augment your business revenue, and to reduce your costs of customer acquisition.
The Intelligent Intervention of Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligenceinvolves knowing theother outer prevailing forces, which influence your business marketing. These can be to look up the latest press releases published by your direct competitors and check out their social media profiles/accounts for understanding the issues faced by their clients & customer so that you can be proactive in finding ways to meet these needs first and troubleshoot your business’ problem points much before they surface. To cut a long story short, competitive intelligenceimplies to gain knowledge about the forces prevailing outside your business to have a competitive advantage in your said field.You can avail my avant-garde competitive intelligence services.
How Does Competitive Intelligence Grow Your Business?
Competitive intelligenceimprovesthe performance of your business. Here’s how
- Reduces costs
- Amplifies sales
- Expands your organization’s agility
- Captures opportunities for alliances
- Suppresses competitors’ sales & profits
- Discoversprofitable acquisition prospects
- Augmentsself-protectivebusiness strategies
- Leveragesoutsmarting performance blockades
Competitive Intelligence for Business Growth
As a part of your digital marketing exercise, you can use competitive intelligence to prepare for new campaigns in a better way by using the experiences of your business competitors, studying how their audience has responded to their marketing campaigns, and comparing them to your own for creating more effective digital ads. Go one step further & beyond! Search for the data about advertisers &publishers in the online market, and also find out the vendors used by your competitors. Thus, formulate a more vast definition of your competition by looking at their targeted audience and seeing their potentially conversions. Always remember that your competition is much larger than you perceive; it is definitely not that small circle in your niche, it is much bigger than that! Your competition is any business or brand, no matter it is big or small, which has the potential to take your target audience or your potential customers away from you!This is how you use competitive intelligence for business growth.
Stages of Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence involves a series of calculated actions or steps to gather & analyze data about your business rivals/competitors, their clients/customers, and their targeted audience. Following are the steps or stages of competitive intelligence:
Market Insights & Strategic Planning
This step of market insights & strategic planningis regarded as the engagement of the management, and deciding which intelligence is needed, to let the competitive intelligence person decide the direction to be pursued to efficaciouslycompletethesaid task.
Counter-Intelligence
Counter-intelligence is a method to secure business secrecies, confidential plans, secret techniques, programsas well as projects to ward-off any adversaries. Counter intelligence basically means toprotect your company’s secrets. As you may be fascinatedto know your competitors’ secret plans, they also might be having the same intent to know about your secret plans; so it is important to secure your confidential info from them.
Continuous Intelligence Collection
This step or stage of continuous intelligence collection marks the assemblage of raw data & info for intelligence purpose. The source(s) of this info thus used are the ones that are handyin the public domains. This implies that is you know where to find this information, you can easily access it. This is the aspect that makes CI or competitive intelligence legal and ethical. Some of these readily available sources in the public domains are the online databases, e-books, broadcasts, businesses’ annual reports, periodicals, and management speeches etc.
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysisis the core stage; here distinctivepieces of data & info get transformed into actionable intelligence. Competitor analysisis considered as the toughest aspect of this entire intelligence cycle.
Market Intelligence
Market intelligencehighpointsthe acquiring of data and doing the analysis of that information relating to the geopolitical issues, marketing trends and regulations in the firm’s market.
Commercial Due Diligence
Commercial due diligence is basically the procedureundertaken by an organization or a corporation for gauging their business’ commercial appeal. In mycommercial due diligencepractice, I dothe analysis of your potential target market environment as well as your competitive position and the whole impactof this on your targeted business plan(s).
Market & Media Intelligence
Market &media intelligence makes use of data mining activities and data science exercise or analyzing social, public and editorial media content. This mentionsthose marketing systems, which synthesize numerous online communications and/or conversations to find appropriateand relevant info. This helps in allowing firm to measure as well as manage their content performance, understand the marketing trends, and drive their communication channels and business strategies.
To Conclude
Competitive intelligence is must for the growth of any business in the online worldtoday. I am a competitive intelligence consultant; you can avail my exceptional services to scale your business to newer heights.