Unlocking the Value of Competitive Intelligence in Your Business Plan

What is a competitive intelligence strategy? Think of it as the research, review, and analysis done in service of helping your company enhance its offerings, capabilities, and marketing programs, with the aim of gaining an advantage to better compete in the marketplace. Putting a competitive intelligence strategy in place can enable business leaders and firms to gain deeper visibility into the competitive landscape and marketplace. It can also empower them to leverage learnings and insights from these efforts to build more effective business or promotions strategies and help increase their odds of successfully going toe-to-toe with competing firms.

“Staying abreast of what’s happening in the marketplace and what competitors are doing is only becoming more important these days,” says Josh Levetan, co-founder of home theater and automation integrator LV Pros. “As fast as things are changing out there, it helps to keep one eye out for how product and service trends are evolving. Of course, at bare minimum, you also need to stay up to date on how customer preferences are changing, too, if you want to maximize your odds of staying a profitable business.”

In other words, building a competitive intelligence strategy and investing in competitor intelligence efforts can help stay on top of how your industry is shaping up and evolving, helping you to gain a competitive advantage. Let’s take a closer look at how you can utilize these practices to help differentiate your company and grow your market share.

What Is Competitive Intelligence?

The term competitive intelligence describes your capacity to collect, analyze, and leverage actionable data and insights on competitors, clients, and market forces or other business attributes that can help your company create competitive advantage. It’s a crucial compass to watch when making strategic decisions, as it provides you with details into competitive landscapes and analysis of industry trends, as well as rivals’ market shares, product features, and marketing strategies. The term "competitive intelligence" generally describes research done on the marketplace, competitors, industry dynamics, products, and other areas of interest with an eye towards boosting your ability to compete.

The Importance of Competitive Intelligence in Business

The practice of implementing a competitive intelligence strategy is important because, as you set about building your business, you aren’t doing so in a vacuum. Rather, a host of competitors, emerging trends and market conditions can impact your organizational effectiveness as well. That’s why gathering strategic competitive intelligence and collecting and analyzing data on rivals’ activities can be critical. Doing so not only allows you to better comprehend the market landscape in which you’re playing. It can also allow you to:

• Understand market dynamics and trends
• Identify emerging opportunities and challenges
• Compare and contrast your efforts with those of competitors
• Pinpoint new opportunities and new audiences to serve
• Make more informed business decisions

“It pays to keep your eyes and ears open to see what’s going on out there,” notes Levetan, who says that doing so doesn’t have to necessarily be a difficult or time-consuming activity to pursue, either.

“From attending trade shows to see what products and solutions are on the rise to tuning into free online webinars that partners provide, it helps to always be learning. Even going to local networking events and discussing what marketing strategies are working with other small-business owners or polling customers to get their thoughts can provide helpful ideas and insights.”

Key Components of Competitive Insights

As part of your efforts to gather and analyze competitor intelligence, you’ll want to stay attuned to several variables. Doing so can not only help you better plan ahead and design winning business strategies. It can also help you maximize efforts to establish and maintain competitive advantage. For example, you’ll want to implement solutions such as:

Customer Analysis

Leveraging tools such as polls, surveys, and market research can help you better understand customers’ wants, needs, and pain points. So too can feedback and social media commentary help you better tune in to what’s driving clients’ business decisions. In effect, listening to your customers is a core aspect of the practice of gathering strategic competitive analysis. Insights gained through these efforts should inform the shape of products, services, and marketing campaigns to enhance targeting and client impressions.

Product Analysis

It’s not only important to monitor your present-day product development efforts to ensure that they’re aligned with current market conditions and customer needs. You’ll also want to gather competitive insights that can help you future-proof your company by offering a better understanding of where the market is trending. Performing a product analysis can give you a better sense of how your offerings stack up against the competition’s – and where room for improvement and innovation, or opportunity to target different audiences and markets, exists.

“As fast as things are changing out there, it helps to keep one eye out for how product and service trends are evolving. You also need to stay up to date on how customer preferences are changing, too, if you want to maximize your odds of staying a profitable business.” —Josh Levetan, co-founder, LV Pros 

Industry Analysis

No effort at assembling competitor intelligence is complete without running a full industry analysis either. Doing so provides a comprehensive look at sector dynamics, key players in any given space, and the relationships and regulations that govern the market. Insights gained here should provide a better sense of where opportunities and challenges exist – and how to craft your business models, strategic investments, and operating plans accordingly.

Market Analysis

Running an analysis on the marketplace also helps you identify emerging market trends, better target customers, and make strategic decisions that support the growth of your business and its market share. As part of these efforts, you can gain deeper insights into how the industry may evolve going forward, and you can adapt your company’s strategies and solutions in turn to match. 

Applying Competitive Intelligence in Business Planning

It’s one thing to institute a competitive intelligence strategy, another to bring all the research and analysis that you’ve been running together to create actionable impact. On the bright side, leveraging competitor intelligence to shape business, product, and marketing strategy doesn’t have to be difficult when you actively apply learnings in context. You can more effectively address complex competitive environments and future-proof against economic or geopolitical uncertainty when you incorporate research and analysis into your strategic planning process.

Developing Effective Marketing Strategies

Via a combination of surveys, polling, and both actively listening to customers and monitoring rivals’ promotional efforts, you can enhance your marketing strategies. Likewise, implementing an ever-growing suite of customer relationship management and data management tools and solutions can provide helpful learnings and insights that can better inform the shape of promotional programs. In other words, by applying market research and market intelligence to stay better attuned to industry trends and customer expectations, you can design marketing and advertising campaigns to better resonate and connect. The most successful firms seamlessly interweave market research and competitive intelligence programs with business processes to know what outreach strategies to deploy and when, as well as how to present and package them – and which specific channels through which to deliver them. A variety of free and paid online tools can help you gain and leverage deeper insights into the marketplace to create promotional programs that better resonate with target demographics.

Enhancing Sales Strategies and Performance

Armed with a competitive intelligence strategy, you’ll gain greater visibility into the shape of competitive environments and be able to make better strategic decisions about how to position and promote your offerings. In effect, selling solutions to your customers becomes much easier when you understand their wants and needs, and are more intimately aware of the day-to-day challenges they face. Competitor intelligence efforts, tools, and platforms of varying kinds (including both free and paid solutions) can give you clearer visibility into how to better target prospects and package your products and services to sell. Likewise, data management and predictive technology platforms can also provide you with a better sense as to what solutions your customers may be interested in going forward – even if customers aren’t actively aware of these needs currently themselves.

Supporting Strategic Decision-Making

Nowadays, it’s more important than ever to be gathering, analyzing, and distilling data-driven insights into actionable strategic solutions. That means having to institute data collection, analysis, and visualization tools into business processes up and down the board, with every customer or market interaction your business engages in a potential source of insight. Conducting regular analysis of competitor intelligence can help you distill information into actionable insights, and proactively adapt your business strategies. Engaging in these practices not only helps you become more agile in terms of planning for or responding to shifts in the marketplace, it can also enable you to more rapidly build a competitive edge.

Challenges and Considerations in Competitive Intelligence

It’s critical that you leverage trusted, standardized, and accurate sources of data when making decisions. Likewise, it’s just as important that you make a point to boost your organization’s data literacy rates and learn to ask smarter questions, as information isn’t particularly useful from a strategic standpoint unless it’s applied in proper context. There are also legal and ethical concerns to be aware of, as well as privacy-related laws and issues. Overall, it pays to remember: details and fact-checking efforts matter when it comes to operating in a world of data-driven decision-making.

“You’ve got to get your facts straight and be sure you’re not operating off flawed data or assumptions,” says Levetan. “That typically means having to dig deeper into any given trend or theory to see if there’s a root cause or concern behind it. These days, it’s important to not take anything at face value without doing more research. Hopefully when you’re considering testing out a new marketing strategy or business theory, you’re starting out small and prototyping ideas cost-efficiently, too.”

Leveraging Competitive Insights for Market Fragmentation

Competing and winning in an increasingly more fragmented marketplace can require business owners and operators to think more strategically and stay better attuned to competitor intelligence. By designing and implementing a smart competitive intelligence strategy across your full range of operations, you can make your business more flexible and adaptable, and stay more in tune with changing times and trends. 

“If there’s one constant in the world of business, it’s that things can and will change – and often change quite frequently,” says Levetan. “The more informed and aware you are, the better equipped to deal with whatever the future brings that you’ll typically be.”

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