In this digital world, competitive intelligence is the latest buzz word! In fact, according to the Crayon 2020 State of Competitive Intelligence Report, 94% of businesses are now investing in competitive intelligence (CI). But why are so many businesses spending so much money to apply CI in their business strategies? Check out this guide to find out!
Definition Competitive intelligence
Competitive intelligence is the formal research process of collecting, evaluating, and interpreting data around detailed business benchmarks. CI’s end goal is to use that data to develop a business’ core competencies.
A competitive intelligence process brings extensive market research into your competitive landscape looking at competitors’ practices, pricing, products, and more, in order to stimulate smarter, more informed business decisions of your own.
Importance
Competitive intelligence offers the most detailed and accurate course of action toward competitive advantages. While many businesses want a distinct set of competitive advantages, not everyone understands how to get there. That’s where competitive intelligence analysis comes in. Here are the three steps that CI can help businesses boost their marketing strategies:
Step 1: Businesses can use CI to establish an extensive investigative campaign targeting specific operational, organizational, and commercial concerns.
Step 2: Businesses can interpret the CI data, getting essential information to help them differentiate their brands and gain better insights.
Step 3: Businesses can execute a milestone roadmap using CI data to closely realign operations and budgets toward the right strategic growth priorities.
Benefits
Listed below are the great benefits of utilizing competitive marketing intelligence to your business strategies:
- Capture Competitive Insights
CI creates unique, evaluative data sets leading toward heightened competitive business activities. This allows businesses to picture themselves with clearer eyes, know what they’re doing successfully and what keeps them lagging behind their competitors.
- Track Industry Trends
CI guides businesses through changes they can make today to improve tomorrow. It also hands over external market information that lends predictive insights into emerging industry trends.
- Develops Better Decision Making
With CI data, businesses can take a look at current strengths and capability gaps, and then re-prioritize investments and efforts to address them directly.
- Improve Product and Service Speeds-to-Market
Speed-to-market is the time a business takes to see its product or service move from the initial ideation to public sales. With CI, businesses can easily improve their product and service speeds-to-market using the data gathered from their competitive intelligence research.
- Predict Competitors’ Behaviors
With the information gleaned from competitive intelligence, businesses are primed to better predict a competitor’s behaviors across business domains, and then beat them effectively.
- Determine Strategic Priorities
CI clarifies data-backed actions and opportunities for businesses to avail. It helps them illustrate how that opportunity can benefit their strategic priorities and gives objective defenses behind tomorrow’s business investments.
Industries That Need Competitive Intelligence
Tech Industry
The tech industry evolves at megabit speeds. Changes in consumer expectations often parallel shifts in wider technological affordances and access, with many tech companies salivating to provide the latest and greatest commercial and enterprise technological goods. With a competitive intelligence process, tech companies can easily predict future market trends and determine better strategic priorities.
Financial Services Industry
The financial services sector is facing many significant challenges, such as rapidly changing product markets and consumers with increasingly complex and individualized needs. With competitive marketing intelligence, financial services companies can maximize the power of CI data to make better decisions and determine their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
Industrial and Manufacturing Industry
The industrial and manufacturing industry has undergone a massive transformation in the 21st century. Scaled-up global competition, combined with emerging technologies and changing supply and demand models, has changed the landscape of the manufacturing industry. Competitive intelligence allows manufacturers to maximize their strengths while minimizing market risks.
B2B Industry
The digital world is evolving at a never-before pace especially in the B2B sector. B2B companies are now discovering the power of competitive intelligence in marketing to reach potential clients and sustain repeat customers.
If you want to utilize CI in your business strategies, look for the best competitive intelligence companies that would guide you along the way. Good thing Markable Solutions is here to help. We provide the best competitive intelligence services fit for your business needs. So what are you waiting for? Consult us now!
Download Whitepaper
Recent Blogs
-
Unifying Marketing & Sales Teams: The best-ever alliance your business needs
Marketing and Sales are two strong pillars of your business that work closely for revenue generation. In the past, marketers did not emphasize unifying them, and therefore, they worked in siloes. The teams worked in parallel to achieve the common goal of businesses: lead generation and acquiring new business. However, the irony is that both
July 26, 2024 -
Is content syndication worth your time and investment?
A significant number of companies invest in content syndication services. The Content Marketing Institute has revealed a compelling insight: 90% of content marketers rely on social media to distribute their content, and 79% maintain an active blog. If you haven’t considered content syndication, here are three reasons to let you understand the unique power it wields in your lead-generation process. Why
July 24, 2024 -
6 Golden Rules of a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Ask reputed B2B marketers about email marketing and they’ll say,” Oh yes, we love email marketing!’. A great tool for nurturing leads, they will way. According to Hubspot, 37% of brands are increasing their email marketing budget! The foundation of a long-term relationship starts with an introduction. An effective email marketing campaign gradually changes the
July 20, 2024 -
Crush your B2B Lead Generation Goals with Intent Data
Intent Data is not just a tool; it’s your new ally in the world of B2B marketing that can lead you straight to your target audience. By tapping into user behavior, understanding their needs, and providing them with customized solutions, you can accelerate your B2B lead generation journey. This level of customization in your engagement
July 8, 2024 -
Two Things about Telemarketing Services we bet you didn’t notice!
Today, B2B lead gen partners adopt an overarching strategy that includes multi-touch campaigns to reach the right target audience and establish meaningful relationships with them. They adopt email marketing, content syndication, and telemarketing to reach prospective buyers. Email marketing is a great tool; it can produce high-quality leads for your business when used correctly. Similarly, content
May 29, 2024
How can we help you?
We love questions and feedback – and we’re always happy to help! Please click below to contact us.