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!
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