You know you and your organization need competitive intelligence, but where to begin? What tools should you use, and will they be responsive enough to keep you up to date? How do you sift through all the information to find what’s relevant to your business? What if there isn’t enough information? The preparation alone can be overwhelming.
But when you get the full picture of your industry and competitors, you can plan and strategize for a more successful future.
Competitive intelligence does this on a number of levels.
Drilling Down: Using CI to Ease Pain Points at Every Level
Competitive intelligence is an all-encompassing term. Many people confuse competitive intelligence with competitor intelligence. Competitive intelligence lets you capture, analyze, and act on information about your business and industry. It’s a look at every possible thing that could impact your business and competitive advantage.
More specifically, sector intelligence examines your industry and the current events affecting that industry. Knowing the trends and challenges for your industry help you pivot and adapt more quickly.
Market intelligence takes it one step further to examine the place where transactions happen. When you analyze at this level, you see growth opportunities now and in the future. This is your opportunity to tap into new markets by identifying trends in your consumers.
As the competitive environment grows tighter, competitor intelligence helps you understand what the competitors have going on under the hood. This is where you gather research on your competitors, watch the moves they’re making with product launches and pivots, and creating strategies to stay in the game.
Keeping Up: How CI Can Change Your Business
One aspect of competitor intelligence is understanding the technology and innovation your competitors are using and how they leverage those platforms to engage their consumers. This gives you the opportunity to examine your own innovative strategy to increase your own consumer engagement.
While examining your own processes and practices in comparison, it gives you the opportunity to find the weaknesses in your products and services. When you examine your competitors or the market, you may encounter new strategies you hadn’t considered before.
Of course, uncovering insights about your competitor can help you identify what will be most effective with your consumers. You’ll improve your advertising and content strategies to help you rank higher in searches and in the minds of your target audience.
Nexis for Competitive Intelligence helps you get ahead of the competition with three times the content powered by the largest collection of global content. This platform helps you identify your competitive edge in a seamless way.