How do you track competitive intelligence

Building a consultancy service hinges on your ability to gather information about your niche. You must know who or what you are against when launching your services into the business space. Knowing your competition is part of the planning phase, and you can begin the planning phase by getting a competitive intelligence reports from a consultancy company. Once you have all the information, you can start preparing your strategic planning, an essential step to make the right decisions for your business. Read on and discover more about strategic intelligence.

Identify your Direct competitors

When gathering competitive intelligence, direct competitors should be the first step so that you can critically analyze your business strategy. It is important to familiarize yourself with whomever is selling the same products as your company because you will deal with the same customers.

By researching your direct competitors, you are required to do market research and compare the pricing structures. You can do market research through the following steps;

• Look at their social media activity and customer reviews to better understand how to compete with them in the business landscape.
• Condition your employees to compete with standards set by your competitors.

You are building a competitor profile for your company using the above methods. Categorize insights by other companies on certain topics of interest and store them for future reference. By doing this, you have information on your competition and how they operate, giving your employees a full view of how they operate. 

Highlight Key Areas of Interest

After analyzing your competitors, it is important to highlight the key areas of interest from the competitors and how the insights will help you achieve competitive intelligence. Once you have identified these key areas of interest, it gives you direction to handle the synthesized information.

Once you have clarity, you have the competitive intelligence to plan and create a mechanism for how you can succeed.

Review external and internal data

When still in the research phase and analyzing your competition, you must create a data storage within your organization for easier access to real-time insights. It is important to have internal intelligence within your organization, which disseminates information from various sources such as social media and user review websites. 

Corporate social media accounts are tools for communicating with clients. When reviewing social media websites, it is important to gather what content other companies post regarding the keywords targeted and topics they are discussing. When checking the reviews posted by customers, apply effort to what seems to be ailing your competitors and satisfy customers in the process. 

Pricing is also an important piece of data you should evaluate as a company because you don’t want to get into a pricing battle with competitors. 

Your team should ensure what they hear is not lost because all conversations had within the company are valuable assets. Ensure what you share in group meetings or chat threads is not lost because they could be useful to the company’s growth. 

Centralize Competitive Intelligence

After the research phase and collecting data, the implementation process begins by encouraging employees to share their ideas with the whole organization. Organize departmental meetings to identify key ideas that may benefit the company. 

It is part of building employee engagement so employees don’t keep ideas to themselves. If that happens, competitors may latch on to a revolutionary idea that would put them ahead again, and the company might have to re-evaluate its data. 

As a company, you need to monitor your improvement. Create a competitive improvement plan amongst the employees, encouraging organizational competition. When creating the improvement plan, also include a reward system. Encouraging and celebrating employees for their contributions is important because it will help build trust and engagement within your organization. 

Share competitive insights with stakeholders

You must communicate your goals before you share insights with your stakeholders. It is an important way of highlighting your direction because employees may follow your vision and help you realize those goals. 

When sharing insights, choose a format that will capture minds and pull them in your direction. You can use stories that hinge on the topic and will move them into buying into your ideas. After sharing your insight, seek feedback on whether it has changed their perspective or where there might be flaws. You must invite suggestions. Through dialogue, you can create great competitive insights that will be used to further organizational goals. 

When sharing your insights, you must anticipate your competitor’s next moves. Anticipation can only occur if you know how your competitors work and have analyzed how they handle negative feedback. Move in the same direction as you pursue emerging issues as you hope to use the competitive intelligence gathered to reach the market before your competition. 

There is a lot to unpack concerning competitive intelligence because competition is always evolving, and you must evolve to realize your goals. Once you learn how to gather information, using it appropriately might pose a challenge. Still, we hope you have understood how to track competitive intelligence by reading this piece.