Businesses must know what their competitors are doing right. But this activity of gathering competitor data must not progress randomly. A systematic approach toward building your business rivals’ profiles is essential for you. This article will explain how to build your competitive intelligence strategy to succeed in the modern competition.
What is a Competitive Intelligence Strategy for Businesses?
A competitive intelligence (CI) strategy is a well-defined sequence of competitive data collection. The collected data includes the factors affecting your competitive standing.
For example, businesses can compare their products and services with the offerings of their business rivals. Also, you can assess the social media presence of your competitors using competitive intelligence services.
Since the competitive data is diverse, businesses must develop a CI strategy. Today, you will learn how to build competitive intelligence to understand your business strengths.
Also Read: Components of Market Intelligence
How to Develop a Competitive Intelligence Strategy that Works
The clarity in the planning process is necessary to build a CI strategy for excellent outcomes. Therefore, we have divided the process of CI strategy development into the following steps.
CI Strategy Step 1 – Identify and Focus on Your Top Competitors.
A business has no need for CI data on all competitors. This idea could seem counterintuitive in the beginning. Still, concentrate on improving your quality efforts efficiently.
The best-rated businesses in your industry have been successful with their strategies. So, your competitive intelligence strategy must focus your competitive efforts on the top players in your industry. Then, your company will automatically surpass other competitors.
CI Strategy Step 2 – Find the Key Competitive Attributes You Already Know.
Companies must not waste their ICT resources and data analytics services for less significant competitive data points. A CI dataset is efficient only after you streamline your CI strategy goals.
In other words, competitive intelligence services must remove the less important data from the CI dataset. Do not tolerate data redundancy in this step.
CI Strategy Step 3 – Research Novel Competitive Parameters You Might Not Know.
Humans have a bad habit of overestimating what they know. This attitude is harmful to CI strategy. Businesses must consult with their stakeholders and CI service providers to unwrap new CI parameters.
Again, these parameters must be relevant and necessary for competitive intelligence services. Otherwise, you will encounter high operational liabilities for less important data.
CI Strategy Step 4 – Enlists the Reliable Sources of Desired Intelligence.
Identifying your top competitors and measurable CI variables is essential for a practical competitive strategy. Businesses must understand that all data sources are not equally authentic or authoritative. E.g., social media platforms, customer review portals, news, and magazines vary in reliability.
A business owner can create a repository of the most reliable competitive data sources. Later, the data collection team will use these sources for the next step.
CI Strategy Step 5 – Collect Data Focusing on Required Competitive Aspects of Business.
The creation of a CI dataset relies on fast and secure data collection. Your competitive strategy must specify the collection workflow, storage policy, and data formats.
Mixed data types are inevitable in this era. Of course, you need a standardized data management regime. Besides, more structured data improves the insights of data analytics services.
CI Strategy Step 6 – Analyze Competitive Data to Discover SWOTs of Business Rivals.
CI data pattern recognition reveals the SWOTs or strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This concept applies to your competitors and your business.
For example, your competitor might provide a better feature in the products that your products lack.
Is that feature proprietary or open source? If it is open source, you can use it right now. Otherwise, you must invest in research and innovation to create proprietary features.
CI Strategy Step 7 – Compare Your Competitiveness with Your Corporate Competitors.
The final step of a good competitive intelligence strategy involves benchmark definition. You must identify the most common SWOT attributes using data analytics services.
You will not compare your business parameters with just one competitor. Instead, you will analyze all competitors to discover minimum quality requirements.
Now, you can plan your competitive efforts to increase the competitive values of your organization.
Conclusion
Methodological businesses last longer in all industries. Now, you know which method to follow when creating your CI strategy that accelerates your growth.
This article includes the precise steps in CI development. You have learned about how to build your competitive intelligence strategy.
A leader in competitive intelligence services, SG Analytics powers business decisions on product development plans, helping your competitive strengths. Contact us today if you are an enterprise aspiring to build customer-win strategies.
