Mastering the Art of Competitive Intelligence: 9 Key Tactics for Outsmarting Your Competitors

Intro

As you build your marketing strategies and position your brand, there's a lot to learn from studying your competitors. Competitive intelligence can provide crucial insight into what you need to properly position your brand in the market and grow your company.

In this article, we’ll break down everything you need to know about competitive intelligence so you can outsmart your competitors. After we cover what competitive intelligence is, we’ll review some practical tips for gathering valuable intel.

Let’s dive in.

What is Competetive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is information that's gathered on your competitors. The purpose of this information is to guide you in making decisions for your business. This information is valuable for product development, developing brand positioning, and creating marketing strategies.

By understanding what your competitors are doing well and recognizing where they are lacking, you can get a better grasp of where the industry is at and how you can stay ahead of the curve. Leveraging competitive intelligence allows you to use the hits and misses of other companies so you can avoid starting from square one.

(Image Source)

Competitive intelligence can also inspire innovation within your company that extends far beyond go-to-market plays. It can reveal opportunities for new products and improved offers. It may inspire some business development.

Moreover, Competitive Intelligence also plays a vital role in the realm of recruitment by providing invaluable insights that enable organizations to attract and retain top talent.

It’s important to note that competitive intelligence isn't corporate espionage. Gathering competitive intelligence lawfully, without using spies or sketchy tactics. But we'll touch on that a bit more later.

9 Ways to Outsmart Your Competitors with Competitive Intelligence

Now that you’re a bit more familiar with what competitive intelligence is and how to use it, let’s review some tips for gathering intel so you can outsmart your competitors.

1. Know What You’re Looking For

There’s so much to learn about your competitors, ranging from the strategy they used to get started to the specific marketing campaigns they run. While all of this information may be interesting, it’s not all going to be valuable for what you’re trying to accomplish.

Before you start gathering competitive intelligence, clearly define what information you need, what you'll use it for, and how you plan to obtain it. You should also define who your competitors are so you have a clear list of companies to assess. Tap into your sales team for a complete list. A virtual assistant can be an advantage to gain the upper hand over your competitors with proper data insights and efficiency.

For example, if you offer software as a service (SaaS), you may be looking to improve your onboarding flow. The information you’d need to know is how your competitors structure their onboarding flows. You can access this insight by signing up for an account on their platform.

Similarly, a mediation law firm may be looking to improve their website’s search ranking with SEO. You can do a SEO competitor analysis by seeing what competitors have done recently on their websites, which keywords they are targeting, and how much traffic their pages are receiving.

2. Follow Your Competitors on Social Media

A very easy way to collect competitive intelligence is to follow your competitors on social media. Following and monitoring your competitors on social media is both easy and free, which is certainly a win-win.

Not only does this provide insight into how your competition presents themselves on social media, but it can give you a closer look at how their audience responds and interacts with them.

(Image Source)

For example, you may observe that your competitors get a lot of engagement on YouTube videos, but not as much with standalone Tweets. Furthermore, visiting the comment sections of different types of posts can give you a better idea of how users perceive a brand based on their comments and interactions.

There's some crossover here with market intelligence, which is information on the audience. Nonetheless, observing their online presence and interactions can be quite valuable.

3. Become a Customer

A good way to learn about competitors is to become a customer. Invest in some of their products to learn more about their offer. This allows you to assess the quality of individual products and understand their strengths and weaknesses. It also helps you get to know the buyer’s journey.

Some things to look at when you purchase a physical product from a competitor are:

• The checkout flow
• The delivery process
• How items are packaged
• The specs of the product itself

It’s even easier to collect intel if your competitor sells a subscription or other digital offer that comes with a free trial. The only caveat with free trials is that you can only access the product for a limited time (or with limited features), so this won’t provide much insight into a digital product’s evolution.

(Image Source)

Remember that the purpose of this strategy is simply to observe what is and isn't working for your competitor. It isn't okay to take a product and completely duplicate it. Your observations should serve as ‌‌inspiration and nothing more. Make sure you create comparison charts to clearly understand what’s working for them and not for you.

4. Create a Repeatable Process

Compiling competitive intelligence requires ongoing efforts. CSS charts can be a valuable tool in visualizing these trends and identifying shifts in competitors' strategies. The industry will evolve, and new competitors will come into the market. To continue to capture valuable intel, you’ll need to create a repeatable process.

As you create a process for gathering competitive intelligence, document the goals, methods, and parameters as we discussed above. Break this down into steps that anyone on your team can repeat. Make sure the process is sustainable so it continues to serve your organization.

Depending on the type of business you have, you may want to set an annual or quarterly budget for gathering competitive intelligence. You could spend this budget on purchasing new offers from your competitors, or it could go towards paying freelancers to help test your competitor's products and write detailed reports.

5. Automate When Possible

Creating a repeatable process is easier when the process includes automation.

Leveraging business process automation can help you streamline these efforts, reduce manual effort, and enhance efficiency. Employees can divert their attention to high-level projects by having mundane, time-consuming jobs taken care of by automation.

Automation software provides real-time data and analytics, enabling organizations to gather insights into their competitors' processes and identify areas for improvement. Thanks to business process automation, companies gain a competitive edge by optimizing workflows, enhancing productivity, and responding swiftly to market demands.

6. Leverage AI

As we mentioned, competitive intel and market intel have some crossovers. When you combine these two types of intelligence, you can outsmart your competitors and stay ahead of the curve.

One way to do this is to leverage AI. You can use tools to get a pulse on what the market wants and how well the industry serves them. By staying on top of this, you can discover problems in the market to create a product or service that fills gaps in the market.

The fastest way to do it is by using an AI-powered product discovery tool, like Zeda, that does the market research for you and provides all the data you need to decide what product to create or what service to offer.

(Image Source)

Some other tools that'll give you these results include demand forecasting tools, SEO audit tools, and search trending tools.

(Image Source)

7. Keep Things Legitimate

There's a fine line between competitive intelligence and corporate espionage. Ensuring that you stay on the ethical and legal side of that fine line is crucial.

Using spies or paying for confidential information might make for exciting movie plots, but it’s not a good idea for real life. Espionage is a felony, so if you get caught, you’re looking at serious repercussions.

Even if you gamble and get away with it, espionage isn't the way to create an honest company culture. So keep your nose clean and lead by example.

8. Read User Reviews

Reading user reviews is another great way to easily access competitive intelligence, since reviews provide feedback on a brand directly from the mouths of users (and your target audience). This will give you very tangible feedback on a competitor’s product.

Sites like Trustpilot, G2, and Capterra allow companies to publish profiles with information about their business, and their customers can write reviews, share pros and cons, and more.

(Image Source)

If you’re looking for competitive intelligence for a physical product-based business, you could check out user review videos on YouTube. If your competitors sell on a marketplace like Amazon, you could check the reviews there, as well.

9. Analyze and Implement Your Findings

Gathering intel on your competitors is great, but if you want to truly outsmart the competition and boost your user adoption strategies, you need to get strategic with using these actionable insights. To make the most of the intel, you’ll need to properly analyze it and create an actionable business strategy to implement it.

When you conduct a competitive analysis, look for trends between your competitors. You don’t necessarily need to follow these trends, but they should give you a good foundation for how you shape your own go-to-market initiatives.

At the same time, look for brands pushing the boundaries and using unexpected tactics. You can use these examples as inspiration for your brand to disrupt the space. When in doubt, leverage competitive intelligence tools to do the heavy lifting. Your marketing team will thank you.

BONUS: Understand Consumer Financial Behavior

While gathering competitive intelligence, it's essential to recognize the financial behavior of your target market. This includes understanding spending patterns, preferences, and challenges faced by consumers. For example, as of 2022, credit card debt in America was $5,910. This figure sheds light on the spending habits and financial obligations of the average consumer.

Using such data in your analysis, you can identify opportunities or gaps in the market that your competitors may not be addressing. This information can be particularly valuable for companies in the financial or retail sectors, helping them tailor their products and services to better meet the needs of consumers burdened with debt.

Understanding the financial aspect enables you to position your offerings more effectively, potentially gaining a competitive edge.

Wrapping Up

Competitive intelligence is a great resource for outsmarting your competitors. It enables you to observe how others are conducting their business in your sector so you can perform better.

Access to this valuable information will equip you to improve your brand's position in the market. And that’s music to any business owner’s ears.

So, how will you gather intel on your competitors? Invest in your competitive intelligence strategy today.