Competitive intelligence in search. How to recognize competition and competitors strategy?

We are living in a competitive world. As a business owner, you will have to deal with competition. If you can overcome competition, you will be able to secure the market and receive the best returns that come on your way. This is where you should have a strong understanding about competitive intelligence in search. Along with that, you should also understand how to recognize competition, and develop a strategy to beat your competition.

What is Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is analytical process you follow to gather information with related to competitors, analyze them, and make strategic business decisions. These strategic business decisions you take can help you to overcome competition. When the competition is increasing, it becomes a must for you to take strategic decisions based on data. Otherwise, you will just be wasting your time and effort without competitive advantage.

Competitive intelligence can provide the opportunity for you to make better business decisions. On top of that, you can even make better moves to overcome your competition. When you are fully aware of your business environment, you will find it as an easy task to remain competitive. This will even help you to discover opportunities in the industry and grab them quickly. When you are the first to do something in the market, you have a higher chance of attracting customers to your business.

How Competitive Intelligence Works?

Competitive intelligence in search is where you gather actionable information from different sources with related to your competition and analyze them in detail. You are adhering to ethical methods for collecting information with related to your competition. You can understand your competition in a better way with the information you gather. For example, you will be aware about the business plans of your competitors. With that data in hand, you will be able to develop a better business plan. This can be done with manual research or with a huge help of data-driven intelligence software, like competitive intelligence platforms, which can do a competitive analyses in minutes. Marketing strategies based on the competitive landscape has higher chance to deliver results, especially in search marketing where we have very high competition.

If you have business competitors who have secured better rankings than your website on search engine results for specific keywords, you should gather relevant data and figure out how they rank. Based on the information, you can refine your SEO strategy, and adopt better SEO methodologies. This will eventually help you to beat your competition and secure even better rankings in the search engines.

What are the benefits of competitive intelligence?

Every business should focus on competitive intelligence in search. That’s because the understanding you have in competitive intelligence can offer a variety of benefits. No matter what industry you operate your business in.

One of the key benefits that you can get out of competitive intelligence is the ability to discover new markets. When you are aware of a new market, you can become the first to enter into that market. As the first player to enter into a market, you can experience the benefit of not having any competition. Hence, you can easily get a solid customer base.

Competitive intelligence will assist you to predict the actions of your competitors. When you can predict the actions of competitors, you will be able to act accordingly to minimize the loss that you have to face. On the other hand, information you have at hand will help you with improving the development of your products as well. A business that launches a new product to the market as the first player can secure the most customer base. With competitive intelligence, you will be able to beat competitors to market.

People in today’s world prefer to interact with businesses that connect with them at a personal level. Competitive intelligence can help you with that as well. That’s because you know how your competitors are interacting with their customers. You can come up with a better approach to interacting with customers.

Another key benefit that comes with competitive intelligence is that you can provide products or services that customers are looking forward to receiving. This is a proven method to enhance your market share. On top of that, you can even discover new technologies and products, which will help you to change the market. All these benefits will eventually help you to highlight your business from competition.

Understanding Your Competitors

As you proceed with harnessing the benefits of competitive intelligence in search, you will come across the need to understand your competition. There are multiple approaches available for you to follow and understand your competitors. Here are some of the best benefits you can achieve from competitive intelligence:

• This is where you understand the strategies that your competitors use to capture the market.
• You can analyze your competitors and see where in which areas they are doing good as of now.
• This is where you figure out how the customers are perceiving your competitors.
• You understand the benefits that your competitors are experiencing as of now. Likewise, you can even figure out the benefits that competitors can experience in the future.
• This is where you figure out where the market is moving to. Based on that, you can figure out where exactly your business is positioned in the market. You can also see how your competitors will continue to move with the market progression.

When you follow these approaches, you will be able to have a comprehensive understanding of your competition. This understanding will help you to take better decisions.

Competitive Intelligence vs. Market Research

You don’t find a clear definition for the terms competitive intelligence and market research. They are dynamic terms, which vary according to the context. However, we often see how marketers fail to differentiate these two terms.

Market research is a term that has been there for quite some time. However, competitive intelligence popped up in the recent past, especially with he way how people started gathering useful data to make informative decisions. You should have a strong understanding about the differences between competitive intelligence and market research, so that you know what you are doing.

Competitive intelligence is an activity where you take a look at the qualitative aspect as well as the quantitative aspect of information that is available to you. You will be able to use the competitive intelligence strategies in order to gather information about the competition of a company, its target market, and its customer base. You will be taking a look at the past, present situation, as well as the future of competitors with competitive intelligence.

Information you gather with competitive intelligence can be gathered through direct data gathering techniques and indirect data gathering techniques. You will be referring to a large number of sources to gather data. However, you follow an ethical approach as you continue to gather data.

With the data that you gather from competitive intelligence, you will be making both tactical decisions and strategic decisions. These decisions are not just related to your marketing campaigns, but can also be related to stakeholder management and product development.

While keeping all these details in mind, you can focus on competitor intelligence in search, and gather information about your competitors. With proper analysis of data and execution of right strategies, you can get your efforts to deliver outstanding returns.