In a world where knowledge is power, what you don’t know can hurt you. However, the good news is that what you need to know to remain ahead is at your disposal. Legal social listening, also known as competitive intelligence, gives you a chance to identify your target audience, learn from them and knock down your competitors to provide you with a positive edge. Competitive advantage is a form of market research that seeks to answer high profile and specific questions on the consumer marketplace.
In any given marketplace, competitive intelligence determines your business progress. It shows whether you are falling behind, keeping pace or getting ahead. Competitive intelligence serves as a warning to what is happening in the marketplace, whether it is a change in prices, entry of a new player, or the introduction of a new product. In some instances, entrepreneurs have used the competitive intelligence tactics to find out what is going on in their own companies and have gotten startling results. Here are the top reasons why you should use competitive advantage.
7 Aspects That Competitive Intelligence Will Cover & Improve
1. Getting Real-Time Info on Your Customer
Competitive intelligence updates you on the progress that is happening in the market relating to your company’s product. The aspects in discussion here are events such as:
- Entry of a new player;
- Launch of a product;
- Change in the leadership structure;
- Recent acquisitions;
- Existing media crisis.
Competitive advantage gathers real-time information and updates a company when something significant is happening around in your competitor’s landscape. Competitive intelligence allows you to know everything that is worth remembering about a customer’s landscape.
2. Analyzing the Market Share
Competitive advantage points out the customers view on your product as compared to the products of your competitors. When competing for the same market share there will be instances when your company will be losing or winning compared to competitors.
By studying the demographics that determine market shares, competitive intelligence presents a more realistic view on the operations of your competitors business as compared to your own. Competitive advantage allows you to identify the progress made by competitors in the markets.
3. Forecasting Sales Projection
Your business may have invested a significant amount of time making sales projections using proprietary information. However, it’s unfortunate that the same diligence cannot work when projecting sales for your competitors. This is unless your competitors are willing to share their data with you which is unlikely.
You may decide to risk it all by using corporate espionage, which is a terrible idea. You can only project their sales using a view of your own market. Competitive intelligence identifies accurate information on the state of the market and gives insights into customers rapidly changing interests. It helps you identify your market share as compared to your competitors.
In an example of consumer technology where consumers aren’t afraid of giving their opinions on new products, it’s easy to track conversations on the products consumers are likely to spend their money on in the short term. Your company can make product developments in accordance to such insights thereby speeding the growth of your company.
4. Fueling Product Innovation
Competitive intelligence offers you a chance to listen to your consumers and your competitors’ consumers. This information gives consumer-led insights that inform your product development. This is quite simple; the more your company listens to consumers, the more likely you will be to make informed decisions on your product development.
An empowered consumer often takes to the social media to air their opinions on the pros and the cons of the product they used. They are also likely to suggest new features on how the product can improve. While a public complaint from a customer may feel like a knockdown, it is a springboard to create new products.
Learn through every pro, con, and fault of your competitor’s product and use that to better your own. Competitive intelligence offers you a wealth of information to drive innovation and improvement. It does no longer limit to what your customers want. It’s about what the entire market is calling out for.
5. Stealing Your Competitors’ Customers
Your company will not push its competitors into oblivion overnight. It takes years of intense competition and social listening to win against your competitors. Developing a competitive marketing approach and innovative products that will destroy your competitors into oblivion takes time.
However, this does not mean that there aren’t battles to be fought on the frontline every day. The erosion of loyalty to other brands gives a competitive intelligence power to win more consumers through identification and engagement of dissatisfied competitors’ consumers.
6. Cost Reduction
Competitive intelligence helps in identifying and forecasting trends especially in businesses where the inventory costs are likely to go haywire. Prediction of sales can help companies operate more efficiently and with fewer losses.
Competitive intelligence also allows the businesses leaders to achieve faster results and increase the probability of the predictions made. Chances of failure thus reduce and every investment the company makes becomes a worthy investment.
7. Better Marketing
Through competitive advantage, companies can track the follower’s numbers, engagement levels, and product messaging and other metrics. In fact, some of the major competitive intelligence tools can rate brand mentions as either a negative or positive entity.
Social listening can additionally help you learn about audio profiles through analyzing the people who mention competitors which aids in defining your target audience.
In the End
With the billions of internet users online every day, the opportunity to grow your business past your competition is present and growing. Companies that are adopting these concepts and getting more agile competitively. Availability of data is helping businesses from all directions enabling them to make more informed decisions. For companies that don’t wish to be left behind in the corporate race, it’s time they utilize the power of competitive intelligence and social listening.
Now that internet has become a pool for all kind of information, the question remains: Who is going to integrate the power of competitive advantage to become the next take all winner in their market? Leave your comments.
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