Search engines, including Google, help keep a business brand on top of search results to attract prospective clients. Brands that appear on top of search results amplify brand recognition, lead generation, sales, and website traffic. Competitive intelligence reports help create efficient digital marketing campaigns and strategies.
Goals Of The Competitive Intelligence Report
The main aim of competitive intelligence is to ensure an individual or a business can make strategic decisions with the provided information. Companies need to have an understanding of what their competitors are doing. Effective state government market strategies have two crucial elements: competition and customers.
Consider the needs, wants, and buying behaviors of clients and competitors’ pricing, offerings, objectives, and limitations and align them into the business intelligence report.
Steps To Gathering Competitive Intelligence
Planning
Create an outline for the research and have a general idea of what is required to minimize time wastage while researching information. The design of a plan has three essential elements.
- Identification of the target audience for competitive intelligence
- Identification of business objectives and goals
- Identification of areas where data is more likely to be found and the process of acquiring it
Research
Once the planning is complete, upfront research is vital to identify primary digital competitors to the business.
Competitor Brand Maps
Analyze the relationship between various brands and their association with service and product attributes. From brand maps, one can uncover similarly performing brands, outline unclaimed market attributes, and outline defining brands’ positions. Brand mapping necessitates the identification of various values attached to competing brands.
Call To Action (CTA)
Analyze the calls to action on competitor sites to establish missed opportunities on the website. Follow best practices, including wording the CTA to indicate the benefits.
Optimize Research
It is essential to obtain the correct data from competitors to reveal the competitor’s marketing strategy and customer engagement. Marketing data can either be primary or secondary, depending on its relevance to a business. To gain a competitive advantage, decisions that target primary research and those informed by secondary data must be made. Optimize the research to unify primary and secondary research to gain actionable insights and support business decisions.
Conduct Analysis
Derive information that communicates, targets, and sells to prospective clients. Competitive analytics helps businesses with the process of cleaning, gathering, and visualizing the competitor’s data.
Create infographics, easy-to-navigate graphs, and reports to make the data easier to act upon and understand. It allows decision-makers to be actively involved in strategic decisions.
Create SWOT
Determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to gaining the target audience’s attention based on the gathered information. A SWOT analysis of every competitor is essential to a successful digital marketing strategy.
A well-informed marketing plan helps develop market segmentation and identify possible opportunities for the marketing campaigns. The company is well equipped to create strategies and goals for the marketing plan based on research.