Competition is a core aspect of the corporate world. Recognising the competition is a golden rule in every industry, from internet marketing to politics to running your neighbourhood grocery store. Firms stay sharp by monitoring and seeking to perform better than their immediate rivals. It promotes creativity, avoids complacency, and provides motivation to improve.
Competitive Intelligence is an essential component of any corporate plan. Whatever your product or service is, you have rivals vying for the same customers and developing tactics to set you apart from the competition. Since the advantages of strategic intelligence spread through your whole enterprise, it isn’t easy to single out only one. However, as any reputable SEO agency will tell you, it plays a crucial role in search engine optimization.
What is SEO Competitive Intelligence?
SEO strategic analysis entails investigating the SEO competitors’ ties, keywords, content, and other factors to reverse-engineer the most effective aspects of their strategies through your SEO strategy. Rather than guessing which keywords to hit, what content to make or how to develop connections, you should look at what’s already working for others and build on their progress.
Competitive intelligence helps an online business determine what its competitors are up to. Current Competitive Intelligence identifies consumer patterns before they are officially reported by trade journals, allowing businesses to remain ahead of the competition. While CI efforts necessitate a large amount of data gathering, the analysis can be easily incorporated into existing studies with little effort or time.
There are many ways competitive analysis helps you shape your SEO Strategy.
Improves Your Sales Strategies
Based on strategic intelligence insights, you can provide the sales team with a variety of collateral and supplementary instructional tools. When it comes to managing objections, the sales force needs timely, actionable, and impactful bits of evidence that can help them win a competitive contract. You’ll see an improvement in your competitive win rate and profitability since your sales staff can access competitive sales products.
Provide the Salesforce with Competitive Battlecards
Providing the sales force with competitive battle cards to turn to while on the phone with a customer. A battle card with strategic and tactical details is more successful. Begin with the fundamentals of a brand, then expand with content such as win/loss tales, landmines, pricing, and current affairs.
Construct Strategic One-Pagers
Constructing strategic one-pagers to provide quick highlights of how the product or service compares to the competition. Make short comments about what your product is and isn’t, as well as what your competitor’s product is and isn’t.
You will also get quotes from consumers demonstrating the superiority of your offering to your competitors. Though battle cards are great lifelines for salespeople to use at any moment, even during a call, one-pagers can go further and act as strategic enablement pillars for the whole go-to-market enterprise.
Polish Your Marketing Strategy
A number of factors determine a marketing strategy’s success. You have a content strategy, a social media plan, a demand generation/growth strategy, and a product development strategy, to name a few. Competitive analysis insights will help with many of these campaigns.
Analyse rivals’ content strategies, SEO strategies, and brand selection to fill in the holes. You will use your content to fill in the holes in the competition to help meet the demands of your target audience. You can also target new keywords based on their Google rankings.
Improve Your Social Media Reach
Improve your social media reach by studying your rivals’ social media messages, interactions and keeping track of which channels they use. You’ll be able to see how social media fits with their overarching plan this way. Perhaps they’re just using one channel while ignoring another; this is a chance for you to take advantage of the channel and extend your scope.
Take ideas for your campaigns from those of your rivals. Pay attention to the landing pages, social media channels, ad copy, and checks on their website. You can not only keep track of their ad expenditures but can also use their campaigns to create your own.
Evolve Your Product Strategy
Listening to your customers is the most effective way to better your product or service. You will learn a lot of detail on consumer pain points when you listen to your clients through market surveys and customer interviews or check third-party websites.
You can also browse third-party pages for feedback from your rivals. People are extremely frank when they rate things online, so you’ll be able to learn about the positive and poor aspects of your rivals’ brands.
Form your product roadmap by incorporating results from third-party review pages. You’ll be able to learn what your rivals have that you don’t, as well as what your buyers want from your product. Analyse how your offering compares to those of your rivals and incorporate your results into your product roadmap.
Improve Your Overall Business Strategy
Keep an eye on the rivals to prevent consumers from leaving. When customers think they have discovered a better option, they sometimes leave. Your customer service departments will resolve issues early and attract buyers if you keep track of the messaging your rivals are releasing. They have a complete grasp of what their offerings deliver.
Keep a close eye on the competition. Competitive intelligence analysis will help you comprehend the entire competitive environment, including overt, indirect, aspirational and new rivals. You’ll want to know who your potential competitors are.
Final Thoughts
Gathering and evaluating competitive intelligence data is critical but putting those observations into motion is where the true benefit lies. Your strategic intelligence approach will not help your company if you do not put your findings into motion. These are only a few of the core results of a well-executed strategic intelligence approach that will help you boost your business.
