The importance of monitoring your competitors’ actions to improve business
If you want to move your business forward successfully, it is essential that you know in advance in which direction to move to rest your feet on stable ground where the risks of slowing down or floundering are minimized.
In order to plan any kind of business strategy, it is very important that you ensure that you keep yourself informed about the changing dynamics around you and your operating environment by relying on specific market research on a regular basis.
Observing the behaviors of your direct competitors is equally important if you want to have references on what may be the right and wrong approaches or the strategies that break through to people’s hearts and those that remain anonymous.
Competitor analysis is a procedure you cannot deprive yourself of if you always aim to get the most out of your business and want to act consciously and responsibly.
Let us delve into this aspect.
What is competitive analysis and why it is important
Whatever your industry, you are certainly not the only one operating within it and devising solutions and products for a particular target customer base.
Competing with other companies that like you are working to solve people’s problems is an integral part of your growth process, especially if you have the ability and willingness to look at them as litmus tests.
This is what competitoranalysis is for: getting to know your competitors and using the results of their actions, both positive and negative, to your advantage.
In order to understand what strategies to take a cue from, in light of finding that they actually work, studying the competition is an absolutely necessary step.
Similarly, it is of paramount importance to look at negative examples: to avoid making the same mistakes made by your rivals, it is very important to have access to all that data and evidence that actually backs this up.
Read also: Research as a Service: the benefits of CMI solutions.
Knowing in advance which actions not only fail to translate into satisfactory results, but even cause a decline in sales and appreciation of your products, allows you to avoid the catastrophic consequences of a poorly structured marketing campaign or the wrong communication strategy.
Whether you run a business aimed at a large user base or a niche target audience, you should rely on both market and competitor analysis to best plan your future actions.
The reason?
Both, though in different ways, help you understand in real time and with great clarity what the scenario is regarding your industry.
How competition can be monitored
To derive reliable, up-to-date competitive data that can be leveraged to your company’s advantage, you should realize that the business intelligence models that worked until a few years ago are no longer sufficient.
Getting 360-degree feedback requires accepting the fact that the center of the world (and of business) has shifted from offline to online, and therefore one cannot help but take advantage of the enormous amount of data and information available on the Web.
And do you know why?
This data originates directly from people, in conjunction with every action they perform on social media, websites, email inboxes, etc.
And since there are people behind companies as well, monitoring competitors involves not only observing customer reactions to marketing campaigns and product liking, but also spying on the strategies they implement.
With the right tools and expertise, it is possible to carry out competitive price monitoring and find out what kind of advertising campaigns rival companies are carrying out.
In addition, it is possible to find out how much they are spending to carry out these actions and whether there is positive or negative customer feedback behind them.
Are they satisfied with the work of your competitors? If yes, what strengths do they most enhance?
And if not, what are the criticisms against them and what unmet needs do they manifest?
By getting hold of data on this, gleaned from millions of interactions, you will have several arrows available to your bow to develop business strategies that can have the desired impact on your target audience and win people’s trust.
Of course, in order to obtain far-reaching results, it is necessary to entrust this type of monitoring to amarket research agency that has not only professional tools and appropriate skills, but also a good method.
We at Central Marketing Intelligence can put all these features at your disposal.
Read also: Business intelligence: what it is and when it can make a difference
The importance of relying on professionals
To translate the entire phase of researching and studying competitive data into concrete and realistically implementable actions, we use a method that has already proven its effectiveness with several clients.
Over the course of our experience we have worked with completely different realities, from small and medium-sized enterprises to large multinational corporations, and for all of them we have implemented a method aimed at turning information into action.
The listening phase is primary, which is why we precisely define objectives with our clients before we set out to hunt for data.
We then devise our search strategy, and once we have the data of interest, we proceed to analyze them according to your priorities and needs.
Having completed this step, we finalize our competitive analysis with an exclusive service: the writing of a report in which we outline a series of strategies for you to adopt to achieve your goals.
By constantly monitoring your competitors, we at Central Marketing Intelligence can help you open up previously unthinkable scenarios.
Do you want to blaze a trail that will lead you to make thoughtful strategic decisions based on your rivals’ top secret information?
Contact us now for a consultation!
