Competitive intelligence (CI) — the act of gathering and analyzing information about your competitors’ reach, audience, and marketing strategies — is increasingly crucial to success in a crowded digital marketplace, where advertising costs and the number of players competing to secure potential customers’ attention are rising. Deep analytics services, which can provide a competitor analysis tool to empower a richer analysis of your competitive environment, are also entering the field.
At the same time, economic uncertainty is not only causing volatility in the stock market but also causing consumers to spend less, even affluent consumers, making it all the more necessary to compete for market share in an informed and targeted way.
Fortunately, even as digital marketing has become a more complex and intricate investment, competitor analysis has become more sophisticated.
As financial journalist Andrew Bloomenthal puts it, “Competitive intelligence transcends the simple cliché ‘know your enemy.’ Rather, it is a deep dive exercise, where businesses unearth the finer points of competitors’ business plans, including the customers they serve and the marketplaces in which they operate.”
What to Gather
In the early days of e-commerce, CI often relied heavily on simple internet searches, but that is no longer true. For today’s digital marketers, competitor analysis involves seeking a complete view of the market, both with a short-term view — so that marketers can establish fine-tuned campaign goals, set more useful key performance indicators (KPIs), and improve their campaign performance — and with a long-term view — so that companies can dig into objective, accurate competitor data to understand their audiences better and spot unexpected growth opportunities (both growth of market share and development of new products and services to meet unmet needs).
Blockchain and Web3 technologies are beginning to play a role in this process by offering decentralized ways to track customer behavior and competitor transactions, providing greater transparency and more direct data than traditional methods. These innovations allow companies to gain insights into competitor strategies from a new, digital perspective, often in real-time, adding another layer of analysis to the competitive intelligence toolkit.
You will want to take a thorough look at your leading rivals’ SEO, PPC, affiliate, and advertising strategies and be able to analyze their marketing mix. The goal is to identify the channels with the highest traffic share for your competitors and your campaigns.
Additionally, aim to find out where your competitors’ referral traffic is coming from. This can help you spot the most valuable affiliate partners who are also the most relevant to your offerings. You can then use this information to sign up for the best affiliates available in your market.
A strong competitor analysis tool can also help benchmark your search ads and display creatives, allowing you to compare your ads’ effectiveness with your competitors. You can use this intel to identify new opportunities for pay-per-click and display campaigns to run more successful campaigns.
And because content is still king, you need to gather the intelligence necessary to improve your competitive SEO and to offer more targeted content marketing. To increase your organic traffic, you need to understand your keywords deeply. Look at each keyword’s traffic share by geography, keyword difficulty, and search intent. Ensure your CI tool can help you spot keywords frequently searched by your market segment but currently under-served with content.
The Risks of Relying on Competitive Intelligence
You can gather all the data in the world, but if you don’t use it wisely, it won’t get you as far as you hope. There are risks to an over-reliance on CI, including the fact that it can lead to short-term thinking and myopic decision-making as marketing teams and the companies they serve spend their time chasing their competitors.
It is not enough to imitate your competitors’ successes. To compete for market share, you must use your intel to spot the opportunities your competitors haven’t seen yet to guide your marketing messages and product and service development that will meet the needs of underserved customers. That is the real magic of deep analytics and the key to future-proofing your strategy: learning to discover the niche or the need to hide right in plain sight.
