Knowing what your competitors are planning to do next can give you a significant edge in the market. You can anticipate their moves and prepare your own strategies to counter or exploit them. But how can you get inside their heads and predict their future actions? Here are some of the most effective ways to anticipate your competitors' future moves.
One of the easiest and most accessible ways to track your competitors' activities is to monitor their online presence. This includes their website, social media, blog, newsletter, press releases, and any other digital channels they use to communicate with their audience. You can use tools like Google Alerts, Mention, or Feedly to get notified whenever they publish new content, launch new products, announce new partnerships, or receive media coverage. You can also analyze their SEO, keywords, backlinks, and traffic to understand their online performance and visibility.
By tracking their website, social media, blog posts, newsletters, and other digital channels, you can gain insights into their strategies, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This can help you identify gaps in the market, create better value propositions, improve your products or services, and stay ahead of the competition.
Patents, Investments, Online hints are few of the things that can help. Intel plays a majority of the role. Having deep roots in the media's ecosystem helps get leads about any updates far quicker than any other hints.
Definitely do your homework in getting a grasp of the Digital capability & maturity of your competitors, the properties they own (platforms, urls) and also what they invest on it (paid, networks). Alerts help your radar when plans are already in motion however, to get ahead, have a Competitive Intelligence framework set-up on where you are playing, with whom & what major moves are likely. This will give you a deeper understanding of what is strategic and tactical. It will also give you enough time and space to decide what responses are necessary in each case.
Another way to anticipate your competitors' future moves is to conduct a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and it is a framework that helps you evaluate your competitors' internal and external factors that affect their business. By identifying their strengths and weaknesses, you can assess their core competencies and competitive advantages. By identifying their opportunities and threats, you can anticipate their potential growth areas and challenges. You can use tools like SWOT Analysis Tool or MindTools to create and visualize your SWOT analysis.
Regular market research, trend analysis, and thorough competitor evaluation, encompassing products, pricing, and marketing, offer valuable insights. Building a strong industry network and monitoring customer feedback deepen understanding of market dynamics. Staying updated on news, tech advancements, and observing competitors' alliances aids in timely decision-making and strategic adjustments.
In our current time and the evolution in technology, it’s important to retest your SWOT analysis results every agreed set time to make sure our results are still actionable and reliable. Tracking the changes/ updates is very vital to keep your eyes open for what your competitors are doing, and how they respond to change cycle
A third way to anticipate your competitors' future moves is to use scenario planning. Scenario planning is a technique that helps you create and explore different possible futures based on various assumptions and variables. You can use scenario planning to imagine how your competitors might react to different changes in the market, such as new customer needs, new technologies, new regulations, or new entrants. You can use tools like Scenario Planning Tool or Futures Platform to create and compare different scenarios and their implications.
A fourth way to anticipate your competitors' future moves is to survey their customers. By asking their customers about their satisfaction, preferences, needs, and expectations, you can gain valuable insights into their buying behavior and decision-making process. You can also identify their pain points, unmet needs, and switching triggers, which can help you spot gaps and opportunities in the market. You can use tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Qualtrics to create and distribute online surveys to your competitors' customers.
Additionally, focus groups can do magic work here to understand how their customers are thinking? What do they want exactly from this product/ service/ good. Elaborating both qualitative and quantitative research to map and understand “our “ customers and “their “ customers will help us to know what precisely we are doing? The idea is not in doing so many research and be overwhelmed with different and sometimes contradicting results and findings, it’s essential to go with a planned bunch of research then study the results carefully and inform the decisions
A fifth way to anticipate your competitors' future moves is to analyze their patents. Patents are legal documents that grant inventors the exclusive right to make, use, or sell their inventions for a limited period of time. By analyzing your competitors' patents, you can discover their current and future innovations, their research and development directions, and their intellectual property strategies. You can use tools like Google Patents, PatentScope, or Espacenet to search and view patents filed by your competitors.
A critical component of your CI framework. Include this in your baseline toolkit. Check pipelines or registration for specific product industries as well on the regulatory pages as part of your continuous scan. There are numerous studies on Google Scholar as well on future directions to look into.
A sixth way to anticipate your competitors' future moves is to join their communities. Communities are groups of people who share a common interest, passion, or goal, and who interact with each other online or offline. By joining your competitors' communities, you can observe and engage with their fans, followers, customers, and partners. You can learn from their feedback, opinions, suggestions, and complaints, and you can also identify their influencers, advocates, and critics. You can join your competitors' communities on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, or Quora.
At the end of the day, keep in mind that while it is important to understand what is happening in your competitive set, it should not necessarily drive your future directions. It can certainly help tactically for short and medium term operational plans and give you a sense of where they are going in the future. Where you go depends on the choices you have made and are willing to make in the future. Go get the Competitive Intelligence Network set-up properly and adjust it accordingly to what you would like to do and what the environment allows. This will allow you to take advantage of opportunities strategically without unnecessarily being consumed by what is happening.