Competitive Intelligence - A Most Underrated Marketing Strategy for SME's

There are very few SME's taking advantage of competitive intelligence. But I say, it should be part of every company (smaller or bigger) to increase the efficiency & effectiveness of their marketing team's output

Most of the businesses invest money on different tools like Web analytics, A/B testing & Survey management tools etc.. but do not care about the competitive intelligence tools

As of wikipedia competitive intelligence is defined as "It is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors, and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers making strategic decisions for an organization"

Many of the companies keep putting their efforts to know what's happening on their website when a users lands on it with their analytics tools. But we have to understand competitive intelligence help us to understand those users before they visit our website which is the primary step

Competitive intelligence help us understanding the market, product & competitors better before taking any decision.

Sometimes you may question yourself like

- Why do I have to do a particular marketing campaign?

- Why our competitors are good on social media or some specific marketing channel?

- Why am I spending more on advertising but not delivering proper results etc?

All such kind of question can be answered with the marketing intelligence

Few of the benefits of Competitive Intelligence are:

1) When you know more about you customers, you can align marketing messages, targeting options, product offers better to meet their expectations which automatically delivers the best results

2) When you know what your customers are expecting from your product, you can build successful products. So, understand the your target market requirements and build a product which can solve their problem at affordable price with ease of use

Sometimes customer do not know what products they want. In such cases you can innovate and take the product to the customers. If your innovative product is solving a pain of the customer, it may be received well, if not you may need to make few tweaks to it until customer's accept it

3) It's always good to know what your competitor are doing even if it is a game or a business. When you know that, it gives you more comfort to define your strategy to counter your fellow competitors

But copying what your competitor is doing can not work for long time. You just have to observe what they are doing & have to align your strategy to counter them. That's the right way of beating the competition

So, investing little budget on competitive intelligence tool is definitely a good idea. If we are talking about the digital world, there are many competitive intelligence tools available at affordable prices. Few of them are

1) Compete.com (only US data available)

2) Similarweb.com

3) Alexa.com

There was an assumption that competitive intelligence tools can only work for those website which get high traffic volumes. But these day's companies are getting smarter and providing data even for small & medium businesses

So, use any one of the competitive intelligence tool and get smarter with your marketing strategies which ultimately delivers best results

Happy Marketing & Good Luck !!!