Competitive insights refer to specific bits of data that reveal insights into the business practices of your rivals, covering aspects from marketing and sales to brand positioning and more. Choosing which competitive insights you need to prioritize for your company plays a vital role in shaping your overall business strategy.
Before accumulating competitive insights using a competitor research tool, you must consider three vital factors that bring clarity to competitive analysis. First, you need to identify and map your competitors accurately; secondly, you must define the business goals that you desire to achieve. Next, you need to clearly understand different aspects of competitor analysis, like strengths and weaknesses, products, pricing models, target audience, marketing policies, brand positioning, reputation, differentiators, and USPs, among others.
Collecting competitive data is essential to understand the reputation of your business and how it sells and markets. This can be achieved by considering the following essential marketing competitive insights.
- Market share – Market share analysis provides insights into the size of your rival businesses and the influence or percentage of sales they hold within your target market. Market share encompasses three areas, namely, the revenue, units, and share of voice linked to brand visibility across digital marketing channels. It also includes certain critical social media benchmarks such as engagement, impressions, and sentiment.
With market share insights, you can better ascertain your overall business standing within the broader market. This empowers you to determine the constraints of your short-term objectives and visualize the curve of your business growth in the future.
- Target audience –Target audience insights reveal varied socio-economic factors your competition is currently focusing on.
A deeper understanding of your rivals’ target audience helps you clearly outline your target personas, thereby assisting in developing tailoredinbound and outbound marketing approaches. These insights also define your company’s positioning and how you can uniquely attract your target audience to expand your market share. It might also unearth a target persona that you had previously overlooked, presenting anew business opportunity where you can extend your brand’s influence.
- Competitor positioning – Competitor positioning gauges the size andinfluence of your competitors, mainly helping you develop your brand identity. It allows you to evaluate how your rivalsproject their distinctiveness through communication to appeal to a bigger market.
These insights prove usefulwhile analyzing the target markets of your competitors, their marketing strategies, products, and services. It can helpyou identify the differences amongyour rival companies, thereby assisting you in determining the optimal market position of your brand.
- Brand reputation or perception – Insights related to the consumer perception of your brand are similar to analyzing competitive positioning that we have discussed in the previous point. But the main difference is that you are changing your perspective to view your business through the eyes of the target market.
The combination of brand perception insights and social media sentiment analysis is widely regarded as more reliable and precise. These insights can offer valuable guidance on the degree of priorityyou must attach to building a brand reputation in your business strategies.
- Marketing channels and strategies –Marketing channel insights reveal how your rival companies are employing different marketing approaches and channels. While omnichannel marketing continues to be the most effective, it is common for your competitor businesses to change or adjust theirmarketing channels and techniques. Competitive monitoring can offer precise data to assist you in monitoring their activities across all marketing channels, like social media, content, and emails.
These observations can help you identify appropriate ways to tweak or segregate your marketing strategies and also pinpoint channels that have fetched the maximum level of success. You can accordingly prioritize the marketing channels in your business strategies.
- Products and services –While it is imperative to collect competitor insights focused on brand positioning and marketing approaches, it is equally crucial to acquire insights on the services and products offered by your competition. It feeds you with specific data related to the performance of individual products or service lines.
These insights not only help you understand the marketing approach for each product or service but also reveal brand positioning techniques, USPs, and the features of services or products that are successful in your specific target market. It also offers a clearer understanding of their pricing models, based on which you can modify your strategies to compete with them.
Final words
When utilized effectively, competitive insights canhelp shape your marketing strategies significantly. However, these insights canbe effective, only if you can accurately analyze and visualize them and implement the data using the right tools.