To Compete or not to Compete – How Best to Leverage Competitive Business Intelligence?

For as long as I have been doing online marketing consulting a key consideration in driving business strategy has been related to what competitors are doing. Generally there is some really valuable information that can be ascertained from assessing competitors interactive marketing strategies and there are also some common pit falls.

The most common pit fall is thinking that you have to be doing what your competitors are doing otherwise you’ll fall behind. A few examples of that approach not resulting in success:

• Because your competitor has a facebook presence you think it is the right thing for your business to stay relevant. The problem lies in having not thought through a content and communication strategy around your facebook page and/or failing to put the resources in place to track and maintain a social property. Customers may be left feeling let down that you weren’t ready to actively engage with them or provide them valuable information and will be less likely to give you another shot in the future.
• Bidding on your competitor terms in PPC just because competitors are doing it to you. This is always a bad strategy as you’ve not considered that quality scores and CPCs are going to be higher resulting in higher cost per acquisition costs. In this situation your aggregate paid search strategy and budget can be pulled down by the knee jerk reaction to bid on competitor terms.

So we’ve talked about pitfalls, but what is the best strategy for leveraging competitive insights?

• Be the best at what you do, not what your competitors do. It’s extremely important to understand your competitors business models and key differentiators so that you can strategically craft your unique value proposition (UVP). Your UVP is your elevator pitch for what makes you better than the rest. If you spend your time analyzing what competitors are doing in order to help better define and grow what you do better than anyone else, your time will have been well spent.
• Look for opportunities to leap frog not just catch up. With the pace of change in business today there are a number of opportunities to not only catch up to what your competitors are doing, but to completely surpass their efforts. In this scenario you leverage your competitive intelligence to craft a plan around how you leverage tools and technology in a way that has yet to be done in order to find some way to better serve your customers.
• Leverage what your competitors are doing to better understand your customers needs. One of the values of looking outside of how you currently market to and engage with your customers is that you’ll often find customers are responsive to something you didn’t expect. Keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to allows you to think outside of the confines of your day to day and think of new and better ways to reach and serve your customers.

A few tips for how to keep an eye on your competitors:

• Set up Google alerts for your top three competitors – this will keep you in the loop competitor product releases, press and news
• Regularly read your competitors blogs/forums – similarly keeps you informed of press, news and updates to their business models
• Check out all of the paid and organic listings on page one of Google for your top competitors – this will give you a sense of how they are leveraging both their own web properties and external web properties

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Tagged as: competitive analysis, competitive insights, Competitive intelligence, marketing, Marketing strategy