How to carry out effective competitive monitoring?

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With the intensification of competition imposed by digital, it is impossible to ignore this strategic tool: competitive intelligence.

Insights into your competitors’ marketing activities are just as important as the data you collect about your customers. This data is used to make decisions to build your marketing strategy and grow your business.

Competitive intelligence helps you learn from the successes and failures of your main competitors. This is especially true if you are a new entrant in your market: you can get your business off the ground by understanding how your competitors operate.

Our strategy experts therefore give you the keys to carrying out effective competitive monitoring, in just 5 steps, and making it a real growth engine.

Competitive intelligence: definition
What is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence encompasses all the activities you initiate japan telegram understand your competitive environment for marketing and sales purposes. It can focus on your competitors' overall strategy as well as specific aspects (products, communication, pricing policy, etc.). It thus becomes a tool to help make strategic decisions based on the analysis of the competition's practices (good or bad).

Why carry out competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is not about copying what your competitors are doing, on the contrary. It is about analyzing their marketing and sales practices and using them to increase your competitive advantage .

Carrying out competitive monitoring can therefore be used to:

Define best practices in your sector of activity (common to your main competitors),
Anticipate the upcoming activities of your competitors that would have an impact on your business (launch of a new product or service, opening of a point of sale, redesign of a website, etc.)
Analyze the competitiveness of your brand in this competitive environment (e-reputation, consumer preferences, top-of-mind, etc.)
Carrying out competitive monitoring, yes, but for whom?
The reasons for conducting competitive intelligence must also take into account the question “for whom?” This guides the actions you will take to analyze your competitors’ strategy.

Effective competitive intelligence must be a tool for your employees (sales, marketing team, management committee, etc.). It must help them to deploy appropriate actions to sustainably position the company and distinguish it from its competitors.

Where to find information for effective competitive intelligence?
In this article, we will focus on white information . This is all information that is freely available, generally on the web. This term of economic intelligence is opposed to gray information, the result of an investigation or indiscretion (collaborator, supplier, distributor, etc.), and black information, obtained illegally (industrial espionage).

To find information to conduct competitive intelligence, you can:

Analyze your competitors' digital communication media (website, social media, newsletters, etc.): you can use platforms like Similarweb (freemium offer) for an in-depth marketing study;
Use specialized sites to obtain information on the structure of the competing company or its financial health (e.g. societe.com);
Browse customer review sites (e.g. Trustpilot) or employee review sites (e.g. Glassdoor);
Use Social Listening software (e.g. Hootsuite, SEMrush, etc.);
Create feeds or alerts linked to your competitors’ digital activity (Google Alerts, Feedly, etc.);
Use mystery shoppers to carry out in-store visits;
Buying competing products or services…
To save time, you can also call on a marketing agency and entrust them with this essential monitoring work.

5 steps to effective competitive intelligence
Defining competitive intelligence priorities
Before launching your competitive intelligence, you must first define what your priorities are. Your goal is to collect relevant information that can be used for your business. This assumes that you know what to focus on. Monitoring can, in fact, be applied to a specific aspect of your competitors' marketing strategy. For example, you could study their pricing policy (price monitoring), the launch of new products or the growth of their community on social networks . Competitive intelligence is above all a tool to serve your own objectives : you must use it as such.

Getting to know your target
To take advantage of your competitive intelligence, you need to correlate it with your knowledge of your customers. You need to put yourself in their shoes and understand what they expect from you. In other words, ask yourself the right questions to understand the motivations of your potential buyers . Advantageous prices, influencer recommendations, ease of use of the website, favorable customer reviews ... Study all possible avenues to identify why a target consumer would choose one company and not another.

Identify your direct and indirect competitors
A central step in your competitive intelligence, it is time to identify your direct and indirect competitors.

A direct competitor targets the same audience as you and offers a product or service similar to yours.

Example: If you run an organic cosmetics store, your direct competitors are all the organic cosmetics stores in your catchment area.

An indirect competitor offers a product or service that is different from yours, but meets the same need from a consumer's point of view.

Example: The direct competitors of an organic cosmetics store can therefore be all businesses that offer beauty products, even non-organic ones (pharmacies, supermarkets, etc.).

If you run an e-commerce site, you can use Google search to identify your competitors. Search for keywords that are relevant to your business and focus on the top five organic results (i.e., excluding ads).

Expert Tip: You can use the query “related:yoururl.com” on Google. The results will include all businesses similar to the one you searched for.