“Your job is to understand your competitors better than anyone else. Ignoring competitors is the same as ignoring customers.” – Hiten Shah, Founder, FYI & KISSmetrics
Competitive and market intelligence benefits all sectors of your business; it helps you craft better products, arms sales, and marketing teams, gives further context to your development and design teams, and provides guidance into navigating your business into a blue ocean.
Competitive and market intelligence is the fuel for companies that want to disrupt existing markets. Only by getting a full understanding of the market and the customer’s needs can you spot the gaps and missing parts of the equation. Just think of how Airbnb was able to understand an existing need and craft their own market.
Let’s break down those benefits across each area of your organisation.
When you gather competitive and market intelligence, you learn where there are gaps between your rivals and your customers through online forums, reviews, marketing documentation; you also learn more about your customers from how the rivals in your market are adapting and changing to meet those needs. These changes extend beyond product features to strategic hires, market positioning, and more.
“Understanding the customer problem and how different market players are responding to that problem allows your UX/design/engineering teams to think of how to deliver a need better than what is present in the market.”
The information you gain is where your market communicates, what gaps they feel are unaddressed, and their pricing/product information improves the way your sales team can sell. Combined with the ability to easily craft reusable and auto-updating competitive intelligence and battle cards, to arm your sales team in head-to-head or overall sales campaigns.
In our articles around doing a SWOT analysis, competitive matrices, or other strategic analysis, you can find countless techniques to apply this intelligence to crafting a better business. Using this intelligence helps you drive your business into “Blue Oceans” or low-competition areas where you can address valuable customer needs quickly, efficiently, and in a way that accelerates your business growth.
Knowing your competition and market is not a one-time activity. To keep reaping the benefits, you will need to invest in ongoing monitoring and discovery. Our platform automates that work. Why not give Rival a try?
If you are ready to apply some of these learnings in your organization, check out our template pack of analysis frameworks.
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