Competitive intelligence is big business. Recent studies showed that 89% of the participants recognise competitive intelligence as a strategic asset, a must-have. But why? What are the benefits of competitive intelligence? Can it help you improve your product? Increase your customer satisfaction? How can it benefit your strategy to know your competitors?
In this article, you will discover the important benefits you can get from competitive intelligence.
Making assumptions is bad in business because oftentimes, assumptions are wrong. And they can take an awful turn on business. By conducting a thorough competitive analysis, you will get accurate and factual data about your competitors and market.
Knowing the weaknesses of your competitors can give you ideas for improving your service or product offering and can lead to innovative ideas for improvement. You will discover what they are doing wrong, how you can avoid it and how they can improve and you can use this to your advantage.
Ideas will never run out if you are committed to continuous learning. This is one of the benefits of competitive intelligence. You will discover many untapped opportunities and you can focus more on solving unmet customer needs effectively.
Knowing the main reasons why your loyal customers do business with you instead of your competition is the importance of competitive intelligence. You should keep your weaknesses in mind but it is more important to focus on your strengths. Use your business’s competitive advantage and apply it efficiently to win more customers.
Competitive intelligence will reveal if you are charging way below or above market for your services: you will discover if you are charging twice as much as your competitor and if this is the reason why your sales might have dropped or if your charge less, which may have resulted to low profits for the business. With information about competitor pricing, you will be able to make wise decisions in terms of your own pricing.
The market is usually excited about new features and trends, which even attract potential customers and prevent loyal customers from leaving. By learning about other companies, technologies and buzz in your market, you can discover and follow the latest trends. See if you can incorporate them in innovative ways into your products and services.
For example, some industries have an annual Black Friday, which gives them a competitive advantage over other companies in the industry. Researching your competitors will give you the opportunity to learn more about the market structure and the culture and spending season of your customers.
Request a demo and learn how to use the DataScouts Platform to map and monitor your business environment, scout for innovations and technologies, and build your own ecosystem!