How well do you know your market? Marketers and business owners often overestimate their knowledge of their industry or niche, which is detrimental to their brand’s success.
A sprinkling of competitive marketing intelligence can be just what your business needs to refine your messaging, build a stronger brand, or capture a new audience.
Though competitive marketing intelligence might sound technical, you’re probably familiar with it (or are already executing this in your day-to-day marketing activities).
Let’s see how it works and why it’s valuable for refining your strategies and increasing conversions.
Competitive Marketing Intelligence vs. Competitive Intelligence: What’s the Difference?
First off, we need to differentiate competitive marketing intelligence from competitive intelligence because while they overlap, they are not the same.
Competitive intelligence involves gathering information about, tracking, and analyzing data about your competitors and competitive landscape.
This process is done to get an objective overview of your vertical or niche and making data-backed decisions to bring you closer to your goals, whether it’s revising your marketing strategy, increasing revenue, or growing your brand.
Competitive marketing intelligence has a narrower scope than competitive intelligence.
It’s the process of researching, monitoring, and analyzing your competitors’ customers to understand them, speak to their pain points and desires, and provide better customer service and experience.
While competitive intelligence focuses on your competitor’s activity and anticipating their next moves, competitive marketing intelligence is about your prospective customers, how they feel about your products, what they value most in a product, and how they use you or your customer’s products.
Why is competitive marketing intelligence important?
Spot market gaps that your competitors have glossed over
Learning more about your audience and actively monitoring them means you’ll be the first to know when their preferences change.
You’ll also be able to respond to issues or needs that your competitors haven’t addressed or have overlooked.
This way, you can stay on top of trends and spot opportunities and gaps to fill. In the kinetic world of ecommerce, B2B, SaaS and beyond, competitive marketing intelligence can spell the difference between boom and bust.
Learning from your competitor’s missteps and successes means you aren’t starting from scratch. They have tried and tested different strategies, and you can learn from them without experimenting by yourself.
Differentiate yourself from the competition
When brands and products start blending together because of how similar they are to each other, how do you stand out as the no-brainer choice for your audience?
With competitive marketing intelligence, you’ll know how to answer that question.
Knowing your customers and providing a stellar customer experience are strengths that you can gain when you research and monitor your customer’s behavior and preferences.
Also, if you monitor customer’s sentiments about other brands in your industry, you’re better able to reshape your brand’s image and adjust your messaging and value proposition.
Maximize resources and minimize risk
Let’s face it, resources and time are limited and you have to optimize every tool and asset you have as much as possible. Learning from your competitor’s missteps and successes means you aren’t starting from scratch.
They have tried and tested different strategies, and you can learn from them without experimenting by yourself. You can apply this knowledge to:
- Product launches
- Advertising campaigns
- Email marketing campaigns
- Pricing strategies
- Marketing funnels
You can make better decisions just by researching your competition and your audience. Stop relying on guesswork and gut feel and start your planning from an informed place.
That way, you don’t waste time and can allocate your resources to where they can make the most impact.
Where do I source competitive marketing intelligence?
Visit your competitor’s website
Your competitor’s website will tell you a lot about your audience and how your competitor is framing themselves to appeal more to them, so it’s worth monitoring this. However, a one-off visit won’t do.
You have to track their website over time and observe their changes to their copy, messaging, images, design, lead magnets, and CTAs. These changes aren’t by accident because your competitor will have done their own customer research.
Monitor social mentions and reviews
Hear it straight from the horse’s mouth–look at what your competitor’s customers are saying online and you’ll have a wealth of information you can use for your marketing.
The best thing is that this resource is completely free. Visit social media platforms, review sites, the comments section, and even reviews under your competitor’s online store.
Aside from customer sentiment, looking at customer feedback makes the demographics of your competitor’s customers obvious, as well as how they’re responding to your competitor’s messaging.
Are your competitors successfully reeling in a customer segment? Or are their efforts falling flat?
Read blogs and articles
Next, look at long-form content by bloggers, writers, and journalists–anyone that’s not affiliated with your competitor. Take note of:
- What they’re saying
- The context in which your competitor is being mentioned
- Specific feedback
Use competitor tracking tools
You can achieve all the above steps through competitor intelligence tools, which do the hard work of collecting the data for you. That way you’re more efficient and your data is up-to-date.
A tool exists for every use case, whether it’s SEO, social listening, or ad monitoring.
For comprehensive competitive marketing intelligence, Panoramata is the real deal. Whatever industry you belong in and whatever business type and size you have, you can make use of this competitor tracking and benchmarking platform to better understand your market.
Some of the things Panoramata tracks are:
- Email newsletters
- Email marketing automations
- Video and static ads (YouTube, Meta, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Google Display, LinkedIn)
- Websites and changes made to them
- Landing pages and changes made to them
- SMS
- Tech stacks
- Content calendars
- Pricing
- Product catalogs
Plus you can automatically create personalized benchmarks that include any competitor or brand you wish to analyze. If your competitor isn’t on the platform yet, we can add them for you.
If you’re dreaming up campaigns, inspiration is a search away with Panoramata’s huge database of email and ad creatives. Whatever the occasion (Black Friday, back to school, spring, New Year), you can find the inspiration you need.
Competitive marketing intelligence for a competitive advantage
Competitive marketing intelligence is a game changer for any brand that wants to outpace their competition. There’s no excuse not to get started and it’s easier than you think with competitor tracking tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is competitive intelligence in marketing?
Competitive intelligence in marketing involves gathering and analyzing data about your competitors to understand their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. It helps you make informed decisions to stay competitive and adapt to market changes.
2. How is marketing research different from competitive marketing intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is a broad look at your competitors and competitive landscape. Competitive marketing intelligence specifically examines customer behavior.
3. What is the goal of competitive marketing intelligence?
The goal of competitive marketing intelligence is to uncover actionable insights that help you improve your strategies and outperform competitors. It enables you to identify opportunities, mitigate risks, and refine your unique selling proposition.
