Business Intelligence MO that makes James Bond Green with Envy

The competitive intelligence modus operandi essentials of the smart businessman/businesswoman

Hello ladies and gentlemen! I hope you had great holidays, you recharged your creative batteries, you spent some quality time with your relatives and friends and now you are ready to switch into “back to business” mode. I will use this opportunity to wish all of you, once again, a very prosperous year. Stay tuned to our rock steady frequencies to receive useful tips that will allow you to take convenient and safe shortcuts to success. Without further ado, I will open the smart marketing box and outline the agenda for today: we are going to talk about business intelligence in such a way that we will make even James Bond, green with envy! So, let’s rock!

Unless you want to unleash the fury of a new industrial revolution and change the course of history, you are in for running an ordinary business that solves certain problems and fulfills certain needs. There is nothing wrong with that, we are an ordinary company, too! Indeed, there are millions of software companies, armies of marketing providers, battalions of banks, etc. The whole point is that you virtually get to participate in a contest similar to a battle of the bands gig and sooner rather than later, you have to come out and play. You should know by now that the winner is not the most gifted performer, but the one that has the charisma to capture the imagination of the crowd and the one that delivers the most memorable set.

If we have to translate the former analogy into marketing terms, the companies that manage to break away from the rest and appeal to their target audience always win. The rest lag behind. So, the moral of the story is that you have to transform your business into a star band that plays lean and mean, and it delivers ultimate satisfaction. Yet, you have to check out what the rivals are up to in order to craft a super strategy that will blow the crowd away! This might seem a bit daunting and just a tad overwhelming, but a rock God once said that it is a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll. So, let’s see how you can possibly rock the competitors like a hurricane:

• Do an extensive market space research and find out who your main competitors are. If you intend to confront industrial behemoths such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Flickr, Daimler, etc, you’d better have a great competitive advantage that makes Steve Jobs and Bill Gates scream in terror. If you don’t have that star quality just yet, you have to settle for some lower bets and track down the small, medium, and big size companies that offer products and/ or services similar to the ones that you are providing. Then neatly write down their names and open a little file on each one of them, which you must keep up to date;
• Once you prepare your list of competitors, spend some quality time on checking every single one of them out. Go to their websites, visit their blogs, examine the content they publish in the social media, or dig out any other relevant sources of information. Try to find out what people on the web have to say about them and roughly define the rate of customer satisfaction;
• Profile your competitors on the basis of the following factors:
  • Set the geographical location (are they operating in your town, in the nearby village, in a neighboring country, oceans apart, etc?). Think strategically and make sure that you focus on your direct competitors first and tackle them, before you make any further plans for market expansion;
  • Determine the target audience of your competitors and define the potential reach of their market;
  • Study their mission statement, their vision, and their message. Determine the degree of interactivity of each of your competitors and establish whether the company is engaging or not;
  • Determine the size of your competitors in order to figure out what you are in for. Sometimes, the size does matter. Indeed, a company that employs ten developers will finish a given project much quicker than a company that has two developers on board. This could make a huge difference, as often clients have no time to waste and they prefer to go with the quicker option. Hence, scalability does rule sometimes. Other times, clients are more prone to work with a small company because of certain advantages. Although it is quite relative, do take the size and the manpower of your competitors into account;
  • Figure out what the main competitive advantage of your industry rivals is! This is possibly the most important thing you have to retain from your analysis! Indeed, if you figure out where the strength of your rivals lies and obtain the key to their good performance, then you have them profiled;
  • Try to evaluate the marketing efforts of your competitors and appraise their efficiency in terms of visibility on the web. The latter is a complex composite of a company’s proficiency in social media usage, the quality of the content it produces, its presence in the blogosphere, etc;
  • Find out how the company ranks in Google by using a set of relevant keywords and use a web grader (there are multiple pieces of software that allow you to grade a site for free) to see how many inbound links its site has. Note that the number of inbound links, which are the ones that link back to a given website, determines the authority of a given website with regard to the Google algorithm. The more links, the better;
  • Make sure you know what your industrial rivals are up to and keep an eye on the products or services they are developing or planning to launch;
  • Type the name of your competitor in a search engine and see what people have to say about them. Find out if there are any reviews about their performance and read those carefully. You are going to obtain some invaluable insights that can help you improve your performance vis-a-vis your rivals;
  • Finally, determine the level of engagement of your competitors on the basis of your findings and draw certain conclusions.
• Do not try to copy your rivals. You can always look up to them for inspiration, but refrain from replicating them;
• At the end of this elaborate process, you will have a certain notion of the possible flaws and drawbacks of your competitors. Use this information to your advantage and figure out where your company can make a difference. Exploit the weaknesses of your competitors in order to improve your own products and/or services.

• Devise your own break-away strategy and make sure you capitalize on your competitive advantage by building virtual marketing and technical moats that give a very hard time to your rivals and are difficult to surpass by the rest.

So, what are you waiting for? All the pieces of the business puzzle are at your disposal. All you need is to put them together and see the grand picture of your future success. Although the competition analysis might seem convoluted and time-consuming, it is all worth it! Take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves, and get to work. Live to win and make it all worthwhile!

If you find this analyze-your-competitors blog entry interesting, then tune in next time for yet another post. We are going to discuss the notion of competitive advantage and try to determine its elusive nature in order to craft the nuke-your-competitors strategy. Do not forget to comment on our articles and share your thoughts with us! Indeed, you can do so by following us on Twitter or by supporting us on Facebook if you still have not done so! It is worth joining us!