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Eyes Wide Net or how to do a competitive intelligence…

We have already mentioned blindness as one of the 7 deadly sins in SEO, and this notion is found on a strategic and operational level when designing competitive intelligence. We will try to explain the interest of the approach.

Competitive intelligence marketing is an essential tool for developing a more effective marketing strategy. It involves collecting, analysing, synthesising and sharing information about competitors. To conduct competitive intelligence, you will need to follow a competitive intelligence process. The purpose of this article is to help you better understand what competitive intelligence is and the different techniques that exist.

How big your eyes are

Competitive intelligence or benchmarking is a decision-making tool that allows you to observe your competitors, currently the e-reputation is very important. It can be set up on a strategic level as well as on an operational level, the areas of choice are wide, as you can do a marketing watch, a price watch, or even a technological watch. Each watch differs according to the sector of activity and the stage of growth of your company.

The objective of a watch is not only to observe the new strategy or digital marketing of your competitor, but also to apply it. This competitive analysis, preceded by a SWOT analysis, will enable you to identify your strengths and weaknesses and to better position yourself. Monitoring also means being able to position yourself perhaps where your competitors are not, so you need to set up a good strategic watch.

Your main objective is to discover their competitiveness on the Internet, their sales tactics, their communication, which is why competitor analysis is almost mandatory. It is essential and primordial not to be trapped by the attack and marketing tactics of the companies.

The important thing to remember is that competitors are sources of information to help you with your digital strategy. If a company does not analyse its competitors, it risks losing its way and not being able to define its real marketing strategy. For this you can look on the web like websites, social media, companies etc. There are many tools to do an effective watch and to conduct an interesting watch.

Yet another digital headache

As a first step, you will need to select organisations, key competitors or individuals. These relevant targets should add value to your current strategy. Now you need to look at the information available about them. This will give you a clear picture of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, as well as their potential strengths and weaknesses, although of course the competitors must remain relevant to your market. Once you have chosen the targets, it remains to know what you would like to obtain from them: better visibility, competitiveness… the choice is yours. After that, you will have to select and classify the sources of information, which can be: rss feeds, institutional sites or general and specialised newspapers.

Monitoring tools such as Feedly can centralise all sources. Now that these steps are done, all that remains is to read, watch and observe carefully the information coming from your direct competitors and be brave. However, in order to keep a watch, you will need to maintain a long-term watch. It will allow you to follow market trends and keep up to date with new technologies that can be used to improve your business or product.

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I can’t, I have benchmark

We come to the famous question “When to do a digital watch? It’s hard to say, because as we said, it differs depending on the sector and the competitive intensity. If you are in a highly competitive sector, then doing a digital watch is essential and that is why collecting data on all your competitors will only help you. In this case, monitoring once or twice a week would be a good thing. But if you are in a sector with low competition and you also do daily curation, it makes no sense. Daily monitoring is essential for large companies, but often the monitoring strategy is put aside.

The last factor is the time you can allocate, you do not have the same resources as your competitors and it is according to this that you will be able to distribute this activity in your schedule. Monitoring software can sometimes save you time, but they are not all free!

And you, which tool do you use to do your monitoring? Tell us about it in our comments.

SEO tips

Don’t go head to head watching competitors without knowing what you want to achieve.

Keep the values you have at the heart of your SEO strategy, as some actions that are implemented by others will not work because of your sector.

By doing too much like others you will become like them, which is why you should keep your values and your customers’ expectations in mind during your strategy.

Think 2.0, and you’ll be able to set up automated monitoring using free or paid tools, as this is a time-consuming exercise.

Want to know more about competitive intelligence? Call on our Paris SEO agency.


Article rédigé par Joseph Mbota

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