For many businesses, market research has been the core marketing strategy when you want to get valuable insights into market precedents and the emerging trends. Nonetheless, competitive intelligence has proven to be far better and resourceful. This is because CI is the legal and ethical process of gathering data from specific industry components and then analyzing and interpreting this data to create invaluable business insights that will spearhead your business in your specific industry.

Conducting competitive intelligence research

To be able to conduct CI research, organizations can either conduct this process internally or through a third party that specializes in the same.

Internal CI research – with internal CI research, an organization will typically use its own time and allocate its own resources so as to successfully formulate, track and evaluate the CI functions that will create elements of their competitive advantage through the available emerging trends. Through this method, organizations hope to establish their own metrics as well as research methods so as to create better and stronger executive decisions that will take their businesses to the next level.

CI consultant firms – Alternatively, organizations can choose to outsource CI functions to third party affiliates who expand the research and emerging trends to create a detailed analysis of business elements during the aggregation and synthesis process. CI consultancy firms such as NetBase Quid use their own proprietary research systems to deduce competitive profiling and in-depth assessments of core business competencies.

Competitive intelligence tools

Whether your organization conducts CI internally or through the help of third-party CI firms, there are some critical CI tools and emerging trends that might prove to be very helpful during this process. Some of these tools include:

• SEMrush

• Spyfu

• TrackMaven

• SimilarWeb

• Brandwatch Anaytics

• Rival IQ

• BuzzSumo

• Moat

These tools use SEO keywords and phrases to target specific domains related to various organizations within the industry. Furthermore, you will be able to get detailed analytics regarding all the business components that are related to your products/services within the industry. It is prudent to argue that the use of these analytical tools in CI will certainly help improve your business strategies and goals towards a leading industry competitor.

Advantages of using competitive intelligence in your company

When using CI, you will be able to predict the behavior of your competitors. This is mostly due to the fact that CI lets you benchmark different company elements that are effective in propagating their business within the industry. Furthermore, you will also be able to do aggregation and synthesis techniques in order to incorporate invaluable business strategies as well as avoid mistakes made by top business.

You will also be able to make decisions regarding the company progress with a lot of confidence. This is mostly because CI not only lets you have detailed in-depth information about the market, but it also provides specific and accurate data backed actions that will lead to insightful and beneficial business strategies.

In addition, CI helps in bettering the decision making on ROIs. These data backed insights are helpful in decluttering business initiatives such that organizations can be able to evaluate their current strengths and weaknesses and create profitable ways in which to grow their startup sand small companies. Consequently, strong ROIs will be created towards improving the business in general.

Finally, CI is very helpful in tracking the possible industry trends and thereby predicting future moves that are most likely to occur within the industry. You will find that an in-depth competitive intelligence acts as a guide towards tracing where the industry has been, the current tactics and business models being applied. You will also be able to track possible moves that the industry could take. Your organization might even benefit from venturing into new territories that were previously unexplored within the industry.