A Comprehensive Guide On Competitive Monitoring

By Author: David Lee
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No business operates in a void. Each business organization is part of a much larger global marketplace and smaller local markets with thousands (if not millions) of organizations like them.

Therefore, knowing who your competition is — that is, who you are — is necessary for your business to operate at peak efficiency and news data can be a good source to get data and insights on your competitors. If continuous improvement is your goal as an organization, you need to know what your competition is doing so that you can do it better than them.
Competitor monitoring is nothing new, organizations have been monitoring the movements of competitors since time immemorial. However, with the changing market landscape, competitive oversight has become more sophisticated.

According to Forbes, monitoring your competition is a great way to understand why they are outperforming you in certain areas and what is getting them results. In some cases, it’s also a way to find out what you’re doing better than your competition — so you can keep improving. In this article, we will discuss what competitive tracking is, ...
... its importance, methods to perform it, and other important issues.

Ultimately, you will clearly understand how and why to monitor your competition. Let’s get started.

What exactly is competitive monitoring?

Competitive monitoring can be defined as the ongoing monitoring of your competitors as well as the market and business environment in order to gather information on the competition, competitive products and services, and market trends.

Usually, the goal of competitive monitoring is to define your own market position, but it is a process that can be used to make a number of strategic business decisions.

The information gathered during competitive intelligence, when it is analyzed and deemed relevant and usable, is called competitive intelligence. Competitive intelligence can be (and should be) a predominant basis for making strategic and tactical decisions that give your organization a competitive advantage.

This competitive intelligence obtained through competitive monitoring can also be used to perform competitive intelligence analysis (or competitive analysis), which can provide a comprehensive understanding of a competitor’s products, services, value proposition, capabilities, and weaknesses.

The significance of competitive monitoring

Competition monitoring is important to any organization, small, medium, or large. As mentioned above, analyzing the data collected during the process allows organizations to understand competitors’ products, pricing, marketing, and sales strategies, which can help them inform their business strategies. Regular competition monitoring provides benefits such as:

1. Relevant and Timely Business Information Intelligence is not good if it is not timely. To be actionable, intelligence must be gathered before competitors act, which is why regular competition monitoring is essential.

2. Better knowledge of market developments and potential threats Competitor monitoring provides preliminary knowledge of market developments and potential threats, which helps an organization prepare for competitor movements, formulate a counter-strategy, and discover inappropriate market paths. any loss.

3. Improved Business Responsiveness, Business responsiveness can be measured by asking the simple question “How long does it take your organization to answer a business question?” For example, “when did our competitor start offering this particular feature?” But this is a reactive approach.

With regular competitive intelligence, the question would be “we know our competitor is about to launch this new feature, what can we do to counter this movement?”

What should you do for monitoring?

Competitive tracking will give you an edge over your competition, but not unless you know what to track. What are the exact data points you should be looking for? Here is the answer :

Competitor’s websites

When it comes to competition monitoring, a competitor’s website is a veritable gold mine of information. The information obtained from competitors’ websites contains a lot of information that will give you an insight into their key investment areas, marketing strategy, product strategy, sales strategy, and overall business growth.

You can also find information about your executives, investors, news, events, products, pricing and packaging, thought leaders, etc. that will give you a competitive advantage.

In particular, getting to know key people in the company will help you figure out what your competitors really are like — the real people who run your business.

When your sales team is on the phone with a prospect and knows exactly how your competitor is positioned, pricing and features, equip them with the actionable intelligence they need to close a competitive deal.
News mentions

News mentions are an important part of competitive monitoring, as knowing what’s being aforementioned regarding your competitors within the media could be an important supply of insights into their business. Get the news data related to your competitors and industry with Newsdata.io news API and you can also get the historical data with this news API that will help in competitive monitoring. News mentions can reveal things like market positioning, popularity, direction, changes at the C-suite level, and product changes, which might inform your own business strategies.

A company’s handout page is a robust indicator of what they require current and potential customers to worry about, and thus, is an important datum to monitor. Similarly, being responsive to awards and recognitions that are being bestowed to your contestant is in our own way to grasp their strengths.

News conjointly helps ascertain that angle and stories they’re pitching, and to which media outlets, to determine if they’ll be convinced to write down regarding you too. Knowing however your competitors are positioning themselves can assist you to think about a novel angle to differentiate your own organization or brand.

Social media

Social media presence could be plenty these days. corporations place up plenty of knowledge on social media to push coming events, thought leadership, product updates, worker updates, support, and so forth
it’s best to observe the social media platforms that your competitors get the foremost engagement on, the type of conversations that they’re having there, and therefore the content they share online.

This could assist you to formulate your own social media strategy,
discover queries that are being asked in your field, and connect with the thought leaders who are providing partaking insights on connected topics.
It’s thus, an avenue of knowledge that may facilitate closely monitoring each and future activity of their business and the way they’re partaking with their customers/clients. This could assist you to verify the various parts of your overall business strategy, and create your next move with knowing confidence.

Review websites

Review websites similar to G2, Capterra are another supply of data you ought to positively be monitoring. In addition to gauging your own client satisfaction, it helps tons to grasp what your competitors’ customers consider} their product and services. This may offer valuable insights into what your competitor's strengths and weaknesses are, which may be wont to improve your own product or service.

Review websites may reveal what the previous or gift staff ought to say about an organization. Whether or not smart or bad, this information is often employed by your sales groups as ammunition to position your organization before purchasers by depicting their weaknesses as your strengths. accomplishment groups may use it to higher position your company’s culture in front of prospective employees.

Marketing Emails

What’s better than letting your competitors tell you what’s going on in their company? By subscribing to your competitors’ marketing emails, you make sure you have actionable information on the type of content they share, what events they want to attend or sponsor, mentions of their news, and which webinars to attend. who can be of assistance for further information?

Job posting

Your competitors’ hiring activities can tell you a lot about what your business is focusing on right now. Monitoring the post location, the number of vacancies, roles, and duration of the online post can provide insight into future strategic plans, growth, and direction.

Try to identify trends in the job posting. For example, if you see an increase in job vacancies for product and sales-related roles in a particular location, your competitor is likely working on developing a new product and about to launch it.

How do you keep track of your competitors?

The Internet is your best resource when it comes to tracking competitors and gathering competitive intelligence. However, if you try to manually gather competitive information about your competitors and the market, you will be overwhelmed with information and will face many challenges that you will have to overcome, and that sounds like a lot of work just for gathering data on your competitors and you still need to process it and there are more steps ahead waiting for you.

Therefore, nowadays companies use BI tools or software for competitive monitoring to gather information on their competitors and to present that data into a meaningful presentation for better decision making.

Conclusion

Competitive monitoring is simply the initial step towards creating your organization competitively intelligent. Get news data related to your market easily with Newsdata.io news API and ensure you utilize the intelligence you collect to its fullest potential, i.e. use it to make competitive analysis, share it together with your key stakeholders, use it in your sales enablement, and/or selling collateral, and use different ways in which to remodel it into action. Hope this post has provided you with a good picture on the topic of competitive monitoring, which can assist you to chart your organization’s journey to success.