subject: Competitive Intelligence For An Effective Online Marketing [print this page] Venturing in online marketing really entails intense effort. Internet marketers tend to do many activities in a day like researching, planning, thinking of new strategies, and measuring results. But there seems to be endless ways to reach out to customers because of the many channels available on the web. But for one to be effective, you only have to determine which ways are worth pursuing and which ones are not that applicable.
In the end, every online marketing endeavor comes down to introducing your brand to the target market, satisfying their needs and wants, and letting your company evolve with the times. Unfortunately, even savvy marketers fail to give proper attention to the last one - letting the company evolve. They are so busy with the introduction phase that they forget to pause once in a while to understand how well the business in doing, especially in comparison to close competitors.
Similar to the way offline businesses study their competitor's pricing, placement, and product strategy, knowing the competitors in your online business is crucial. That's why in this blog post, we would like to emphasise the use of "Competitive Intelligence" in the social web. Before we discuss what "Competitive Intelligence" is, it might be a good idea to know what it is NOT:
- Preparing a chart comparing your competitor's traffic to yours but failing to re-evaluate it
- Copy other website's strategy and ask your product manager to make a roadmap for its implementation
- Complaining and ranting about your competitor's recent successful marketing move
- Googling the competition's brand names to see what results turn up
If you are guilty of any of these things, it is time to take better action. Competitive intelligence goes deeper than that. The above-mentioned actions merely let you scratch at the surface, which is no good since you are competing with them. So to aid you in determining how correct information have been collected, below are some areas to remember.
Competitive Intelligence is doing the following:
- Identifying company products that can stand head-to-head against the competition
- Knowing the reasons behind the competitor's strategies and how it can potentially affect you
- Mapping out the factors that differentiate you from the competition
- Research initiative that enable you to understand the current and future platforms of both direct and indirect competitors
It may seem rather low-tech but the first step in competitive analysis is writing down (or using Excel) to identify all competitors and their key attributes. Among the factors that should be included are their business size, features, affiliate program initiatives, price points, advocates, and core customers. You can create a more effective strategy from here.
