5 Ways a Competitive Intelligence Platform Can Help You Make Use of Your Insights

In this blog post, we explain how a competitive intelligence platform can work for the benefit of your organization. Here is what you can do with your insights:

1. Gather

In the world of abundant information flows, your starting point is to collect all the information that is relevant to your business or organization. You need to plan carefully what is it that you want to enable with insights that you hope to get from the collected information.

For instance, you may want to monitor the discussion about your products or a key theme. This discussion takes place across different editorial media and various social media channels, as well as product review sites.

For most companies, it is vital to identify key competitors and gather all relevant information about them. This includes both direct competitors selling the same product and indirect competitors offering a different product or service but potentially satisfying the same customer need as you.

You will get essential information from both external and internal sources. For the latter, think of all the information your salespeople can take on from customer meetings and your won or lost offers. This is called field intelligence – you can easily insert it in your platform and share what you learnt e.g., about your competitor’s product to your colleagues in product management or sales and the customer front.

All this gathered key information will be available in your competitive intelligence platform.

2. Organize

A bookshelf is a good analogue. Depending on what kind of a person you are, you may want to organize your books alphabetically, by theme or even language, or prefer to have your books disheveled, unorganized.

In working life, being unprepared or having things unorganized is rarely a recipe for success. A competitive intelligence platform helps you get your things organized. Once you have gathered your insights, you can easily find information about your stakeholders and your industry, or the field intelligence your personnel inserts in the platform.

For your competitor information needs, create competitor battlecards that allow you to easily benchmark your competitors to each other.

You can also direct different feeds into your platform to get all the relevant news, media monitoring, market intelligence and other content at your fingertips.

Your competitive intelligence platform has now become your central library.

3. Search and Visualize

Once you have your books organized, it is easy to find what you are looking for between the cover and the back cover. Advanced search is a key feature of a comprehensive competitive intelligence platform. It helps you find all the relevant information you need.

Visual dashboards are not only for those people who prefer picture books: dashboards help you to visualize key insights. You will get the big picture – whether it is about comparing the visibility of emerging trends or illustrating raw oil price development in the previous 12 months.

You are also able to embed all sorts of content in your dashboards and other presentations.

4. Share and Distribute

A competitive intelligence platform provides you with opportunities to share your findings quickly or distribute them, for instance, daily or weekly. You may decide to share what you have heard in a customer meeting to your colleague or your team. You can also create alerts on diverse topics and share those with people who need that piece of information. Or you can order curated newsletters.

The key is to think who needs to get the insights. Is it the marketing department, management, your analyst team, or someone else? You can be the boss who helps your personnel to get access to the specific information they need to perform in their jobs, and therefore help your organization to be successful.

5. Activate!

All good plans must lead to action. Make sure that your marketing turns their insights into campaigns that bring awareness or new business to you if those are your key goals. If you are a product owner, think how you can use the knowledge that you now have about your competitor’s product’s weaknesses and strengths. Is there something you need to quickly include in your product development roadmap?

As you can see, an easy-to-use competitive intelligence platform has tons of benefits that can help you power your decision-making, engage your organization, and beat the competition. Take the next step and elevate your knowledge management to a new level!

Contact us for a free demo on our Intelligence Plaza 10 competitive intelligence platform!