Sources of Competitive Intelligence and Best Practices

Competitive data on customers

You can obtain competitive intelligence about customers by relying on the following sources:

• Social media

• Primary research

• Customer reviews

Social media

Social media offers unfiltered and unfettered access to people’s thoughts regarding products they have purchased or intend to buy. Thus, by collecting the publicly available data therein and analyzing the conversations, you will generate reports that allow you to evaluate your brand against your competitors in terms of customer reviews and feedback. The information generated can help you modify your brand strategy accordingly.

Primary research

Conducting surveys and one-on-one interviews with your customers is a surefire way of understanding the market needs. After all, customers form the focus of any company’s operations, given their role as the target personas. Through this research, you’ll gain insight into their needs, feedback, and pain points, as well as your products’ use cases.

Customer reviews

The internet is home to numerous online marketplaces that contain review sections. By obtaining this review data, you can immediately establish the value customers attach to your product and those of your competitors as well.

At the same time, while competitive intelligence is beneficial to companies, it’s crucial to ensure that such information is accessed ethically. At Oxylabs, we promote and espouse ethical web scraping by only collecting publicly available information. We don’t encourage nor support unethical web scraping or gathering not publicly available information.

Check this for more information on web scraping and how to do web scraping in Python.

Challenges of competitive intelligence

Although competitive intelligence has increasingly grown in importance, becoming an integral differentiator in the competition-filled business world, it’s not without its challenges. These challenges of competitive intelligence include:

• Accuracy and reliability of data sources

• Timeliness of data

• Preparation of data

Accuracy and reliability of data sources

Technology is more central to companies’ operations now than ever before. Avenues such as social media platforms have emerged that businesses can use to generate marketing hype. Whereas this is beneficial to firms behind the advertisements, they complicate the process of obtaining valuable data. In fact, competitive intelligence professionals have described the heightened level of difficulty when it comes to distinguishing what a company does and other essential data from their marketing hype.

The digital age has eased the dissemination of information, some of which may be inaccurate or borne from hearsay, and has created multiple sources of information. This means that to obtain useful competitive data, professionals have to find ways of sieving the useless data sources out – that’s the product of hearsay – leaving only the accurate ones.

Importantly, companies could adopt technology that obtains, organizes, and prioritizes each update from all the possible sources to deal with these problems. Further, to guarantee the accuracy of the information, businesses can constantly check their competitors’ reviews, products, leadership team, promotions, digital presence, content, and customers, both online and offline.

Timeliness of data

For data to be actionable, it should be fresh or up to date. However, competitive intelligence professionals often struggle with obtaining the data in a timely fashion. Also, a lot of the crucial information is not freely available, meaning collecting it consumes much time, and by the time professionals complete this step, the data could have already become stale. 

Substituting manual forms of data collection with automated data collection and analysis methods is a surefire way of addressing the problem.

Preparation of data

Usually, data from various sources is available in an unstructured format, may contain unimportant values, and may not be easily accessible. These characteristics mean that the data needs to be transformed into the industry-accepted data format – JSON – before it can be analyzed or used in the generation of models.

Best practices of competitive intelligence

While reading through the challenges discussed above, one element may have stood out: the importance of technology. Competitive intelligence tools facilitate:

• data collection;

• conversion of raw data into the accepted format;

• analysis. 

They also enable the verification of the accuracy and reliability of the data sources. Without such tools, it would be impossible to retrieve accurate, reliable, and timely data from resources such as the internet. It would even be impossible to analyze the said data.

Thus, competitive intelligence tools smoothen the data collection process and deliver the data in real-time. Previously, competitive intelligence professionals used to gather and analyze the information manually. But this approach was disadvantageous. By the time they had completed the analysis, the market would have already transitioned, rendering the data irrelevant. 

Nonetheless, this is not the case anymore, given that you can readily use readily available competitive intelligence tools from Oxylabs. Our Scraper APIs are a set of reliable all-in-one solutions that are suited for collecting competitive data. 

Conclusion

The importance of competitive intelligence on businesses is undeniable. From the onset, managers realized its contribution in ensuring companies have a competitive advantage, and they have been unrelenting in using it since. The emergence of new technologies and digital platforms means that large volumes of data are being generated daily and to adapt, the competitive intelligence best practices call for the use of competitive intelligence tools. These tools are capable of collecting, analyzing, and presenting real-time data faster than if professionals had used manual methods. They also address several problems associated with collecting competitive data. Our Scraper APIs, for example, are a set of reliable and comprehensive solutions for collecting competitive data.