Utilizing Competitor Data to Give Your Business a Leg Up

Competitor data can help your company find customers, examine industry patterns and trends, and gain a market advantage. Of course, to get the most value out of this information, you need the right data analysis tools, processes, and technologies at your disposal.

There are lots of things you can do to analyze competitor data and generate actionable insights from it. Now, let's look at four tips to help you utilize competitor data to give your business a leg up on its rivals.

Perform a SWOT Analysis

You can use a SWOT analysis to assess your company's competitive position. According to Lucidspark, this analysis focuses on four areas:

●  Strengths

●  Weaknesses

●  Opportunities

●  Threats

To conduct a SWOT analysis, put together a team that includes members of different departments across your business. Then, team members can examine the aforementioned areas in detail. You can even use a SWOT analysis generator to hone in on each area and get the best results out of your analysis.

Ultimately, a SWOT analysis can help you uncover ways to strengthen your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. It does not, however, allow you to account for government legislation, labor demands, and other external and internal factors that can impact your company's success. So, even though a SWOT analysis can be helpful, you should not rely on it as a lone source to assess your competitive position.

Leverage Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis can provide a great complement to SWOT analysis. This natural language processing technique lets you review customer feedback and determine whether the majority of it is positive, negative, or neutral.

With sentiment analysis, you can take a collection of text and break it down into sentences, phrases, and other components. From here, you'll need to identify sentiment-bearing components and score them accordingly. Typically, components are scored on a scale of -1 to +1. As you add up components, you'll be able to calculate a sentiment analysis score.

Sentiment analysis tools are available that allow you to analyze massive volumes of customer feedback as quickly and efficiently as possible. These tools enable you to assess customer feedback from emails, surveys, social media conversations, and other sources. They can also provide you with real-time insights that can help identify ways to foster trust and loyalty among your customer base. Best of all, you can leverage these insights to uncover ways to stand out from your competition.

Take Advantage of AI 

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to automate competitor data collection and analysis. It consists of computer algorithms that can unify data across multiple sources. Plus, AI can help you extract insights from large sets of data and make accurate predictions based on this information.

You can integrate AI into Google Analytics, your customer relationship management (CRM) system, and many other competitor data sources. Next, the technology can search for patterns and trends within competitor data within these sources. It can even provide visualizations that highlight competitor insights and offer recommendations you can use to rise above your rivals.

To realize the full value of AI for competitor data, you need to implement it properly. It pays to search far and wide for engineers and data scientists who can help you set up and leverage AI models. Demand for these AI professionals is growing. As such, you'll need to work diligently to identify and retain top talent to support your AI initiatives.

It can be beneficial to develop and launch AI training and boot camps. These programs ensure that your company can train its current workforce to use AI as part of its everyday activities. And over time, your staff can become AI experts who can help your company use the technology to streamline competitive data analysis and become more productive and efficient than ever before.

Deploy IoT Analytics

In addition to the aforementioned options, Internet of Things (IoT) devices allow you to generate competitive insights from myriad sources. You can build and execute an IoT analytics strategy designed with competitor data top of mind.

As you develop your IoT analytics strategy, consider your business goals. Think about what types of competitor data you want to obtain and how you intend to use it. Also, determine the stakeholders you'll need to involve to ensure your strategy stays on track.

Some companies hire a chief data officer (CDO) who ensures analytics can be accessed and utilized by appropriate stakeholders. The CDO can do its part to prevent data silos and other issues when collecting and assessing competitor data. He or she can implement an architecture that supports a company's immediate and long-term competitive analysis goals, too.

The Bottom Line

Competitor data can help your business:

●  Fine-tune its unique selling proposition

●  Uncover ways to improve its products and services

●  Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and other competitive benchmarks

●  Identify issues that hamper your research and development, hiring, and other business departments

●  Discover potential threats to your business

There's a lot to like about competitor data, and you need to use it consistently. That way, you can gain the insights you need to become an industry leader that stands above the competition today, tomorrow, and long into the future.