Nowadays, competition is increasing vastly and companies from different industries are trying to take the biggest portion of the market spy. Whether you want your company to be cost leader, differentiation leader or even focused on servicing a niche market, you need to assess the proper business strategy that will allow you to form a long-term comparative advantage and give you the space for constant improvements.
Before you even start thinking of proper methods to position your products in the market, you need to identify the market demands for which you will either innovate new products that suits them or improve your current products to better satisfy them.
Doing so is not an easy process, it requires experience, skills and patience. Most importantly, it requires a large set of data that is based on the surrounding market specifically your competitors, whether these competitors are direct or indirect.
So, throughout this article we will be discussing the importance of data and data analytics in helping companies monitor their competitors and use this analysis to serve as the lead for their innovation and improvements of products.
Data Analytics for Monitoring Competitors Behavior
Data analytics have an undeniable benefit regarding monitoring competitors’ behavior. This goes beyond monitoring the actions of your direct competitors, but identifying your indirect ones as well. Take company X, for example, company Y is its biggest competitor just because they both offer the same products, however, company Z could be another hidden competitor that satisfies similar needs to consumers. Data analytics allows company X to be aware of company Y and Z. This is done through the constant and timely gathering of data and thus being more “awake” to and reactive with any actions done by both.
Data analytics allows for the formation of partnerships and sponsorships. It’s possible through having big data about your competitors’ behavior. This data ranges from: methods your competitors are using to market their products, sponsorships or deals they have with companies from the same or different industries, the clicks and traffic of the websites they market their products through, etc. This serves as a shortcut and startup point for your thinking. If your competitors were succeeding and benefiting from a partnership with a certain company, you can consider a similar company to partner with. If they’ve been having an increase in customer traffic on their websites because of YouTube collaborations, you can start searching for channels to sponsor you and even add discount codes to users coming from these channels.
Data analytics helps you in identifying your competitors’ strategies, mistakes, weaknesses and strengths and thus enhancing your strengths, minimizing your threats and widening your windows of opportunities. Again, data analytics allows for the analysis of your competitors’ approaches to marketing their products and targeting their customers. What kind of information do they share? How much details do they have of their products posted on their website? How do they engage with customers on their official website and on their social media platforms? etc.
Once you identify the answers, you can then asses what your competitors are doing right and wrong or even what are some opportunities they are missing out. For example, they might not be benefiting from real-time marketing or engaging with customers properly, so this opens a new opportunity for your company (considering that it operates with similar products and service similar customers) to better engage with customers and improve your real-time marketing. The accumulation of these actions taken as a response to competitors’ weaknesses and transformed to strength points can not only enhance your reputation and quality, but also provide a comparative advantage.
How can Data Analytics help you?
Now that we’ve discussed the importance of data analytics for monitoring competitors, it’s time to see how can this analysis help you in innovating new products or improving your current ones.
When it comes to analyzing the market, internal analysis revolves around the “exploration of your organization’s competency, cost position and competitive viability in the marketplace”. Further analysis includes assessing external factors in the surrounding environment including competitor’s behavior. Once you’ve assessed your competitors’ scope, actions, strategies, deals, strengths and weaknesses, you would know more about how they target customers, segment them, position their products and thus how they produce new ones or improve the current. In addition, the thorough analysis that you did of your competitors allows you to tape into new avenues. These avenues can be certain geographical areas you can tailor your current products to better serve, or even innovate products that customers want but are not yet produced. On the long run, keeping an eye on the competitors actions becomes an incorporated norm along with keeping a responsive, reactive, and innovative strategy.
Where Do You Start?
Analysis makes no sense without the word “Data”, so basically you need to have the raw data in order to further analyze it. The most important thing is the tool you use to get your data. That’s simply because you need to have authorized data with accurate details about your competitors. There are a lot of tools that help you find that. They might not get you data on your competitors’ culture, or what they don’t post publicly, but these tools can get you data about feeds left of customers on the competitors’ services, any posts present on the competitors’ social media platforms, and general structured and unstructured data about your competitors products.
Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) is a crawling and scraping tool that allows users from different parts of the world have access to the data present online. If you’d like to check it out click here.
We cover hundreds of different use cases ranging from wanting simple data about reviews left on products to wanting big data that include detailed information about thousands of products’ names and descriptions. We offer our users with a smooth scraping and crawling process while keeping their identity anonymous. We can help you start your analysis that hopefully will end up in your company being distinguished and capable of forming multiple of unmatchable comparative advantages.
