The overall competitive intelligence trend is clear: companies are increasingly recognising its importance.
87% of companies believe that competitive intelligence is important for their business, with 63% planning to increase their investment in the next 12 months. With that growth comes innovation. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
The way organisations gather, analyse and use competitive intelligence are evolving thanks to better technology and advancements in artificial intelligence. They can monitor competitors globally, in real-time, and with only the click of a mouse.
This article will identify the 5 important competitive intelligence trends organisations need to focus on over the coming year.
Why Monitor Competitors?
Organisations monitor their competitors to gain a competitive advantage, so they can get or stay ahead in their market. By gathering and analysing competitor activity and strategies, organisations can identify opportunities and threats and take action to protect and improve their position.
The intelligence they gather can be used to validate and optimise their own strategies, so they maximise their revenues and growth.
How Competitive Intelligence Is Performed
Until recently, competitive intelligence was a manual process. Teams, or more likely, individuals were tasked with visiting websites and reporting back on their findings. The data set was usually small, making it easy to analyse, but the process was slow and inconclusive. Key insights were easy to miss.
In the last 20 years, software has been built to streamline these manual processes. RSS feeds, Google Alerts and social media monitoring tools have made it easier and faster to track a lot of what’s taking place online. But again, they often left gaps in knowledge.
Many organisations combined these tools with periodic ‘state of the market’ reports from research organisations and other, usually offline, forms of market research. This competitive intelligence was far more detailed and therefore insightful, but it lacked immediacy. By the time the reports surfaced, the intelligence was relatively old making it harder to use effectively.
Today, the market is being disrupted by competitor intelligence platforms – automated software that tracks a competitor’s global digital footprint in real-time across any number of criteria.
This game-changing technology is giving organisations immediate access to deeper levels of intelligence than ever before. The data is captured and presented in online dashboards, often with the ability to export or share insights with relevant departments across the organisation.
What Do Organisations Track Using Competitor Intelligence Platforms?
Competitor intelligence platforms can track a wide range of information related to a competitor’s digital footprint, including details and changes to:
- Pricing
- Promotions
- Products
- Marketing
- Content
- Messaging
- Website changes
- Investments
- Personnel
- Share price
In addition, they can be used to track regulatory changes and other industry news. With this information in mind, let’s look at the important competitive intelligence trends to look out for in 2023.
5 Key Competitive Intelligence Trends
Here are 5 competitive intelligence trends we’re seeing and how they’re affecting the future of the market.
1) Customisation and Personalisation
One of the challenges organisations have experienced with competitive intelligence is that so many tools offer a one-size-fits-all solution. Every organisation’s need for competitive intelligence is nuanced by what they do, the competitive landscape and the specific challenges they face.
Only 37% of organisations effectively use the competitive intelligence they collect. While 39% of organisations cite their biggest challenge with competitive intelligence as having too much information to manage.
While there are obvious benefits of using competitor intelligence tools – including ease and speed – organisations will barely scratch the surface of its value until it narrows in to their specific challenges.
From how intelligence dashboards are configured to the level of ongoing support provided by the software team, we expect service levels to become more flexible and customisable across the competitor intelligence market.
With that flexibility, organisations will be able to become more prescriptive with their requirements and the outputs they need.
2) Smarter Artificial intelligence
AI and machine learning are the future of competitive intelligence. They are changing the way in which data is gathered and presented, streamlining processes and getting intelligence in the hands of decision makers faster than ever before.
The manual process of visiting competitor websites to identify and analyse changes have been completely replaced by automated software. Once configured, data is gathered continuously, flowing real-time intelligence into organisations.
But you only have to look at the recent arrival of Chat-GPT (3 and 4) and Google’s Bard to see that AI has a more significant part to play across most industries. 84% of organisations say AI adoption has generated new insights, with 63% saying it has led to an increase in revenue. In competitive intelligence, we expect AI-powered platforms to get better at learning and adapting.
As they get smarter, the results they produce will get more relevant and usable. That will help organisations get smarter and faster, giving them more opportunities to gain an advantage over their competitors.
3. Cloud-Based Competitive Intelligence
The future of competitive intelligence is in the cloud. As competitive intelligence trends go, this is one that is already gathering great momentum and will continue in the coming years. The global market for cloud-based competitive intelligence solutions is expected to grow from $1.7 billion in 2020 to $4.8 billion by 2027.
The benefits brought about by this cloud-based approach are that your applications and software can be accessed whenever you want to, regardless of your location. You’re also able to use any device of your choice to do this.
This means that everything can be accessed by simply clicking a button on your chosen device. If you want to access data collection, insights or analytics, this is something that can be done with ease.
This will help organisations get relevant competitive intelligence into the hands of the right people faster, enabling them to respond and adapt to threats and opportunities in a timely manner.
4) Augmented Analytics
Augmented analytics could well be the future of competitive intelligence. The changes brought about by augmented analytics will relate to the ways that data is prepared, how insights are generated and shared, and how to operationalise data science and machine learning models.
Perhaps the biggest benefit offered by augmented analytics is the fact that it allows non-technical people to become involved.
Without a deep understanding of systems, software or anything else that would usually create barriers, virtually anyone is able to create data analytic models that have a degree of sophistication. What’s equally important is that users are then easily able to draw deep insights from them.
5)Human Analysis and Curation
For all the innovation and technological advancements, an important competitive intelligence trend that must still be considered is human analysis. 82% of companies that use human analysis along with automated tracking reported more accurate and actionable insights compared to those that relied solely on automated tools.
We’ve already touched upon the challenge of handling large volumes of data for many organisations. Not all can justify or afford to build a dedicated insights team – and doing so would potentially delay intelligence being shared with relevant stakeholders within the organisation.
As such, we expect to see more organisations looking for competitor intelligence solutions that can provide expert analysis and data curation as part of their service. This will save organisations considerable time by giving them access to the most relevant insights for the specific challenges they face.
Make Smarter Decisions Faster With WatchMyCompetitor
Unlike other intelligence solutions that serve up hard-to-mine unfiltered data, or which collate insights into periodic reports that lack immediacy, WatchMyCompetitor is the complete competitor intelligence platform.
We use AI to track your competitors’ global digital footprint in real time, so you don’t miss anything important. While our market experts analyse and curate the most relevant competitive insights on your behalf.
That means no more sifting through unmanageable volumes of data. You get fast access to relevant, timely intelligence to optimise strategies, outsmart the competition and protect and grow your revenue.
Don’t let your competitors gain an advantage. Book a demo today.
