How do you engage and influence your target audience with competitive intelligence?

Create content that focuses on your target audience: There is a place and time to talk about yourself and your company. Whatever marketing channels you choose, if you want to grab the attention of your target audience, talk about the clients and not yourself. Use market intelligence techniques: There are numerous market intelligence techniques you can use depending on your organization's nature and maturity. These techniques can help you enter a new market, strengthen and defend your position in the market, and gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. Survey your audience: Surveying your audience helps you understand the people buying your products and services and how best to engage with them.

In retail for instance, a comprehensive tracker can identify changes in the market dynamic. Repeat studies at periodic intervals reveal how customers change behaviours eg impact of higher cost of living on brands shopped and frequency; how their perceptions of brands and price / value position has altered with rising prices; how quality and other dimensions of “value” move vs price for individual brands. Monitoring the market regularly vs competition can arm brands with powerful insights enabling them to respond faster to protect and strengthen their brand position.

Being wary of the pond and the other fishes in the pond helps to survive in a better way. A brand needs to be cognizant of the industry and the market it belongs to. It becomes easier to navigate through the market and reach the desired audience if we are aware of the competitors and their strategies. By using CI a business can have an edge over their competitors. Which can be the selling point of a product. Over the years we have seen many case studies where brands/competitors have neck-to-neck marketing strategies. (Pepsi-Cocacola). The LinkedIn page also has a feature where you can add your competitors and get useful insights regularly.

The best use of CI would be working on your USP. CI will help leverage the loopholes of competitors' products and services if used wisely.

CI can help to explain the value chain to your audience, whether implicitly or explicitly. This will help them have a broader overview on your value-added compared to the rest of the competition and will automatically help you position yourself in a more distinguished way

The audience also enjoys the competition between their favorite brands. They are smart and they keep comparing who is offering more value. If a brand wants to be on the top of its audience list then CI is the cheat code.