Competitive Intelligence: Purpose
When it comes to marketing your brand online there is just so much to do. We spend our days researching, creating, implementing, and then measuring the success of our efforts. There are dozens of channels to participate in, and obviously thousands of ways to go about marketing your brand, but however you slice it—online marketing comes down to introducing new audiences to your brand, keeping your current brand users happy, and evolving the brand/company itself. outline strategy
Unfortunately I think the first two steps often overshadow that third step to the process—evolving the brand/company itself, probably because to grow as a company you really need to take a pause and evaluate where you are currently standing. As marketers, the idea of pausing is equated with losing momentum which scares the hell out of us all. This industry moves too quickly, and pausing to reflect on where your brand is compared to your competitors seems like time poorly spent.
I am here to argue just the opposite. A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at PubCon South on “Competitive Intelligence on the Social Web,” and I wanted to extract a few of my key arguments and offer them up the SEOmoz audience both as thought provokers and for feedback. In my opinion competitive intelligence is one of those marketing steps we all say we did, but few of us rarely do. It’s true. Most of us are big fat liars when it comes to “doing competitive intelligence.”
For example, competitive intelligence IS NOT:
* Sitting in a room and ranting about your competitor’s latest marketing move
* Grabbing lunch with your Product Manager and creating a roadmap based on what your competitors have that you don’t.
* Putting together a grid of you and your competitor’s website’s traffic stats, never to be looked at again.
* Googling your competitor’s brand name to see what latest things are noted in the SERP’s
Sorry friends that is not competitive intelligence.
However, competitive intelligence IS:
* Understanding what direction your competitor's are headed
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