Five tips on profiling your competitors’ marketing strategies
In today’s market, knowing your competitor is half the battle. More businesses need to dedicate resources to profiling their competitors’ marketing strategies, says B2B’s Paul Hague.
Profiling the competition plays an important role in four decision making areas that are key to business success: product planning, setting future strategies, pricing and acquisition policy. However, according to a survey of large UK businesses that B2B International carried out last year – with a mean revenue of £1.9 billion – just 37% of British B2B firms currently engage in competitor research. This is despite 61% of them citing in the same survey that ‘countering the competition’ was one of their top five business challenges.
It seems that most companies identify the need for in-depth competitor knowledge, yet the majority are acting as if they operate in isolation. While it is true that many businesses can recall the names of their major competitors, perhaps even tell an anecdote or two about them when prompted or produce files of rivals’ brochures and press cuttings, this sort of information barely scratches the surface and is not what is needed to inform a successful marketing strategy.
If b2b firms want to successfully counter the competition, a more in-depth analysis of the marketplace is required – one that provides the competitor insight necessary to appropriately inform business strategy.
Why is competitor research vital?
Essentially, business is about defeating competitors and you cannot make judgements around strategies for doing this without understanding their strengths and weaknesses. To determine a firm’s product range, for example, a marketer needs to have detailed knowledge of all competitor products and prices in order to make comparisons, and thus determine options for improvement and diversification.
For most firms, it seems not to be a case of not understanding this, but of being overwhelmed with the amount of information needed and with what they perceive to be a small amount of resource available. However, it’s important to note companies don’t need to be devious to obtain the intelligence required. There are many sources that are legitimate, cheap and readily accessible if you know where to look and what to look for. Here are our five top tips:
1. Interview distributors, suppliers and other industry players
One of the first points of contact should be to connect with those at the centre of the supply chain, such as distributors, agents and importers. As they are in frequent contact with manufacturers and sellers alike, these stakeholders often have very detailed knowledge of the market and can prove particularly useful. In every industry, it is worth mapping out the supply chain to find these contacts and assess who might be able to provide the most valuable intelligence.
In addition, the majority of markets have a number of independent ‘experts’ of some kind who are often willing to share the information they possess. Examples include industry associations and journalists at industry-specific media outlets.
2. Speak to your customers
In the digital age, particularly since the birth of social media, there is no more effective, reliable or valuable source of competitor information than your customers. Buyers are now more willing than ever before to say exactly what they want and how they want it, or even to complain and publicly take their business elsewhere if their needs are not satisfied.
Customers can display an astonishing level of honesty when talking about their suppliers, even those that they have a close and collaborative relationship with. Details such as price, service, contracts and technical information are often topics of discussion, as well as ‘industry gossip’ such as who is launching what product and when.
3. Engage with your competitors
Although conducting competitor interviews can be difficult, they are a valuable means of gaining important insights. This doesn’t need to be a senior level respondent. Many middle management employees, such as sales managers, can provide a great deal of information on new products, overall strategies and various other topics. Unlike other staff within a business, these employees are trained to talk about the firm’s offering, and a ‘mystery shop’ – where a market research agency makes contact as a prospective customer and obtains answers to a range of predefined questions – can prove to be very effective.
4. Speak to the competition about the competition
While it may be difficult to ask a rival to provide you with details of their own business, asking them to talk about other players in the market is more easily achievable. Staff at all levels tend to move between different firms, and competing businesses certainly talk to each other, so it can prove fruitful to ask competitors to ‘dish the dirt’ on their peers. This can be an extremely effective method of gaining competitor insight as well as an overview of the market as a whole.
5. Always remember to use company websites
It may be an obvious source of competitor information, but it is an increasingly effective one that is commonly overlooked. With the vast majority of b2b decision-makers searching for their information online and the increasing use of content marketing strategies, facts and figures – which a decade ago may have only been obtainable by a company visit – are now freely available. Information and data on company vision and strategy, product innovation sales figures and targets, staff credentials and a host of other intelligence is often available for anybody willing to sift through volumes of content.
Although profiling the competition is integral to informing many business decisions key to a firm’s success, it’s surprising how many companies don’t have any structured research in place. While collecting the data can appear a large burden on internal resource, putting the right market research strategies in place can help a firm get the right competitor information quickly and effectively.