Competitive Intelligence Software

Get smart about competitive intelligence software

Competition intelligence (CI) helps business learn about their competitors, including the competition’s suppliers, materials and technology. Competitive intelligence solutions also help businesses learn about legal, market and political changes that affect their business. In order for CI to be effective, businesses must research the competition regularly and use the data they gather. Business competition software can help companies keep track of and use this crucial information.

Competitive intelligence software allows your business to create profiles of business competitors and to organize information about the competition for analysis. Many of today’s competitive intelligence solutions are designed to fully integrate with your company’s software and to help you at every stage of competitive intelligence: data gathering, aggregating, indexing, analysis, searching, implementation and collaboration. When selecting your market intelligence software, consider:

1. Information sources that can provide you with information for your competitive intelligence application;

2. Competitive intelligence software that works with the information you want to analyze;

3. Integrated and specialist business competition software packages.

 

Select competitive intelligence systems to gather facts about your competition

In order to use business intelligence software, your company needs to gather information about competitors, but not all competitive intelligence systems help you collect information. A service or program that provides you with competitor reports or general data you can feed into your competition intelligence software programs is key. This data can include information about a competitor's due diligence, investors, media coverage and more.
Try: Cipher offers solutions that allow you to create competitor profiles, run market and industry audits, or check a company's investors. Factiva allows your company to gather intelligence from more than 14,000 business and news sources and even allows you to organize information into charts and graphs so that you don't have to read every article about the competition.

Choose competitor intelligence software to organize, analyze and report

Even if your company is vigilant in gathering information about the competition, that information is useless until it is rendered usable. Good competitive intelligence management software lets you transform raw information into material that can be searched, analyzed and reported. Good programs let you easily share the information with your marketing, management and other decision-making teams.
Try: Competitive Vision is a software program that lets you enter raw data about competitors and generate frameworks and models that you can share with your team members. Strategy Software is a desk-top software and a secure web-based software that lets you organize analysis about your competitors and send the information out directly to your decision-makers.

Select an advertising competitive intelligence tool to track marketing efforts

You will want to know not only what your competitors are doing, but also how they are reaching their customers. Marketing intelligence software can help you because market intelligence software lets you gather and analyze your competition's advertising and marketing strategy. Marketing intelligence software lets you understand what keywords your competitors are using for pay-per-click campaigns and even how they are structuring their advertising campaigns.
Try: VMS provides advertising competitive intelligence solutions that let you keep track of competitors' marketing strategies. VMS is powerful because the company lets you see how the competition is using broadcast, newspaper, print, radio, Internet, and other media to advertise. AdGooroo keeps track of your competitors' online marketing efforts and specifically focuses on search marketing competitive intelligence. If your industry mainly advertises online, selecting a company like this, with its online focus, is a good idea.

 

• It's important to know what your competition is doing, but before you start using a competitive intelligence software program, you need to understand who your competition is. You cannot assume that your competition is limited to similar types of businesses in your immediate area. To find out who you should be keeping an eye on, ask your customers who they considered before they selected your company. The answers may surprise you. Your competition may include online companies located half a world away and even companies in other industries offering parallel services or products.

Copyright © 2011 Business.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

---