If you've been in PR long enough, you've probably experienced that moment when a client or CEO pulls up their competitor's latest media coverage and asks: "Why aren't we getting this kind of attention?"
It's never fun trying to explain complex media dynamics to stakeholders who measure success through direct comparisons. But it doesn't have to be this way.
This is where competitive intelligence (CI) can help. CI enables you to stay informed about your competitors, how they’re perceived in the marketplace, and how customers and audiences feel about them. With this intel, you can make more strategic decisions about how you position your brand against them in the marketplace.
Media monitoring can be a powerful competitive intelligence tool. Those same platforms you use for tracking brand sentiment, media mentions, and audience reach can do the same for your competitors. From there, the information you gather can support your strategic decision-making and give you a competitive advantage.
Let’s take a look at the benefits of competitive intelligence and the role of media monitoring in a CI strategy.
What is Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is about looking at a set of competitors and understanding how they’re operating, how they’re talking to their customers, and what their overall strategy is. It should ensure you’re in a better position to compete for a share of the market.
This differs from market research, which is more focused on the overall market and industry trends. Though there are differences between the two, both can complement and feed into each other. For example, examining multiple companies and how they operate will help you zoom out and spot larger scale market shifts.
The Benefits of Competitive Intelligence for Brands
Every organization should be aware of what’s happening around them. Public relations and communications professionals have their ear to the ground, making them ideally placed to understand what’s being said about the competition.
The are many advantages to implementing a CI strategy, so let’s take a closer look at a few of the brand benefits.
Move from Reactive to Proactive Thinking
Competitive intelligence can turn your business from reactive responders to proactive market leaders. By analyzing competitor activities, market signals, and industry developments, you can identify emerging trends before they spike with consumers.
Thinking proactively will allow you to:
- Anticipate new trends that will impact your brand
- Pivot strategies in advance to navigate headwinds
- Capitalize on opportunities that competitors haven't recognized
For example, if you notice multiple competitors in your sector making big moves in an emerging technology such as artificial intelligence, this could signal an important market shift that requires strategic consideration.
Make More Informed Decisions
With more information at our fingertips than ever before, it’s possible to replace gut instinct with data-driven, quantitative insight.
When PR teams look in granular detail at competitor activities like product launches, marketing campaigns, and customer feedback, they can make better choices about how they structure and execute their own campaigns.
This intelligence, when relayed internally, can also guide product development by identifying gaps in competitor offerings, inform pricing strategies, and shape marketing messages to better differentiate from competitors.
Shape Reputation Management
CI can help brands understand and shape public perception and reputation over time. By plugging media monitoring in to your PR strategy, you can examine competitor successes and missteps in public relations, crisis management, and social media engagement.
Furthermore, brands can develop and maintain a stronger reputation by learning from others' experiences rather than making the same mistakes themselves.
Enhanced Customer Understanding
It's important to monitor and interact with your customers and audience, but you can also take lessons from how your competitors’ approach customer service.
By monitoring competitors’ product feedback and user experiences, brands can identify pain points in the market. They can then leverage this knowledge to improve their own customer experience, proactively addressing common issues and developing solutions that better meet customer needs.
Think about how your product or service can offer features and functionality that your competitors don't (and are their customers talking about this gap?). Your PR and comms output can leverage this knowledge to create messaging that will set your brand apart and help you gain a competitive advantage.
Competitive Intelligence Tools: How to Use Media Monitoring
One of the best ways to gain competitive intelligence is through media monitoring. With media monitoring software, you can track earned media generated from a competitor’s press releases, or track conversations on social media to understand the general feeling around a brand or emerging topic, making it a powerful competitive intelligence tool.
Key Competitor Intelligence Metrics to Track
A straightforward way to start your CI is to take the metrics you use for monitoring your own brand and turn them around to focus on competitors. Most public relations software will allow you to track the below earned media metrics.
Brand Mentions
PR teams can leverage competitor brand mentions to identify earned media gaps, build strategic media relationships, and optimize their PR calendar based on coverage trends. By analyzing the messaging that generates the most coverage for competitors, PR teams can refine their own pitch strategies and identify underserved media channels to expand into.
Media Impressions
Understanding competitors' media reach helps PR teams set realistic campaign goals and benchmark their media targeting strategy. This data enables teams to identify high-value publications currently covering competitors but not their own and justify budget requests with concrete competitive data. These insights help teams allocate resources more effectively and build more targeted media strategies.
Engagement
By analyzing how audiences interact with competitor content, PR teams can optimize their own content strategy for maximum impact. This includes identifying successful content formats, analyzing optimal posting times, and understanding audience pain points through comment analysis.
Sentiment Analysis
Tracking the tone and context of competitor coverage provides valuable insights for reputation management. PR teams can identify industry-wide reputational challenges, see opportunities during competitors' negative coverage periods, and develop more robust crisis communication plans. Moreover, this analysis can help benchmark brand sentiment against industry averages while learning from competitors' successes and failures.
Share of Voice (SoV)
SoV analysis enables PR teams to set strategic growth goals and identify channels and topics that deliver the most impact. Teams can track campaign effectiveness, map competitive landscape changes, and demonstrate PR's impact on market presence. This metric, over time, provides evidence of communication strategy success while highlighting areas needing additional focus or resources.
What Next? Gaining a Competitive Advantage
With the information you gain from media monitoring, you can identify competitor strengths and improve upon them, identify their weaknesses and highlight your strengths, or see where they are missing opportunities that you can capitalize on.
But the competitive intelligence insights you uncover aren’t solely for PR teams, they can also help departments like sales, customer service, and product development.
Here are three ways these metrics can serve the wider business:
- Evolve sales messaging: Understanding the pain points and frustrations users have with your competitor’s platforms can help your sales team focus on the benefits you bring, and then target prospects with messaging to highlight the key differences.
- Improve customer engagement: What works and what doesn’t in your competitor’s customer engagement strategy? By understanding this you can refine your own service, look at improving response times, and communicate with customers more effectively.
- Product evolution: CI can help highlight gaps in the market, or certain features or services where you may be lacking. By responding and working with product managers, you can ensure you’re maintaining an offering that’s competitive in your particular sector.
Choosing the Right Media Monitoring Tool
Your chosen media monitoring platform will primarily be used for tracking your own brand, but once you’ve mastered that, it’s easy to deploy its features as competitive intelligence tools.
You should establish exactly what you want to get out of your media monitoring software, and if there’s value in consolidating your efforts into a single platform like CisionOne. A single, unified public relations solution should offer features to help facilitate both your PR efforts and give a full picture of how the competition is performing.
A good provider will also take the time to answer any of your burning questions and understand your specific goals, needs, and concerns to help you find a solution that’s best for competitor analysis. Take a deeper dive with The Complete Guide to Effective Media Monitoring for PR.
Final Thoughts
Competitive intelligence isn’t a one-time activity. It’s an ongoing process that requires continuous refining and adjusting to adapt to external challenges. But the more effort you put into it, the more benefits you’ll gain, and the better positioned you will be to anticipate industry changes, optimize your offerings, and gain and maintain a competitive advantage.
What’s important is to understand what you’re looking for in your CI journey. Is it being used to increase your market share, to boost sales, or to improve customer sentiment? Establishing your goals early will help you create a specific plan to guide you through that journey.
Media monitoring can be a powerful partner for CI, helping to track and analyze competitor activities and gain a comprehensive viewpoint of the market landscape. This makes it possible to arrive at more informed, strategic decisions, enhance your brand reputation, and ultimately better serve customers.
For more advice on media monitoring, check out The Complete Guide to Effective Media Monitoring for PR.
If you’d like to learn how CisionOne, our all-in-one PR platform, can help you enhance your competitive intelligence strategy, get in touch and speak to an expert today.
