by Sheri Fink

Created on: February 11, 2007   Last Updated: April 13, 2007

Competitive Intelligence is the ability to know what your competitors are up to in the marketplace. It can help your business gain or maintain a competitive advantage over the competition.

The Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals defines competitive intelligence as "a systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing Information about the external Business environment that can affect a company's plans, decisions, and operations." It's a bit of an art as well as a science to monitor your competition and analyze their position in the competitive landscape relative to that of your business. Competitive intelligence is particularly important for online companies.

There are many ways to get public information on your competitors. The Internet contains a wealth of information on just about any business. Some basic things you may want to consider doing in your competitive intelligence efforts are:

- Watching your competitors' websites for changes in marketing messages, products, sponsorships, partnerships, etc.
- Reading your competitors' publications and articles, as well as transcripts of speeches given at conferences, etc.
- Reviewing their financial statements as they are posted (if they are a publicly traded company).
- Using a service to see how much traffic their website receives each month compared to your company and your other competitors.
- Setting up alerts on a search engine such as Google to email you whenever an article that includes your competitor company's name is posted.

By regularly reviewing these data points, you can use the information to determine how the competitive landscape is evolving. This strategy will enable you to foresee competitors' emerging product and service capabilities and industry trends. Competitive and other business intelligence can actually save your business a lot of money through providing the knowledge needed to compete effectively in the long run. For example, if you are aware that your top competitor is developing a market-changing product, you can take steps to mitigate your potential loss of customers when the product is released versus being blindsided when it reaches the market. Proactively seeking and analyzing competitive intelligence can make your business more competitive in the marketplace.

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