Competitive Intelligence (CI) or Corporate Intelligence is the action of ethically gathering and analyzing information about competitors, products, customers and other aspects from various sources. Knowledge about your competitors’ marketing strategy helps organizations in strategic decision making.
And with the integration of Artificial Intelligence into the system will ease the process of competitive intelligence. AI enables enterprises to easily gather and analyze online data within few seconds.
Role of AI and CI in benefiting Business
Personalization: Key to Gain Potential Customers
As we all are consumers, we know how particular we are about our choices before purchasing a product. Much research is done before selecting the brand, and reviews are read on different platforms to ensure that the product’s quality and to find out if the brand/product is received well among the other customers.
Artificial Intelligence, combined with competitive intelligence, enables any business to gather customer information like, their purchasing history, engagement in social media posts, their interests and other details. This way, enterprises can understand customer behavioral pattern and anticipate their needs.
Leveraging this information, marketing team can create customized messages like emails, ads, pop-up messages and suggestions as per customer’s interest and target more potential customers.
Highly Engaging Content Creation
Before launching a marketing campaign, it is highly essential to learn various aspects like customer behavior, trends in the market, competitors and their strategies, and so on. It is also equally important to analyze and learn from contents created during previous campaigns launched by different enterprises.
Traditionally, due to the lack of optimized content, marketing campaigns were prolonged. It took around a month or two for marketers to launch a campaign. But now the scenario has changed as a large number of campaigns are launched in a day.
And with a plethora of online contents, it has become almost impossible for brands to manually track and analyze related contents.
AI, with the help of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), can easily track and analyze these online contents (including the competitor’s contents) on various platforms and swiftly identifies contents that received high engagements and well accepted by the audience. This way, your brand can plan accordingly, creating more engaging and personalized contents, and gain a competitive advantage.
Analyzing Pricing Strategy of Competitors
In a fast-changing online market, businesses have to remain competitive. If you own a product-based or a retail-based business, you might know that the main factor that drives the customers to make a purchase is the attractive pricing.
Hence, it is important to understand the market behavior, its trends, and also the competitors and the strategies they use in pricing their product.
AI, with competitive Intelligence, gather and analyze massive data from millions of contents circulating on social media and websites, including the price data of your competitors. It allows you to understand the price trends in the market and monitor competitors price data 24/7.
Imagine your competitor provides an attractive discount on products on various occasions like Christmas, New Year, or year ending sales. And they create content for this and circulate it through social media and other online platforms to reach mass audience.
AI integrated system alerts you about these price changes and helps you learn about your competitors’ pricing strategy. Overall, it will allow you to learn from your competitor’s mistakes, keeping you ahead in the competition.
Strategy for Influencer Marketing
Undoubtedly, Influencer marketing is one of the most popular marketing strategies that exist today. Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown followed by it witnessed a massive rise in the social media users in terms of numbers and amount of time spent on these platforms. This, in turn, raised the graph for Influencer Marketing.
According to a study by Nielson and Tap Influence, Return of Investment (ROI) generated by Influence Marketing is 11 times higher than traditional strategies.
Influencer marketing is not about finding a random influencer and promote your brand among their followers. It is really crucial to find the right influencer whose persona resonates with your brand’s DNA.
AI with competitive intelligence will allow you to analyze multiple influencer’s profiles (including your competitors’) and evaluate every content (engagement level, reach, influence) they post for on different platforms. This will assist you in identifying the right influencer who can collaborate with your brand to achieve the end goals.
Conclusion
Despite being at its baby stage, Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing various aspects of business strategies. It has eased the process of Competitive Intelligence, which was once a tedious action. From learning market trends and customer behavioral patterns to analyzing competitors’ marketing strategies and identifying engaging contents on various online platforms,
AI incorporation is guiding enterprises in better strategic decision-making. Undoubtedly, as AI technology advances in future, its early adopters will gain a competitive advantage over other competitors.
