How Businesses Can Utilize Data to Gain a Competitive Advantage

Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.

Data is a great resource that businesses can use to gain a competitive advantage in this information age. Companies can use competitor data to analyze industry trends and patterns, serve their customers well, and gain a market advantage. Since every business is in competition, and every data is a resource, competitor data isn’t something you come by easily.

You’ll need to have the right data collection and analysis tools and understand how to process and utilize the information. This calls for using the right technologies at your disposal to collect, analyze, and understand competitor data and generate actionable insights. Let’s look at three tips to utilize competitor data to give your business a competitive advantage.

Get Powerful Data from Competitive Intelligence Tools

Robust data brings business insights and prospects. Businesses use robust data to know customers’ needs, and improvements they should make to gain a competitive advantage. Data also informs businesses about how customers prefer to interact with one another and with companies and the important values. This makes data a real-time resource that can help businesses alter their practices to adapt to customer needs and market changes.

It’s worth investing in a tool for competitive intelligence and data analytics for your industry. A great tool will give you exclusive insights and company-personalized real-time data for all your customers, competitors, and partners. You can use the data to uncover top competitors (direct and indirect) in your niche, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and discover opportunities for improvement.

Leverage SWOT Analysis and Sentimental Data

SWOT analysis gives you insights into your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to help you assess your company’s competitive position. When conducting a SWOT analysis, all company departments must be represented. You can also leverage a SWOT analysis generator for better results. If done well, SWOT analysis will help you uncover ways to improve your product or services and meet client demands above what your competitors are offering.

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining complements SWOT analysis that gives you direct customer feedback that you can review to support your improvement and competitive advantage agenda. The great thing about sentimental analysis is its textual data is directly embedded in customer feedback to monitor a customer’s brand, service, or product sentiment. This gives a business a direct way of understanding customer needs. With sentimental tools for competitive intelligence, you can analyze massive volumes of customer feedback for better results.

Make Use of AI Technology and Internet of Things (IoT)

Companies can use Artificial intelligence (AI) to automate competitor data collection and analysis. AI tools such as chat boxes, digital assistants, search algorithms, e-payments, etc., can unify data across multiple sources and present them in a way that’s easy to understand. They can also help extract insights from large data sets and make accurate forecasts. The advantage of AI technology is that you can use them in other tools like Google Analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), content marketing tools, etc., to use competitor data to search for patterns and trends. To get the best AI, you can combine it with IoT analytics strategy with competitor data in mind.

Endnote

Competitor data is a great resource for businesses to fine-tune their selling proposition, analyze market trends, understand customer needs and uncover product or service improvement needs. Businesses need to know how to collect and understand competitor data to use it for their competitive advantage. The best way to do this is to automate the data collection process and be consistent in implementing the needed improvement changes.

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