Creating a weekly competitor monitoring routine can have a big return in the long run and allow you to use that data for timely actions. Collecting competitive information by hand can be really time consuming. This is why we recommend using a tool like Signal Insights to automate the collection for you. If you’re not familiar with our platform, book a quick demo and start a free two-week trial. 

With just 15 minutes a week reviewing the information collected, your dashboard can become a powerful sales and marketing tool. 

Here are 3 tips to help you analyze the information in your Signal Insights dashboard and create a weekly routine.

Tip #1: Look at the information

This tip sounds easy, but it’s probably the most time consuming. Take a look at the news articles, social content, emails, and other information. Did a competitor launch a new product? Are they expanding into a new market or region? Did they get a lot of Facebook engagement? How many articles did they post?

You may not have big updates every week, but even if you have a few slow weeks, it’s important to check your dashboard consistently. So when something big does happen you can take action.

One of our clients uses their Signal Insights dashboard during their daily team huddle. They look for things that would trigger an action for them – who just won a big account, which customer is expanding, who’s posting a lot of content, who’s getting a lot of social engagement, etc. They get a lot of ideas for content creation and their sales process. 

If you’re not happy with your current competitive intelligence solution, you can start a two week free trial of Signal Insights.

Tip #2: Take action to stay ahead of the competition

It would be a waste of your time and your budget if you collect all this data, analyze it, and then don’t do anything else. There are several different ways you can use the insights you gain from competitive intelligence.

Look at how many articles they post and what they’re about to influence your content strategy. Use highly engaged social posts to help determine your own social content. 

What “news” do they consider for press releases? Should you be posting more press releases yourself?

Another client of ours loves logging into her Signal Insights dashboard first thing on Monday mornings. She skims through the news and really digs into the content her competitors are sharing on their websites and on social media. It helps her figure out where her company fits in and what she could do differently or try that week. 

Tip #3: Share it with everyone on your team 

What’s the point in doing all of this hard work on competitive analysis if it only reaches 30-50% of its potential?

You can share any important data and insights with your executive team. This could be a big acquisition announcement or an expansion into a new market. Anything that could impact your industry directly and your market share. 

A different client uses the dashboard to keep his executive team up to date on how they’re comparing to everyone else in their industry. He was already preparing a monthly report and now the dashboard makes it easy for him to pull in numbers and articles to show how they’re stacking up. 

Also imagine if all sales info is shared with the marketing team. Then marketing would know what competitors are winning deals that the sales team bid on. The sales team would know about expansions, new products, or promotions that could help a big pitch. When the marketing team and the sales team are aligned on what the competition is up to then there’s a lot more potential for winning more business and attracting more leads.

When thinking who to share this information with, keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be limited to people within your company. If you work with distributors, partners, agencies, etc. they would likely find all of this competitive information valuable. One of our manufacturing clients added all of their distributors to their dashboard. Another client added their social media agency. 

Now, the easiest way to make sure that all the dashboard information is shared with all the right people, is making sure they each have access to it. Which is why we offer unlimited users. 

If you’d like to make competitive analysis a weekly routine and you’re not using Signal Insights, start a free two week trial and see how it can help you stay informed quickly and easily.