The global marketplace is complex, highly competitive, and constantly in flux. As a result, assumptions made by companies today can fail to protect them in the future.
Supply chain disruptions and economic downturns can quickly upend a company’s position in the marketplace. Forward-thinking competitors will pivot their business operations or marketing strategy, enabling them to dominate the industry and replace previous leaders.
Take for example American exercise equipment producer Peloton. The pandemic boosted its sales and revenue. Yet on the same day, it announced record earnings, its stock dropped by 8%. The company was too slow to react to consumer unrest due to the company’s inability to ship its exercise machines. As a result, Peloton not only suffered financial losses but also took a hit on its reputation and market share.
Robust competitive intelligence, based on real-time news data, accessed by a News API, empowers the entire company’s operational team, from the CEO to regional managers, to preserve its competitive advantage in the global marketplace.
Market intelligence, therefore, should be the foundation upon which a company makes all of its business decisions.
What is competitive intelligence, and how does it help companies grow?
Competitive intelligence is collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing data from published and non-published sources to protect a company’s competitive edge in the marketplace. It has become one of the most rapidly growing sectors of information technology, fueled by the need to make sound decisions quickly.
Competitor benchmarking reveals the intelligence behind competitor products and business strategies, providing business leaders with verifiable insights into future developments in their industry.
Sources of competitive intelligence include:
- Websites
- Media and press articles
- Patent databases
- Social media profiles
- Customer review sites
- Online forums
Market intelligence is a powerful tool for any business to optimize strategic planning, product development, pricing, marketing, and messaging, regardless of industry or size.
Why do companies need competitive intelligence?
Real-time competitive intelligence provides companies with a knowledge advantage that enables them to
- take advantage of current and future market opportunities to gain market share and increase brand equity/revenue
- interpret objectively global events that might challenge or enhance their position in the industry
- improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction, and speed up product iteration
- uncover insights that ordinarily fly beneath the radar.
Finally, competitive intelligence enables a forward-vision approach to strategic planning that keeps a business at the head of its industry.
The challenges of competitive intelligence
With the growing amount of generated data, it can be easy to overlook critical information about market trends and competitor activity. Furthermore, the sheer amount of information can quickly overwhelm company analysts, resulting in abandonment before reaching the most vital data.
Consider these statistics:
- The U.S. Census Bureau reported that 4.5 million new business applications were filed in 2021
- The European Patent Office received 188,600 new applications in 2021, 4.5% more than the previous year
- Global mergers & acquisitions in 2021 reached $5.1 trillion, primarily by business executives looking to diversify commercial portfolios and access new products, services, and technologies, according to KPMG
- More than 30,000 new products are launched every year, according to Harvard Business School)
While every company is engaged in some level of business intelligence, capturing and analyzing the amount of data produced daily is virtually impossible. Yet, lack of access to critical developments in the marketplace, particularly competitor intelligence, leaves companies vulnerable to risks that harm their market share. Analysts cannot prepare decision-makers for market disruptions and new customer behaviors and preferences without access to an intel platform that yields real-time competitive intelligence.
Among the most critical challenges of competitive intelligence are uncovering qualitative and quantitative data and competitor identification.
Gathering data for competitor analysis
A mere Google search will not uncover critical qualitative and quantitative data such as:
- Previous contracts
- Product launches
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Personnel changes
- Leadership biases
- Offices, production, and distribution facilities
- Technologies
Identifying competitors
Gathering competitive intelligence begins with knowing both direct and indirect competitors. However, in a global market that’s constantly evolving, identifying competitors becomes more complex and time-consuming. New businesses emerge to take advantage of shifting customer preferences or technology disruptions.
The amount of intelligence a company needs to mine is considerable, including data such as:
- Market share
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Target market
- Customer pain points
- Marketing strategies and assets
- Product specs, pricing, and distribution channels
How news accessed via News API can boost competitive intelligence systems
As demonstrated above, the sheer amount of datasets involved in competitive intelligence makes developing actionable competitive analysis virtually impossible.
However, data accessed via News API is distilled to capture the meaning and sentiment behind every article, story, and image. Furthermore, this data is structured and enriched to deliver contextual, noise-free data that is quickly and easily readable by machines.
How can Webz.io’s News API help?
Webz.io News API is the secret behind a good competitive intelligence analysis that helps companies keep up with the volume and pace of market changes in today’s world.
Competitive intelligence fuelled by News API provides analysts with access to industry trends, emerging products and technologies, and customer preferences. Corporate decision-makers will be able to:
- Identify strengths and weaknesses of competitors
- Understand competitor behaviors
- Create strategies based on competitive differentiation
- Optimize product launch processes
- Improve the distribution of resources
- Capitalize on ROI
Webz.io’s News data feeds enable companies that offer data-driven solutions to provide their customers with the data needed to scale quickly and thrive in the rapidly changing competitive landscape.
Extensive coverage
Webz.io News API crawls millions of global sites in multiple languages daily. In addition, our advanced technology expands our coverage of new sources daily and according to our customer’s needs.
Latency
Webz.io gathers data daily, updated by smart, adaptive web crawlers to deliver near-real-time data.
Archived data
To provide greater contextualized data on relevant market trends and competition history, Webz.io also offers 50TB of historical data from news, blogs, online forums, and reviews from across the web dating back to 2008.
Online reviews
In addition to news data feeds, Webz.io also offers an online reviews API, which provides near real-time data from e-commerce sites. This data shows companies how customers react to their competitors’ products. With this intelligence, analysts and strategists are better positioned to optimize new product offerings or upgrade to meet customer demands.
Critical data in real-time
Knowledge is power.
Competitive intelligence empowers corporate decision-makers to optimize their business strategies to thrive in today’s highly competitive market. Webz.io’s News API is a standardized, near real-time web data feed that helps data-driven competitive intelligence solutions provide companies with the power of knowledge to succeed and scale in the global marketplace.
Competitive intelligence is critical to business success, but there is no time to collect all the data needed to create an actionable competitive analysis in today’s competitive environment. News API delivers comprehensive, structured data to fuel actionable insights, leaving corporate stakeholders to focus on scaling.
Ready to learn more about the best data feed for your competitive intelligence? Click here to talk to one of our data experts to explore how our News API can help you never miss critical intelligence again.
