Media Monitoring for Online Competitive Intelligence: An Often Overlooked Goldmine of Information

Gaining insights into competitor activities remains an often overlooked benefit of media monitoring.

Companies usually track mentions of their own names and products. It doesn’t always occur to them monitor mentions of competitors. However, marketing experts agree that monitoring and measuring news and social media mentions about competitors can help companies uncover a goldmine of advantageous intelligence.

To gather competitive intelligence, marketing leaders employ the same media listening techniques they use to track mentions of their own company and products. They basically replace their search terms with those of competitors.

Information gathered from news and social media about competitors can be well-known or highly proprietary. New product announcements reveal changes in product features, positioning and pricing. Even more helpful for competitive intelligence, social media buzz before a product launch often divulges substantial information about the anticipated product. One client of the CyberAlert media monitoring service discovered the location, size and purpose of a competitor’s new plant through media monitoring before a shovelful of dirt was overturned – and before the competitor made any announcement. (The competitor didn’t announce the plant construction until its opening many months later.)

Best Practices: Media Listening for Competitive Intelligence

To gain the full benefits of media monitoring for competitive intelligence, it’s important to follow best practices:

Break down silos. Public relations departments – the usual keepers of media monitoring results — often fail to share news and social media results with marketing, sales and customer service departments that can also profit from the data. Sharing data with other company departments ensures the entire organization benefits. Other departments often tease out information or insights from media clips that the PR department may miss.

Measure competitors’ media presence. Corporate PR and marketing programs don’t exist in a vacuum; they are part of a competitive media landscape. Knowing the media performance of competitors provides perspective on your own organization’s PR and marketing results in earned and social media. Following trends of mentions, reach (“opportunities to see” or “potential impressions”), sentiment and messages provides a gauge of how well your PR and marketing programs are performing in the competitive landscape.

Seek insights. In assessing media results from PR and marketing campaigns, many communications professionals concentrate on the data and pretty graphs produced by media monitoring and measurement services. While comparing PR or marketing performance with competitors is undoubtedly useful, the most valuable nuggets of competitive intelligence usually come from looking beyond the numbers and seeking insights from the content. To find those insights, organizations need knowledgeable staff members or a third-party service to review media mentions.

Competitive intelligence from media listening programs can provide benefits in many areas.

Marketing strategy. An analysis of competitors’ marketing activities can help marketers improve and develop their own strategies. That’s especially beneficial for new and emerging brands. Competitive intelligence about PR and marketing programs coupled with sales data can reveal why competitors are succeeding – or failing. Some of the information to consider includes what social networks competitors are emphasizing, how frequently they are posting, when they post and what keywords and hashtags they prefer.

Social media listening can identify websites or networks that a competitor is actively exploiting but you might not know about. Conversely, you can find areas competitors are not pursuing, which could open an opportunity. You can also uncover bloggers and other influencers mentioning competitors. You can then reach out to those influencers to introduce your product to them.

Social media listening can also uncover issues that customers are having with competitor’s products or services, potentially providing openings that your marketing department can exploit.

Audience research. By analyzing people who are mentioning competitors, you can learn about their audience’s profiles. That can help you better define your own target audience.

Share of voice. Share of voice compares your amount of activity online to your competitors’ which helps gauge your marketing endeavors. As you might think, a larger share voice means your strategy is working, while a small or declining share of voice might indicate you need to re-evaluate your tactics.

Sentiment. Analyzing brand mentions for sentiment, or how positive or negative mentions are overall, can reveal how customers feel about a company and its products. Organizations can compare the sentiment ratings on their mentions to sentiment towards competitors. Changes in sentiment relative to competitors can reveal how PR and marketing efforts are influencing customers’ views.

Market index. In addition to assessing competitive market reach, comprehensive competitive intelligence analysis can also include assessment of prominence and dominance of the mentions of your brand compared to mentions of competitors. It can also include an assessment of marketing messages that are delivered. In its soon-to-be-announced media measurement dashboard, CyberAlert combines all those factors into a single index that rates the impact of the news and social media campaigns of all the competitors. The index is as close as you can get to a “magic number” to assess PR and marketing performance in relation to competitors.

Product development. Customer praise or complaints about product features of competitor’s products (or your own) provide guideposts on features your own brand should avoid or pursue.

Customer service. Tracking customer service complaints shows how the company is performing relative to competitors. Social media has become a key channel for customer service, offering brands opportunities to rectify customer issues – and to demonstrate in public to all customers the company’s commitment to customer service.

Customer education. A pattern of customers expressing frustration over some aspect of using a competitor’s product or service may signal an opportunity to create customer education materials about the product category. It could also indicate changes that could be made in the customer instructions or online “help” files for your own products.

Sales contacts. If social media listening uncovers a negative mention of a competitor’s product, your sales team can reach out to the individual to establish contact and open a relationship.

Bottom Line: Monitoring news and social media about competitors can provide a wealth of data and insights. Competitive intelligence can benefit marketing, sales, customer service and product development. Perhaps most importantly, it can alert brands of competitive threats.