Thinking about competitive strategy is essential for companies to conquer their market. But to ensure this desired advantage, it is important to deeply understand the scenario in which one is inserted, which requires having the right information so that managers can make accurate decisions.

This data is available from various sources, but mainly from the press and social media. Therefore, organizing a media monitoring strategy is key to identifying risks and opportunities.

How to use monitoring in competitive strategy

Media monitoring is the basis for you to be able to dig for content in the ocean of information we live in.

News portals, articles, studies, research, traditional and digital journalistic vehicles, videos, and social networks need to be routinely monitored. And it is essential to have an analytical eye, so that you can identify the right information at the right time.

However, content analysis requires a strategic look, starting from well-defined objectives and criteria. To have media monitoring as the basis of your competitive strategy you need to start from 3 steps:

1. Keeping up with the competition

Monitoring the steps of your competitors is essential to understand what ground you are treading on. Evaluating the competitor’s movements allows you to observe how each brand is positioned, how it is perceived by consumers, what its strengths and weaknesses are.

This well laid out scenario offers a clear vision about the other, but also about your own differentials and competitive advantages.

How to do it: for an effective competitive strategy to keep up with your competitors you need to monitor keywords related to the name of the companies and their products. Do not forget to include in the search possible variations (such as fantasy names, company names, misspelled versions, etc.).

Follow:

• Publications that mention these brands.
• Articles that use competitors as sources.
• And articles that competitors publish themselves.

All of this is a source of valuable information for you to understand how other organizations position themselves, what they are investing in, and what gaps you can cover.

Remember that keeping the competition close to you, including in competitive strategy monitoring, is essential to be accurate when it comes to business positioning.

2. Monitoring the niche market movements

A good competitive strategy requires keeping track of everything related to the market in which you operate. To make increasingly accurate decisions, it is important to keep up:

• Studies.
• Trends.
• Technical and/or technological novelties.

How to do it: build specific searches for each relevant area or topic, so that they help you to constantly follow all the contents that are related to your niche.

Monitor mainly:

News.

Articles.

National and international research.

Area publications that can impact your business strategy.

Guide your analytics professionals to identify bottlenecks, misstep triggers, and growth opportunities. 

Last but not least: organize a process for disseminating this information. A big mistake and one that impacts the achievement of an effective competitive monitoring strategy is failing to get the hard-earned data into the hands of decision makers in a timely manner.

3. Analysis of political, economic, and social movements

Your brand is inserted in a political and economic context. That is, all the movements of this scenario can directly impact on its positioning.

A good example of this is changes in legislation. A new tax, a circulation ban, the decreeing of a holiday can directly impact your sales or even create opportunities unnoticed by your competitors.

How to do it: use media monitoring to follow everything that involves politics, economics, and social/environmental aspects that can directly or indirectly impact your performance.

As this monitoring is extensive and requires specific technical knowledge, it is possible to organize your team to make separate evaluations – product clipping, legislative clipping, for example.

However, it is necessary to have a well-structured information sharing process to prevent relevant data from being isolated within a certain “fiefdom” of the company. 

How to avoid slips in monitoring for competitive strategy

When we talk about competitive strategy in companies, we enter a scenario where any slip-up can be very costly. Information not collected (but seen by the competition) or data disregarded by decision-makers are mistakes that can mean brand failure.

Therefore, the investment in media monitoring needs to be accompanied by a precise and complete strategy of information collection, analysis, and sharing.

To do this, it is necessary to invest in process automation. Automated data collection allows the analysis of thousands of sources in a few minutes.

The analysis through artificial intelligence segments and classifies the information according to previously defined requirements based on your needs.

Knewin Monitoring, for example, is the monitoring service that helps companies keep track of relevant content for competitive strategy. In addition, it delivers rich analysis of the information collected.

Through the union of technology and individualized service from expert analysts, managers can easily get a complete view of all the scenarios that can impact the organization’s day to day.

To learn about the benefits of Knewin Monitoring contact our team and take advantage of the potential of competitive monitoring.