Competitor Tracking Daily, Weekly, Monthly

Monthly, Weekly, Daily
Competitor Tracking

Cascade Insights
Cascade Insights focuses on:
Competitive Intelligence Research
Qualitative Market Research – IDI’s and Online Qualitative.
Softwareand Hardware Industry Focus
We’ll be sharing with you:
How we track competitors on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
Contact: sean@cascadeinsights.comscott@cascadeinsights.comtel: 503.898.0004
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Why Track the Competition?
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What does competitor tracking do for you?
Be seen as a source of reliable and up to date information on your competitors
Raise your exposure within the organization by publishing a regular series of competitive insights.
Help your organization (field, marketing, executives) recognize early and often where competitors are headed and have been in your marketplace.
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Helps to answer questions
What is “x” competitors last quarterly results?
What is “y” competitors product roadmap?
What did “z” competitor say about “x” offering over the last three months?
What recent wins did “x” competitor have?
What products did “y” competitor release in the last month or quarter?
How are reviews trending for competitor’s “z’s” products?
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Big Day 1 Graphic
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Daily Polling
Twitter
Search terms setup for key intelligence topics
Google Alerts
Keyword based alerts straight to your inbox.
Google Reader
Groups of high traffic feeds for arms length perusal
Doing the above let’s know that you have a sense of the competitor’s “pulse” on any given day.
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Setting up Twitter Search Terms
TweetDeck and other programs make it easy to push keyword focused twitter searches to your desktop or phone.
Subscribe to twitter feeds for key enthusiasts, particular topic areas (i.e. competitor press release feeds, customer success story feeds), and other content.
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Setting up Google Alerts
Google Alerts makes it easy to “push” news content to your inbox that matches keyword searches.
You can set the frequency and you can filter by content type (blogs, video ,etc.).
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What’s in and what’s out? - Daily
Filter Aggressively
Flag items that might make a weekly or monthly summary cut.
Just separate “wheat from chaff” don’t “stack rank” at this stage.
Situational Awareness is what you’re looking for.
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Big Week 4 Graphic
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Weekly Polling
Competitor webcasts
Recently released case studies
Interviews with key executives
Local Newspapers, National Newspapers, Industry focused websites, Magazines, etc.
Product reviews
Review of analyst commentary
Review of video search sites – interviews, etc.
Review of Slideshare for new content
Review of LinkedIn company pages for new job postings significant personnel moves
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SlideShare.net
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Video Searching
www.blinkx.com
www.silobreaker.com
www.youtube.com
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LinkedIn
Employee Movement
New Hires
Recent Promotions and Changes
Popular Profiles
Jobs Posted on LinkedIn
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What’s in and what’s out?Weekly
Take a step back and start asking whether that’s one tree or several ahead of you.
Identify the 2 to 5 stories that will make the cut for the current week’s portion of the monthly summary
You may identify a story that you proactively push to your field, execs, or peers along with supporting analysis.
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Big month calendar highlighted
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Monthly Summary
If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind, give it more thought. ~Dennis Roth
Provide a summary of competitor moves to the rest of the organization or peer organizations on a monthly basis.
Include the top news stories
Include a competitor threat assessment based on their recent activity.
Include a historical view of their moves based on a 3 month and 6 month horizon.
For slower moving industries quarterly news updates may be best.
Your closing analysis should contain a “brief” summary of the news but focus predominately on threats and opportunities based on the month’s news.
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Tips
Reach out to your “field” contacts see if their analysis matches yours for the month
Are they hearing and seeing the same things in their meetings
Is what you’ve heard their marketing “say” getting “heard” by their current or potential customers from the view of your field.
Remember to view past monthly communications to see if there are trends you can highlight
Remember to keep looking for new sources of information for your “farming tools”
Doing consistent daily and weekly tracking leaves you ready to send out “flash” reports when something significant happens in your industry.
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Cascade Insights
Cascade Insights focuses on:
Competitive Intelligence Research
Qualitative Market Research – IDI’s and Online Qualitative.
Softwareand Hardware Industry Focus
Specialize in projects that require:
Software or Hardware—Product/Industry Knowledge
Understanding of Business to Business Sales and Marketing Dynamics
Solid secondary research from non-marketing sources (forums, blogs, technical webcasts, and presentations, etc.)
Interviews with the users or implementers of your product and competing products in your space
Recruiting of hard to reach individuals, ranging from developers, senior architects, implementers, and executive decision makers
Contact: sean@cascadeinsights.comscott@cascadeinsights.comtel: 503.898.0004
12/18/2009
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Competitor Tracking Daily, Weekly, Monthly

by Cascade Insights on Dec 18, 2009

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Competitor Tracking Daily, Weekly, Monthly — Presentation Transcript