SO What? Tools for competitive intelligence

Well, hey there everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. How's it going, guys?

Good. How do you ho, neighbor? Uh on today's episode, we are talking about tools for competitive intelligence. Uh what is competitive intelligence? The tools used to gather competitive intelligence data.

And then as always, what the heck to do with all this information. Um before we get into sort of the not some bolts of it, um, I don't know how you guys feel about it, but I feel like competitive competitive intelligence is just another one of those terms that gets tossed around that doesn't have a whole lot of meaning, but it sounds really fancy. John, what do you think of when you hear competitive intelligence? Well, we have thought much about this. The Trust Insights patented competitive analysis digital footprint.

We cover search and then pay so that's it, you know, all SEO stuff. You can compare what you're doing to everybody else, and then uh Ginny Dietrich's patented model of paid, earned, social, and owned, you can measure on all those fronts too, what your competitor is doing. So it's it especially in um mature industries where you have a number of competitors to be able to see what everybody's doing on those fronts. And you know, usually you'll find a place where you're coming up short that you need to, you know, improve your game and do a better job of. But that's pretty much the you know, all in one easy done for you package that we put together, and that's the easy way I like to look at it.

And if you want that, you can uh reach out to us at trustinsights.ai slash contact and get John directly, and he will, you know, surprise and delight you with all the different things uh that our digital customer footprint uh offers. So now that we've gotten that out of the way, uh, you know, when I hear the term competitive intelligence or marketing intelligence or data intelligence, I feel like it all really boils down to the same thing, which is having good data to make decisions from. And so it's just a matter of the context in which you're using it. So, Chris, what the heck in this context is competitive intelligence? See, I always think of it as spying on people.

There you go. It it it is in the sense it's it's open source intelligence gathering, right? So if you are familiar with open source intelligence, it's exactly the same thing. If you're not familiar with open source intelligence, that is uh a term used in the intelligence community for information that you can get readily without having to use covert methods, right? You don't have to, you know, walk be wandering around in a trench coat and a fedora, you know, hanging out in people's uh, you know, at their facilities diving to their dumpsters and things or doing wiretaps or anything suspicious.

It's all publicly available information and it's open source intelligence has become really popular in the last two decades because of these. These lovely devices and people documenting literally everything all the time may are the perfect tools for sharing information. And then because people like to talk and post and share and tweet and you know all that stuff, there's so much information that's available to us to look at what competitors are doing. And so there's there's a huge, huge raft of tools that are available. So I guess I would I would start Katie by asking what's the purpose, right?

What in the in the five Ps of competitor intelligence? What is the purpose of what we're trying to do? Well, and it really comes down to you know, it's not going to be the same purpose for everybody. You know, so we were talking about this in our Slack group this morning, and that's TrustInsights. And it sounds like, you know, rightly so, everyone has a different reason for wanting to understand what their competitors are doing.

Um, for us, you know, I look at our competitors just to understand, you know, the words and phrases and language that they're using as they're talking about their services and offerings so that I can get a better understanding of what's resonating, and I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. And so, you know, if the term, you know, digital marketing support is the term, then I'm gonna keep using digital marketing support because that's what every other competitor is using that we are theoretically losing business to. So that's how I use it. Um, but the purpose for another company might be I want to, you know, outpace my competitor in terms of social media followers, or I want to have you know, better customer service ratings, or I want to have you know, more customers in my you know, community than the guy down the street does. And so it really comes down to putting together that user story of as a persona, and so let's just say the CEO, as a CEO, I want to understand the language that my competitors are using for their services so that I can mirror and match and try to get back some of that audience that I may have lost to them.

Or as a CEO, I want to understand my competitors' organic social reach so that I can mirror and outpace what they're doing and capture some of their audience. Because really, when you're talking about competitors, you're talking about doing better than the guy next to you. Exactly. And so with competitive intelligence tools, one of the things we have to think about is what level of visibility we have. So if we think about your your traditional sales funnel, your sales and marketing funnel, you know, awareness, yeah, interest consideration, uh, evaluation, purchase, ownership, retention, loyalty, the usual customer journey.

Um the further away from purchase you are, the easier it is to see things, right? So it is easy to see awareness, right? We can see how many mentions or in you know, or press releases or things that a company has published. We can see how many social media mentions. It's much harder to see who's a lead, right?

That that's the information that's kept locked away in people's CRM systems. It's difficult to see who has bought something. It's easier to see what a customer thinks of something, particularly in certain industries where there are review sites like G2 Crowd, for example, or uh Rotten Tomatoes, or any of the, you know, any industry's review sites. And it's easy to see what a company is hiring for because they desperately need people to say, like, hey, I mean, you know, we're looking for these kinds of people, or hey, this is what it's like to work at this company. So if we think of the customer journey as sort of this long arc, that middle part is very hard to see, but the externalities are very easy to see.

So I guess the question then becomes of the when you when you're thinking about the the five P's of competitive intelligence, it's what do you have available in each of those places? So, for example, with uh with people in competitive intelligence, it's who has the skills to do this sort of thing, who knows um how to do competitive comparative analysis. Uh, there's a whole slew of processes, there's a whole slew of technologies and tools, but ultimately the the performance, the outcome of competitive intelligence has got to be an action plan. Here's what we're looking for. Like you want to know, Katie, how do we beat a competitors at search?

The outcome has got to be do these five things to do better than your competitors search. Well, and it sounds like what you're saying, Chris, is you know, over the past few decades, the amount of data available has uh exponentially increased, and you know, more platforms are being added regularly. And so, you know, before starting a competitive intelligence analysis, you really have to narrow down what your purpose is because there's no shortage of tools. Um, John, when you think about, you know, evaluating uh a competitor or a company, what's one of the first things that you do? Yeah, hrefs is always the go-to for me, just because I'm really interested in the web presence, you know, and that it gives you a couple things in one hit.

You can kind of see what's their domain reputation, like how long has the company been around? Is the website uh property that has been out there? What kind of content are they putting out there? And is it you know getting traffic? And then are they doing any paid ads?

You get a, you know, it's not the be all end all, but it is a good one stop shop to at least figure out who the players are. And uh, or more importantly, I always joke about it as a bozo filter. You know, you can, you know, there's four or five companies that say they compete, but you go look on HREF, so you're like, oh yeah, no, they've had four visitors in the last three months. Like, we don't need to worry about these people. And I think that that's a really smart approach because you can't get a lot of that information just by looking at the person's website.

They can say whatever they want on their website. They can say, I've won, you know, 15,000 awards and I have all of these clients. Like, they're in control of that information. When you go to a tool like Hrefs, you know, they're not in control of that information. Okay.

So let's look at a gallery. A little let's step through a I'm gonna do a very step th quick walkthrough of just some of the tools that you can use, and then we can go back and look at this the situations in which you might use these tools and maybe uh talk through uh some of the use cases, maybe even do one or two. But uh let's let's do this. This is gonna be rapid fire. So first one, Google uh search, it's Google uh big query, the the G Delt database.

This is the comprehensive news database of news events throughout the world. Um this is several terabytes, it's updated every 15 minutes, and chances are if it's in here, it's also in Google News. Uh the easiest way to search this database is of course by using uh the the SQL terms, and you can see there's the number of actors that are involved. There's the the scale or intensity of news events, there's URLs. So there's you can extract a lot of news data.

That's a tool that one is free to use. Next, as John mentioned, uh hrefs is one of the premier SEO tools. They have an enormously large crawling database, and you can do things like look at a very specific website. So let's look at who's what's a website we don't have access to. Let's do our friend Chris Brogan, uh, because I don't have access to his website.

Um and you can get a sense of the domain authority, uh, the number of links that it has, the estimated amounts of traffic, things like that. You can compare keywords, you can audit a site to understand structurally how that site is doing. Uh you can also do rank tracking, compare how a site uh ranks for certain keywords. And the tool one of the things I think is really powerful is it has batch analysis to allow you to do up to 200 websites comparisons of their metrics all in one shot. Um, very helpful.

Another one that we've used a lot is a tool called Spy Foo. This is for specifically for pay per click advertising. They do some SEO stuff as well. But spy foo is a very, very powerful, helpful tool for understanding uh what's going on with a website and it's and it's paid keywords. Now, for us, there's not gonna be a whole lot of uh paid ads.

We don't run paid ads, but this was a tool that lets you go through and see what competitors are advertising, what they're bidding, how much they're spending, and then you can get a look at the ads. Uh, very, very cool tool. Next up, Google Trends. This one's totally free. I should uh mention Hrefs and SpyFoo both have subscription costs.

Uh, Google Trends, totally free. Allows you to type in specific terms and look to see how those terms are doing compared to each other. So let's look at Deloitte, for example, Accenture. Uh, let's look at Bain. This is a very simple example of how this works.

You can see the relative search volumes uh in different lunch countries in different format types. Um, very powerful, very easy tool to use. Um, this one is free. Indeed.com, one of my favorites for job postings. The reason for that is that pretty much every job software package out there allows you to post your openings to Indeed.com for free, which is again super helpful.

If we were to wanted to check out, for example, what our friends over at Netflix are hiring for. Let's look at Los Angeles and see you know who's hiring and what are they hiring for? Stock operations analyst. And of course, this list goes on and on and on. Um, if you were trying to figure out where a company might have a weak spot, uh you would you would go to indeed.com and say, well, what are they hiring for?

What things, what gaps do they have? Uh, we have talked about in the past um using this as a way to do sales pitches, even to look at a company and say, Well, if you're hiring for like 48 marketing analysts, you might need some short-term help. And you know, please call Trust Insights when you do. Um, indeed, free to use. The next one is a piece of software called Crowd Tangle.

Crowd Tangle is a piece of software owned by Facebook, and it allows you to extract data about Facebook groups, Facebook itself, uh, Instagram, and Reddit. Uh, you can export up to two years' worth of data. You have to put in accounts manually, but you can go into those accounts then and see the history of what they've been up to. So again, we'll use our friends over at Netflix. And we can look at all the different Netflix accounts that they have and their engagement rates and then dig into and export all the individual posts and the post metrics.

CrowdTangle is technically free to use, but it requires an application process that uh occurs pretty much never. Um, they really stopped admitting people uh to be allowed to use the software about five years ago. Um, we were actually one of the last companies to be let in before they closed the doors, but it is a useful tool. Fred, the Federal Reserve Economic Data System from the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

This is by the US government, it is free. Uh within here, there's a lot of good macroeconomic data about industries as well as certain industries' uh specific data. So, for example, let's look at um analytics. And you'll get a bunch of different data series. Actually, let's do this one.

Let's do San Diego. And you can look at things like uh real estate jobs, uh indeed.com postings and stuff. So if you are, for example, in the real estate industry and you wanted to check out a market or how competitive a market was for real estate, this would be a great tool to use. And there's a gazillion and a half data series in here. So there's macroeconomic data that you need to use to understand how not a specific competitor, but how competitive a space could be.

This is a fabulous tool to use. The next one is, of course, the US government's data.gov. And there are many of these types of services. Uh, the EU has one. Uh, most nations have one of these data portals, uh, that at least democratic uh democratically elected nations seem to have these.

And you can look at very specific things and you can look at broad categories. So some things like named company names, they may or may not be in here, but you can definitely get again industry data and it will help you understand film production. What data the government has available, and then how you can get that data and work with it. Up next, TalkWalker. TalkWalker is a paid service.

They are one of our favorite social monitoring and I guess consumer intelligence tools. You put in your search terms in here, and you can look at uh let's take a look at different media types and the individuals as well as information about the crowd. So, for example, I can look when I'm at the search term Netflix, I can look at news, newsletters, Twitter, YouTube, and so on and so forth, get a sense of the search volume or the social volume in terms of what's being said. Um, do word cloud analysis uh to see what the major themes are about this company and what people have to say about it. Uh, look at some of the demographic data uh about who is talking about this company and in what formats, which can be very, very helpful.

Uh, you can see here, for example, there's uh some uh professions, uh locations, ages, etc. And as I said, you can get the verbatims which is the individual results. So TalkWalker is uh it's a paid product, but highly recommend it if you want to be doing anything with news, um social content, and social video. Next up is open food facts. This is for the food and beverage industry specifically.

This tool is a massive user-generated database of 2.8 million products around the planet. So if you are in food and beverage and you're looking at uh you want to do competitive analysis of specific types of foods that your competitors offer uh and the nutritional values and data and reviews, great way to do that. Uh the internet movie database has all of its data available. Uh you can download these massive tables. So if you are in film or TV production, you can again do competitive analysis, look at ratings, look at reviews, look at the velocity of growth of any particular show or franchise or selection of shows.

One of the tools that has become very prominently used in the last couple of months with the increasing instability of platforms like Twitter is a tool called SN Scrape. This is a free open source tool. Um, I should mention, by the way, the IMDB and the open food facts are also free. Um SN Scrape is a piece of software that you have to download and compile. This allows you to scrape Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Reddit, Telegram, Twitter, vContact, and Sino Weibo.

Uh so if you're trying to extract data about those services and compet specific competitor accounts, you can get that data out of here. This requires some technical expertise, but it is well worth it if you can. Um of explaining who we are and what we do. So uh if you want to get a sense from a preview perspective of what things like you know, Bing's uh chat GPT integration might say, uh, and you have access to the the the OG itself, give it an ask. A few more, a couple more.

MX Toolbox is a very powerful tool for examining someone's email reputation. So you can put in the domain of yourself or a competitor and look to see you know how well set up they are technically. Uh, and then you know, are they on any uh email blacklists? Thankfully, we are we are doing good. Um, so we are but you can obviously imagine there are plenty of companies that are not.

It would be good to know from a competitive perspective if your competitors have some email issues that uh might be reducing their reach. Google itself is a very powerful tool if you know how to ask it questions. So in this case, I'm asking uh Google show me unprotected spreadsheets that are accidentally listed on US government websites that contain emails. Uh of course you are. And there's there's a large number of these.

You can just go ahead and download all these uh if you wanted to. The use obviously is do competitive scans of of custom of domains to ask ask at things. For publicly traded companies, a company like Seeking Alpha is a very, very powerful tool. Um, it is subscription-based, but there's a lot you can get out of free subscription before you have to start paying for it. I particularly like that you can get things like earnings call transcripts, where you can get the transcripts of earning calls and then use natural language processing to pull out the major themes of what it is that people are talking about on the earnings calls.

You will find a lot of information for publicly traded companies uh about what they think are major problems. And finally, Google Scholar. So Google Scholar is another portion of Google, but this one is specifically looks at academic papers that have been published about, you know, about or from a competitor. So if you're looking for uh competitors in and you have a field where academic publishing is a thing, this is a great resource to go and see what your competitors are publishing about. Uh a few weeks ago when we did our show on social media algorithms.

This is one of the sources where we found those papers to find, you know, here's how Twitter's algorithm works. Here's how LinkedIn's algorithm works. Oh, and one last one, um, forgot about this one. Uh Glassdoor. Glassdoor is a super powerful place to go to ask what's it like to work there?

And you can, there are certain tools that you can use to extract information programmatically. So if you wanted to gather up all the one-star reviews about a competitor uh and kind of get a sense of what it is that people don't like about working there, if you're trying to hire away from competitors, great tool to use, but also just gives you a sense of what it's like to deal with that competitor, what's like to work at that competitor, and maybe some of the system-wide issues that they're having. So that's the a short, very fast run through a lot of different tools, which is one of the reasons why we're talking about how important it is to have those user stories and those five Ps defined. Yeah, no, and I think that that's you know, it's dizzying. I was writing down the names of the tools as you were talking.

Um, and so if I changed the video, that might have been me accidentally. Um, you know, what about tools? Oh, like this is obviously not an exhaustive list of tools that are available, and I think that that's you know, sort of the overwhelming piece. Like if we think back to the Martech 9000, there are literally over 9,000 tools in possible in a Martex stack, and we've actually started talking about tools outside of the Martex stack. So add those tools from different industries on top of the 9,000 plus tools.

And you know, focusing your purpose first is you know, number one. And so that goes back to that user story of as a persona, I want to sew that. And so, you know, if you are, you know, someone who, you know, your executive team comes to you and says, I want to do a competitive analysis, you know, go find my top five competitors and tell me what they're doing. Well, we just in what 15 minutes covered one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen different possible tools, and that's not even scratching the surface of how many are available. And so you're probably gonna be like me, and your eyes are struggling to focus because so much information just came at you that it your brain is like, okay, I'm done.

I'm I'm overwhelmed, I'm good. Uh Chris, what about tools like screaming frog or scrutiny? Are those tools that you could use for competitive analysis as well? Absolutely. So scrutiny is uh one of my favorites.

Um, scrutiny allows you to crawl someone's website and extract all the information on it. Um, so this is a tool that I have used very, very recently, actually, as part of the whole um save warrior campaign to find Twitter handles of people. But you can hang out if there's if there are links on a site, you can scrape that site. Um, I recommend you do it with a VPN. Um, and then you can get a full digest of everything that's uh that that site links to, and you can even do things like build your own network graph to understand, okay.

Here's how you know what the most important pages are. Here's how pages link to each other. You can find files that maybe that uh the people on that site don't know are uh publicly available that that really shouldn't be. So there's all sorts of of different ways that you can uh look at uh someone's website, you can do an SEO assessment of some of the basics, you know, kind of how well optimized is this site. I don't know, John.

Is your head spinning yet? Yeah, no, it's you know, there's a huge gigantic array of options, you know, and so it's just a matter of kind of where do you want to go, what do you want to dig into? But yeah, there's no shortage of stuff. And it is I I hadn't thought about it in the terms that Chris had put it, how yeah, you know, pre-internet, like you had to go bang on the door or get your janitor costume on and go through the trash cans, you know. There was no other way to do this, and now there's data just kind of spilling over that people have forgotten about.

I I was unaware of the whole IMDB database. I didn't realize you could just go grab that whole thing. That's insane to me. I can't believe they don't charge for that, but I guess you can defend it against bias if you say, hey, it's out there and everybody can look at it and verify. Here you go.

Yep, there's there's the IMDB database, and and you know, all there's anything, any place that someone's got an API, there's there's probably data available. I mean, that's one of the the I guess more sophisticated hacks uh of compet of competitive intelligence is if a company has got an API and it's open to the public, and meaning you don't have to do anything unsavory to get access to it, send in an applic, a developer's application and see what you're allowed to get out of it. And sometimes it's a lot more than they think because they're not thinking about, well, how would a competitor use this data against me? Well, and I think that that's you know, you didn't say it explicitly, but this is sort of the important piece to know is that just because the data is available doesn't mean that you can use it. And so you have to have some level of data analysis skill, maybe some level of coding.

So when you were showing sites like uh Fred and Data.gov and Indeed and IMDB, an open food source, you know, if you're extracting data from those sources, you have to know what to do with it once you get it. And oftentimes you're not getting it immediately in this nice, clean, pristine, usable form with really nice labels and no anomalies in the data. Like you have to clean the data, and a lot of times I know with a lot of uh data.gov and other uh government sites, there's a corresponding data dictionary, and you have to try to piece it together. And so just because it's available doesn't mean it's instantly out of the box usable, which is why some of these other services like HFs and SpyFu and TalkWalker and Scrutiny and Screaming Frog cost money because someone has done the work to clean up and present the data to you. Exactly.

This, for example, is what you get out of SN Scrape. SN Scrape gives you what's called JSON L files, which is just a long text file uh in JSON markup language of Twitter data. If you are not accustomed to processing this kind of data, this is really not going to be helpful. And that is one of the great challenges of this. Um, the absolute worst, you know, the champion of uh impossible to use data is US government data.

So you can get, for example, all the data about every single political campaign and who's donating down to the dollar by person from the Federal Election Commission. It comes in a format that was probably in use in 1975 with someone's mainframe. Like it is one of the worst, most painful uh data sources to use. Super valuable, hard to use. And so there are actually companies that charge political campaigns like $1,500 a month just to get access to data that's freely available because it's such a pain in the butt to work with the Federal Elections Commission data.

I have often thought of opening up a cottage business on the side where you can just, you know, people can access the data at like a discount, like here, get the trust insights, you know, $500 a month data, exactly the same as those other services, but you know, it's it's two-thirds less because we're competent at coding. Well, you know, if you're interested in that, contact John Wall, he'll set you up. Um but it's actually that's a real that's a really good point. Um, when I in a past life, you know, when I was working more in the public health, mental health substance abuse space, a lot of times we'd be looking at those uh government, you know, data sets of the self-report. Um, yeah, I was gonna say I'm hard pressed to remember any of what they were at the moment, but they would come out in really unusable forms.

And so you're talking about um, you know, data that was already at, you know, uh a two-year lag, and then you get it, you finally get this data that you and your stakeholders have been waiting for, and it's messy and unusable, and so you have to spend another six months cleaning it up using you know SPSS, because at the time that was the most appropriate tool to use it, and it was just you know, just because the data exists does not mean you're going to be able to immediately um you know use it. Exactly. So, for example, one of the um systems that we use a ton is called iPumps from the University of Minnesota, which is a a it's a public free system. You do have to register, log in and provide academic or business credentials, uh, but it then allows you to deal with uh data from the US government from the Census Bureau, because the Census Bureau's data is even less usable. Um, and so this one at least allows you to go through and choose your different uh your different data types that you want, and then you can you get uh data exports from them in SAS, SPSS or R formats, and then you can export that data and process it.

But this is a tool that I've used. This is not for competitive intelligence, but this is just general uh data, and it is it if this didn't exist, the Census Bureau data would be almost unusable because again it's it's built for 1975. But um there are other data sources and you have to think outside the box when it comes to particularly government data for compet for competitive analysis, because there's some that are so good, but we don't think about it um until you know somebody else points it out. So, one of the ones that uh we've talked about, I know on the past on the show is the payroll protection program. So the payroll protection program was a COVID era um that the government set up that said, Hey, you can get loans um from the government to to deal with all if things happening.

And pretty much any company that was in business, from the smallest cornest convenience store to you know, Fortune 10 companies went and got this data. Well, when you did that, you also had to register with the government and say, here's how much, here's how many employees we have, here's the industry we're in. And so this data set, which is freely available from I wonder, I think it's the Department of the Treasury, has all your competitors and their their most recent uh data because they had to submit it in order to get these loans. Um yeah, I mean, and so I think the point that we have now completely driven home is that there is no shortage of available data if you are asked to do some kind of a competitive analysis. And you know, to Chris's point, think beyond just okay, how many Twitter followers do they have?

Uh, how many articles did they publish this week? Or um, you know, how many times is their CEO mentioned in the news? And so there's tools beyond, especially depending on uh the industry that you're in. So I was I just found the website that I was thinking of is uh SAMHSA, so SAMHSA.gov, and then they also have Don data, NSOMS, NSAS, NSDA, RDC, TEDs, Sanda. I mean, there's no shortage of data sets within data sets within data sets if you are in that industry.

And so now that we have been talking for you know almost 35 minutes about the available data, let's try to make it actionable. What can we do with some of this data? So let's say, Chris, for example, I come to you and I've done my user story, and I say, as a CEO, I want to know what, you know, how big our web presence is against our you know competitors so that I can make us even bigger and better. Really, what I'm saying is I want more awareness. Um, you know, so where do we start with that?

What do we do? Because that's a big question. Number one, who are your competitors, right? Um, it's it's you it's not a phishing expedition. You have to have some level of focus.

So who are the competitors that you care about? Um, that would be the first place to start. And then the second question is okay, it's it's website, you care about awareness. What specific measures does that mean? Are you talking about organic search traffic?

Are you talking about pay-per-click advertising? What kind of what data set are we working with? Knowing the you know who's involved and uh what kind of data uh determines the process, right? If you know the people, or in this case the corporate entities, and you know the data set which comes from the platforms, then you can decide, okay, how are we going to present this? How are we going to extract transform and then present this information?

If we don't have that information, it's very, very difficult to do any kind of meaningful competitive analysis. So, Katie, how do you want to do this? Excellent question. Um, do you want me to sort of list off uh competitors or like what data, you know, let's say I'm a you know loudmouth CEO who doesn't know what's going on? How would you, the analyst, start narrowing down my big ass?

I'd say, okay, let's pick three competitors who who are the competitors that you care about that that you you really want to go after uh so let's say for the sake of this exercise let's go McKinsey let's go you know Deloitte and let's go Bain because I have big lofty aspirations you know right or not we're gonna be bigger than all of them one day okay so initially we you know just the very basic uh we see McKinsey Deloitte and Bain McKinsey and Deloitte rank for about a million keywords we rank for under a thousand uh so got a little bit of work to do there um traffic wise about the same uh and then we can obviously go through and take a look at these the different links so there's some pretty clear um gaps in in our measures between you know the number of referring domains clearly one of the big things to that we should be looking at is getting more links we know when you look at uh this case Deloitte Deloitte has eighty nine million links to its website right and McKinsey has 7.3 million and we have 72000 out of 73000 is respectable and that's that's not zero um but it definitely shows okay there's there's there's a pretty big gap there um the next step that we would want to ask is if we if we want to increase our awareness we need more links to get more links, we need to go and and and start figuring out okay. Well, where where should we be getting those links from? So in this case, we'll use we'll start here.ai. And so I'm looking for the different places that was not link to one, two, or all three of these competitors that don't link to us. Now, this is again a good starting point to ask some of those questions about well, you know, who do they get their links from?

What quality of websites do they get their links from? And then based on what this would spit out, we would then say, okay, well, of those places that are giving them links, and this does take a little while. Um, how realistic is it that we would be able to go and get comparable value links? Because no offense to us, but when McKinsey releases a new paper, it's not terribly hard to get people to link to it because of the McKinsey brand. It's slightly harder for us.

It's not impossible, but it's it's it's slightly harder for us. John, uh, so you mentioned at the top of the show that hrefs is one of the first tools that you do. Is this one of the types of analysis that you're looking at, or is this something that you might start incorporating into your research? Yeah, no, I've seen this report. It's usually not what the first one that I run.

The big one is the other one that shows content, you know, to actually see what are the four or five biggest resources on their website. That's really where you can get a feel of you know the stuff that they're publishing. Is it getting any traction for them? And that's just like the easy steal. You know, you go look at those top 20 and you say, okay, which ones of these 20 do we not have on our website?

And that's an easy place to to get started as far as you know, gaining some ground on your competitors. Yeah, there you go. So see if there's anything we can steal from McKenzie right off the top. What is the metaverse? What is the meta?

Yeah, that's well. When will the COVID-19 pandemic end? Never. So, you know, in terms of, you know, prioritizing this as actionable. Um, you know, if Chris, you and John were coming back to me with this information, you know, I'd be like, great, go write something about COVID, or great, go write something about the metaverse and steal that traffic.

I would expect you to say to me, Yeah, we could do that, but it's not the right audience because that's not at the core of what Trust Insights does as a business. And so just because you're seeing this information doesn't necessarily mean it's the right information. And so, you know, you may get, you know, into this and like, what is uh blockchain something? Um, I can't read what that says, but what is blockchain? You know, that's yeah, we could answer that question, but it's not necessarily the right question for us to answer.

And so as you go through this, you might be like, you know what? Yeah, McKinsey is great and aspirational, but we don't actually compete with them at all because they do a bunch of stuff that we don't do. So we need to find someone who's more aligned with what we do. And so that would be the conversation that you, the analyst, would have to bring back to me and try to convince me, the CEO, that I'm wrong. So good luck with that.

It it is challenging because you do have one of the challenging parts of competitive intelligence is that there is a natural, well, they're doing it at work, so we should be doing it too. Um and it's like, well, you know, uh, I can look at at Kobe Bryant. He plays basketball and and and has you know done very well. So should I go play basketball? Probably not, right?

Very, very different outcomes. Uh the ROI of a basketball for Kobe Bryant is substantially higher than it is for me. Um so that is part of the of what you have to take into account is going back to the very beginning. Uh, what is it that you're trying to do? Because if you if you aren't clear on that and you don't know what the outcome is that your your stakeholders are after, uh you could end up doing a a whole bunch of work that doesn't matter, or B could do uh a whole bunch of work that leads you to a very unproductive outcome.

Well, and so even ahead of doing the competitive intelligence analysis, you really need to challenge yourself to make sure you have the right list of competitors. Um, I know for us, we've gone through this exercise a few times, and I would say, you know, I'm saying sort of like tongue in cheek, depending on how we feel that day, our list of competitors changes because you know, we might decide one day, you know what, we're really gonna double down on data science, who's in that space? Or you know what, digital marketing is the right place for us to be, you know, hanging our hat. So who's in that space? Or let's just look at general consulting.

And so, you know, first and foremost, you need to know who you are as a business and what it is that you want to be known for, and then you need to be selective about your competitors. Um, we were joking about this again in our analytics group, uh, analytics for marketers, our Slack group earlier, our community, that there are some companies that don't believe they have competitors at all. Uh John, you have your two cents on that. Yeah, that's well, we were just talking earlier about you know, if you don't think you have competitors, then your competition is apathy, right? You need to set out and become the uh the do the missionary sale, which is worse than having competitors.

Yeah, the general argument is if you have no competitors, then the market doesn't value what you do. And so I think you know what what we're trying to come back to in terms of what do I do with this all of all this information? Like anything, you have to do requirements up front to understand what's the question I'm trying to answer. Uh and so, Chris, we've worked with clients who their sole focus was getting more Twitter followers than their competitor. But that was a very clear purpose statement.

As the CEO, I want to have more Twitter followers than my direct competitor. Great. There was no ambiguity in terms of what the ask was or where you should be spending your time or what the outcome was going to be. You had to have more Twitter followers than the guy who's sitting next to you. Period.

Done. As goofy as we think it is, it's very straightforward. It's when you start to get into those vague, you know, how can we overtake McKinsey? Well, what does that mean? Do we want more money?

Do we want more of a digital footprint? Uh, you know, do we want to steal all their team members? Like we have to be a little bit more specific. And so in terms of competitive intelligence, that's a hundred percent where you should start. Exactly.

All right. So any other final thoughts on competitive analysis before we roll out this week. Go stomp the competition, see them scattered before you take their gold. I would say just be super clear about why you think you need to understand what your competitors are doing. Uh, if that's your sole focus and you're not really focusing on what's happening in your company right in front of you, uh, you maybe need to reevaluate your priorities.

Yeah, that's the old Henry Ford thing. You know, the the competitor you really need to beat is is the company you were yesterday in order to uh to be the company you want to be tomorrow. Competitors are good, and it's important to know that the pressures they exert on your market. But um, if you're gonna spend if you have a hundred points of effort to spend, spend like 95 of them on making yourself a better company to do business with, because in the long run, that is the most sustainable tactic. Thanks for tuning in, folks, and we will talk to you next time.

Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast at a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers.

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