Crayon Competitive
Intelligence Blog
Sponsor, Scope, Solutions: How to Create an Ironclad Business Case for Your CI Program
Things could be going better. You’re working hard to deliver on the competitive intelligence requests that come through your inbox, but as far as you can tell, very few people are consuming the insights and materials you produce.
To make matters worse, whenever someone does consume your output, there’s a decent chance you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of the dreaded message: “This is out of date.” Clearly, something has to change. If you keep doing CI in this ad-hoc fashion, you’ll permanently lose the trust of your colleagues—not to mention your sanity.
It’s time to create a business case. Don’t worry—we’re not going to give you a generic ...
3 Ways Product Marketers Can Win (More!) with Crayon’s Competitive Win Loss Tools
It's Monday morning. You haven’t even taken the first sip of your coffee. You touch your right index finger to the magical biometric scanner thing on your MacBook. Your company-approved desktop ...
Competitor Messaging Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide for Product Marketers
In a world where the most talked about 60 seconds of the Super Bowl involved a $7M black screen emblazoned with nothing more than a bouncing, polychrome QR code, the road between market leader and ...
B2B Competitive Analysis: Your Definitive Step-by-Step Guide (+ Free Template)
B2B competitive analysis is the process of critically assessing your company (or business unit) in relation to one or more competitors. Broadly speaking, the objective is to identify opportunities ...
Your Guide to Conducting a Successful Competitive Product Analysis
To be successful in a crowded marketplace, it is important to understand the competitive advantages of your company’s solution against its alternatives. Enterprises must be well-versed in their ...
How to Create a Competitive Matrix (Step-by-Step Guide With Examples + Free Templates)
A competitive matrix is a visual resource that enables you and your colleagues to better understand your company’s position within the market—that is, to better understand how your company stacks up ...
Competitive Landscape Analysis: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get a Head Start
Neglecting competitive landscape analysis is a costly mistake—one that’s steadily growing costlier over time. We say that for several reasons. First of all—and as regular readers of this blog are ...
Competitive Analysis Frameworks: 3 Ways to Get More Value From Your Competitive Data
Competitive analysis frameworks are indispensable for anyone who wants to extract meaning from intel and inspire action across their organization. When we talk about competitive intelligence, we’re ...
24 Questions to Consider for Your Next SWOT Analysis
So, you’re getting ready to conduct a SWOT analysis — fantastic! Whether you’re a marketer, an executive leader, a competitive intelligence (CI) professional, or someone else entirely, you’re on your ...
Competitive Analysis Requires Benchmarking Your Own Company
Most businesses know their own strategy through and through, and recently, more companies than ever before are investing in competitive intelligence. The real secret to success is combining those two ...
5 Steps to Get Valuable Insight From Competitor Website Analysis
When it comes to user experience (UX) design, competitive analysis should be an integral part of your strategy, to stay ahead of trends and make your website stand out against the rest within your ...
How to Leverage Product Reviews In Your Competitor Analysis
Review sites are jam-packed with competitive intelligence (CI). On review sites, you’ll find both happy and unhappy customers giving insight into your competitors’ products and outlining strengths ...
Using Competitive Data Points to Predict the Future
For anyone with an internet connection and a glut of time available for research, competitive data points are nearly inexhaustible. New job postings, minor website copy changes, new marketing content ...
5 Key Areas to Analyze when Conducting a Competitor Marketing Analysis
A competitor analysis encompasses many different facets of your competitor’s business—revenue, product, marketing, sales, engineering, organizational structures, and more. But there’s something to be ...
Making Sense of a Fast-Moving World Awash In Information with STEEP Analysis
Information comes at us fast and in a volume that makes it difficult to deliver insight and foresight. STEEP is the first step to exploring implications of events to get to the heart of "So what?" ...
How to Avoid the Dreaded Feature Comparison Checklist
Every product marketer has been asked by a sales rep, somewhere between one and a million times, for a feature comparison checklist. “I need to see how we stack up. Does our competitor have X ...
Analyzing Your Competitive Landscape: 4 Case Studies
Conducting a competitive analysis can be time-consuming. It takes time to gather intelligence, analyze the insights, share data, and integrate your findings into your strategy. However, if you’re ...
How to Take a Snapshot of your Competitive Landscape
“Can you give me a quick overview of the competitive landscape?” Unless you have an in-depth and current competitive analysis on-hand, you might find yourself slightly panicked at this sudden ...
Competitor Tiers: How to Break Down Your Competitive Landscape
“Who are your competitors?” is a seemingly simple question that can be surprisingly difficult to answer. Do you answer with your most common competitors from a sales perspective? Or, the leaders in ...
How to do a Comprehensive Competitor Analysis [+Free Template]
84% of companies say that their market has become more competitive in the last three years, according to the 2021 State of Competitive Intelligence Report. With markets becoming more competitive, ...
How to Do a Market Analysis In 5 Steps
Becoming a market expert is a big undertaking. Markets are large, complex, and constantly changing. But if you’re tasked with tackling a market analysis, here are the steps you can take to get an ...
How to Conduct and Leverage a SWOT Analysis [+ Free Template]
Giving your company a competitive advantage requires ongoing assessment and strategic planning. One way to evaluate your company's performance is through SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis includes ...
4 Steps for Conducting an Impactful Competitor Analysis
A competitor analysis is the process of identifying and analyzing your competitors and how they compare to you. The challenge with a competitor analysis is that it’s a labor-intensive task that ...
How to Read Between the Lines of Your Competitor’s Website Update
So your competitor updated their website… From the outside, this may seem like “just some marketing fluff.” Everyone updates their website at some point! Who cares? But product marketers know to look ...
The Surprising Power of the Weak Signal: How to Go Deep on Competitive Intel
After the digital explosion of the last 20 years, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the staggering amount of competitive data available today. In many ways – and for many organizations – it can be ...
What Is a SWOT Analysis? Let’s Start with the Basics
In order to win a market, you need to know where your company stands in the competitive landscape and where you have opportunities to grow. One analysis that can help your business grow is a SWOT ...
Amazon's Job Description Gave Away Strategic Plans -- What Can You Learn About Your Market's Competitive Strategy from Job Posts?
Companies can be plenty secretive about their sales numbers, product roadmaps, and go-to-market strategies, but frequently lay out these details in plain sight: in job descriptions. Last week, Amazon ...
How to Decode Your Competitor's Strategy with Predictive Intelligence
A new year is upon us, and with it annual plans with new key initiatives. While you are crafting and executing your plan, so are your competitors… how will your plan succeed in light of their ...
Competitor Analysis Trends: How to Spot Them and What They Mean
Keeping tabs on your competitors involves more than monitoring their announcements or online reviews. Competitive intelligence requires analysis in order to turn information into actionable insights. ...
Your Competitive Intelligence SWOT Cheat Sheet
The web is full of noise about "optimizing strategy." The explosion of B2B content marketing has flooded our inboxes with playbooks about improving your marketing and competitive intelligence ...