Ever wonder how some businesses always seem to stay one step ahead of their competition? They set the pace, seem unbothered and pivot away in another direction once the world catches up. Their secret lies in the power of up-to-date competitive insights. So, what exactly does that mean? Let us explain it to you.
Back in the pre-internet days, standing out from the competition was a lot simpler. There were fewer channels to monitor and businesses had time to watch what the rest was cooking up. Oh, and let’s not forget the control they still had over their own messaging and reputation. But then came the great corporate migration to a world of digital. And suddenly, the competition seemed to pop up from everywhere… all of the time. Enter globalization and artificial intelligence and *boom*, companies have fallen behind their competition before even hitting the ground.
Such doom, right? Nope. Because when you read these facts again with a new mindset, you’ll distill that a lot of crucial information by your competitors is available online. Think of pricing and portfolio information, but also what campaigns they run, when they install discounts, how they respond to fluctuating markets and much more. In other words, the way to track and outsmart them is publicly available!
Obviously, getting your hands on that info takes a lot of work. You can read more about how we used to do that here and we don’t recommend. But the message is this -> it is very, very possible to track what your competitors are up to. In fact, we based an entire company on it and we think you need to give it a try.
A successful competitive intelligence operation requires a complete technology set-up. You’ll need a toolbox filled with data collection & analytics tools, machine learning, AI, cyber security tools and data visualization tools. And with any operation, you’d need a skilled team of data-minded experts who can develop secure, bug-free data solutions that seamlessly integrate into a customer's environment, enabling a plug & play experience. And this is exactly what our company Competify does.
At the core of our way of working, we adhere to a solid Software Development policy. This ensures that each development follows a structured procedure, reliably delivering on the key requirements of every data solution. We employ a three-stage process, consisting of a development stage, a testing stage and a production phase, which guarantees the highest quality before deployment. In terms of technology, we prefer to work with Azure, Amazon, or GBQ for data warehousing, Airflow for ETL and PowerBI, Qlik, Tableau or Looker for dashboarding. We adapt to our clients' needs and the set-up they already have in place. If necessary, we choose the ideal set-up based on our tooling benchmarks to meet the client's specific requirements.
Our scraping set-up is tailored to the target websites. We use different solutions depending on the structure, security and complexity of each site. For some, simple ‘http’ requests in Python combined with BeautifulSoup are sufficient, while others require more complex implementations, such as Selenium. We also use the most cost-effective proxy to handle each task. Our development policy and tailor-made proxy set-ups are designed to handle the complexities of competitive intelligence. We use market-leading tools and remain flexible, adapting to our clients' set-up to provide a plug & play experience for market and competitive intelligence in systems they already use.
We pride ourselves on matching and normalizing data in a way that makes it actionable for our customers. Our focus goes beyond just data – we connect external market and competitive data to your internal performance data, turning it into actionable insights. Our structured 3-step approach allows for easy onboarding and our tailored solutions keep things simple for you.
We believe that the future lies in combining competitive intelligence with AI models. We're already experimenting with this innovative approach and can't wait to show our customers and prospects the exciting results! So, if you're ready to take your business to new heights by tapping into the power of competitive intelligence, look no further than Competify. Our secret sauce will help you outsmart and outperform the competition in no time.
Want to know how we work?
We build and maintain custom webscrapers that turn any website into structured data and insights.
