5 Essential Factors to Look For Before Investing in Your Next CI Tool or Service

If you’re finding your current competitive intelligence falls short of expectations, you aren’t alone. Cam Mackey, Past Executive Director of Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) pointed to a growing gap between competitive intelligence (CI) leaders and laggards in 2021. At the time, Mackey noted that leaders are “… more adept at ‘seeing through the fog’ of a volatile market and acting quickly when opportunities and threats arise.” With markets still in a state of flux, timely and relevant CI remains a top priority. Are your current competitive intelligence tools and services hindering more than helping?

Maybe you have too many blind spots in your datasets, resulting in competitor profiles that are incomplete at best or completely inaccurate at worst. Maybe your existing platform is too complex and cumbersome to use and navigate, loaded with gimmicky features that add little to your competitor research. Or maybe your competitive intelligence as a whole consumes too much time and energy with little to show in return.

Eventually, you decide to look at alternative competitive intelligence tools and services. And if you’re reading this blog post, then it’s likely safe to assume that this hypothetical scenario looks a lot like your current situation.

Research executives, strategists, and others in charge of competitive intelligence analytics switch from one competitor research tool to another for a variety of reasons. If you’ve outgrown the capabilities and insights offered by your current CI research and analytics solution, what should you prioritize when considering new technology?

Whatever unique needs you may have, evaluating any potential tool or service using these five factors can put you on the path to improved competitor research that enables you to get—and stay—ahead of the competition.

Factor 1: Data Variety & Volume Available

Accurate, insightful competitive intelligence demands a diverse range of data. Does the competitive intelligence solution you’re considering offer the content you require for an in-depth understanding of your competitors?

How LexisNexis Helps

For decades, organizations worldwide have relied on LexisNexis solutions to access a robust data universe featuring credible information sources spanning news, company information, and more. Whether you want to integrate data into your own tools using the flexible Nexis^® Data+ API or conduct ongoing media monitoring with Nexis Newsdesk^® to track what’s being said about your organization and competitors, LexisNexis has solutions to fit your needs.

Factor 2: Geographies Covered

Uncovering competitive intelligence from diverse sources across countries and regions worldwide makes it easier for today’s global businesses to identify opportunities for growth in emerging markets. Global content can also help you develop a more holistic perspective and understanding of regional regulatory risks or insights into cultural influences to inform your strategies, positioning your organization for proactive, informed decision-making that yields a competitive advantage.

How LexisNexis Helps

The LexisNexis data universe includes local to global sources—in native languages—enabling you to pick up on important context that might be missed in translation.  Plus, the technologies enable you to narrow or broaden your focus as needed, allowing you to explore regions of interest and unearth new opportunities.

Factor 3: Noise Reduction Features

Tagging on another process, tool, or service to an already convoluted workflow won’t make your research any easier or efficient. Instead of compounding existing complexities—or, even worse, replacing one complicated workflow with another—the competitive intelligence solution you’re considering should streamline the process by enabling targeted searches that yield refined, relevant results.

How LexisNexis Helps

LexisNexis normalizes and enriches the data we aggregate with metadata and index tags. In combination with powerful search technologies, the enriched data makes it easy to cast a wide net with your initial research, then filter out the noise to reveal critical CI insights more quickly.

LexisNexis solutions are designed to make insight sharing easier. Features like dashboards, alerts, newsletter or report generation enable you to gather and organize competitive intelligence insights to share with decision-makers, where and when they need it.

Factor 4: Data Visualizations to Tell a Compelling Story

When considering a tool or service, evaluate the ways it enables data visualization. The ability to visualize data is not only key in helping you to find insights, but also for helping others to see and understand those same insights as well. The saying, “A picture is worth 1,000 words,” exists for a reason. Data visualizations make numerical or textual data more accessible and persuasive which accelerates the decision-making process, as conclusions can be drawn more swiftly. This is especially critical for executives who may already feel the pressure of information overload and want to get to the heart of the matter, not read through pages of text.

How LexisNexis Helps

Solutions like Nexis Newsdesk^® or Nexis+ AINexis+ AI™, feature visualizations to paint a picture of companies of interest including news coverage over time, ESG ratings, sentiment analysis and more. Or you can use the Nexis^® Data+ API solution to fuel your own data analytics and visualization tools, ingesting key CI information like legal or intellectual property data. 

Factor 5: Insight Sharing Capabilities

Competitive intelligence teams are growing. In recent years, the number of organizations with multi-person CI teams versus single practitioners has increased 13% or more. As such, everyone in your lineup needs tools that make it easy to summarize findings, as well as a simplified process for sharing key insights with decision-makers across your organization.

How LexisNexis Helps

With solutions that enable you to send automated alerts, generate reports on the fly, use visual dashboards or create custom newsletters, LexisNexis technologies make it possible to not only find CI insights quickly, but share them with colleagues across the business.

LexisNexis provides a suite of competitive intelligence (CI) solutions to meet your needs. Whether you require data feeds to power your own CI tools or seek our cutting-edge AI solution, Nexis+ AI™, we have you covered. If you lack the bandwidth for in-depth analysis, our Nexis^® Media Intelligence Research & Analytics service offers a solution. Our experts can complement your efforts by delivering Brand Benchmark Analysis or custom reports, keeping you informed about your competitive landscape.

Explore the possibilities with LexisNexis. Talk to a CI solution specialist today.