What’s your brand’s ace card? The one thing that marks it out from the rest? Securing this knowledge is your best chance of convincing your audience, and your shareholders that you are the standout choice from your competitors.
Traditional methods of collecting data to identify your competitive advantage are time-consuming and inaccurate, but thankfully there is a whole heap of freely available data online that you can easily tap into with one AI tool.
Read on to find out how the Symanto Insights Platform enables you to discover your competitive advantage within minutes.
What is a competitive advantage?
A competitive advantage is a quality, feature or characteristic that empowers a business to outperform its main competitors. It enables a company to have wider margins than its competition, creating more value for shareholders and for the business itself.
Traditional techniques to identify competitive advantage
Traditionally, in order to identify your competitive advantage you need to send out customer surveys to find out why your customers prefer your brand. But there are several problems with this means of collecting data.
- Firstly, you’re only getting insight into your own customers. It’s much harder to reach out to the customers of your competitors to find out why they didn’t choose you.
- Secondly, let’s face it, customer surveys aren’t particularly appealing, so customers are often incentivised to participate. This leads to bias that can render your insights inaccurate.
- Repeatedly sending surveys can lead to “customer burnout” leading participants to leave less favourable and inaccurate feedback.
- Finally, if you want to analyse the data quickly and efficiently, you need to stick to closed questions. These questions don’t necessarily provide you with the insights needed to fully understand your customers’ motivations.
Enter Social Media Data
What does the term social media data mean to you? With the existing social listening tools on offer, you might consider it to mean counting the number of likes, retweets, shares and comments an account receives to measure engagement.
But there’s a vast amount of data on social media that barely gets a look in. Rich data that is largely untapped. And that data lies within the comments themselves and online reviews. What exactly are your customers and the customers of your competitors talking about?
Unlike customer surveys, social media comments and online reviews are written organically without the need to incentivise the author. You also have equal access to your competitors’ social media accounts and review site pages so that you can compare your brand against theirs.
Of course, this kind of data is infamously difficult to analyse, but new AI technology from Symanto is changing what’s possible.
The Symanto Insights Platform
The Symanto Insight Platform is connected with around 75 online portals including social media sites and review sites. This information is freely accessible, meaning that you can conduct the same analysis on your own social media accounts and those of your competitors.
Symanto’s AI technology crawls these sites and extracts insights that are buried within online comments, reviews and conversations. Symanto’s advanced text analysis capabilities enable it to understand the written word with a high level of accuracy. Unlike basic brand sentiment text analysis technology, Symanto is able to understand words in their context and ascribe them an accurate sentiment.
Intuitive data visualisation
The Symanto Insights Platform then organises this data by topics, subtopics, sentiment and psychographics and arranges them into easy-to-understand graphs and charts. Symanto’s data visualisation makes it incredibly easy for you to compare brand sentiment between companies and identify which topics your brand excels in.
Industry-related topics and subtopics
For example, you may discover that compared to your competitors, customers are impressed by
- The selection of products your brand offers
- The quality of the service you provide
- Your product’s intuitive interface
- Your highly skilled personnel
- Your low prices and generous deals
- Your unique location
Symanto generates different topics relating to your industry, so the possibilities on what you can discover are limitless.
Discover your niche market
Serving a niche market is an example of competitive advantage. When we think of a niche market we consider demographic information (age, gender) and behavioural information (likes, interests, buying habits) but there’s another way to define a niche market that often gets overlooked: psychographic profiling.
Symanto is unique in its capability to analyse written text and conduct psychographic profiling. Find out whether your audience is more fact-oriented or self-revealing; rationally or emotionally driven. The Symanto Insights Platform enables you to easily analyse and compare your audience profile against those of your competitors so you can discover whether you are, for example, the only company in your industry to appeal to emotionally driven, self-revealing customers.
Nurture your existing competitive advantage
Get to know your brand on a whole new level and discover your competitive advantage from the perspective of your existing customers. Use this information to nurture your existing reputation and use it to shape your marketing and business strategies going forward.
Your first step is to get started with the Symanto Insights Platform. Get in touch or book a free personalised demo and discover many other ways you can use Symanto’s AI technology to your advantage.
