Generate Interest in your Competitive Intelligence Project with these Internal Marketing Strategies

You don't have to be an internal marketing expert to create content and events that inspire interest in your Competitive Intelligence project. You just need the right tools in your toolbox. This article lists the nine most common internal marketing strategies used by Competitive Intelligence professionals to promote projects like a marketing pro!

Following these internal marketing strategies can help you engage your audience, increase awareness about your competitive intelligence projects, and open lines of communication that enable people to collaborate with you or start their own projects. The goal is to create a self-sustaining cycle of engagement, feedback, and collaboration that leads to high levels of participation and success with your market intelligence projects.

Please note that this list of tips is designed for small and large companies alike. If you’re a smaller company, you can implement some of these tactics with limited resources.

1. Organize stakeholder meetings

Consider hosting semi-annual meetings where stakeholders can contribute to your Competitive Intelligence project, discuss results and identify areas of improvement. We recommend focusing on a specific topic or set of topics in each meeting. This creates a more streamlined communication process and a more personalized feeling for the attendants.

2. Communication is key

Depending on your available resources, we recommend regularly communicating with your audience through an internal newsletter or magazine.

Common newsletter topics include:

• Top stories, shares, and trending topics relevant to your readers
• Recognize the most active members of your monitoring project
• Share employee stories and testimonies (how people are using your CI platform to monitor topics related to their specific job)
• List facts and figures relating to the evolution your projects & of the community (number of members, number of new members)
• Interviews and anecdotes from the top Competitive Intelligence experts in your organization

3. Organize webinars or create handouts

Regular webinars are an effective way of communicating your strategic intelligence approach, helping new users get started on the platform, learn how to search for and view information, and how to organize information with customized deliverables.

If organizing regular webinars isn't right for you, consider creating practical fact sheets on the topics mentioned above and make them available to your employees via your intranet.

4. Use questionnaires to measure the effectiveness of your efforts

Have you ever asked yourself if your Competitive Intelligence project meets the needs of your internal customers or if the information you provide is valuable?

Our clients have asked their audience to answer short questionnaires to answer these questions.

Popular questions include:

• How effective is the content?
• Has the information from your project helped the decision-making process?
• What information do readers find relevant?
• Is the frequency appropriate?
• How is the format of the deliverables? Are they easily downloadable and searchable on the move?
• Do they have other subjects to watch for?

Tailor the questions to your specific concerns and gain the feedback you need to make adjustments to your methods.

You can also install an idea box in the office. Ask your colleagues to provide immediate feedback on the alerts and newsletters they receive. Incentivize them to provide feedback by offering to turn the idea box into a monthly raffle.

5. Directly recruit internal experts & new readers

Launching an internal campaign is a direct way to encourage collaboration on the project. You can directly solicit your colleagues to find additional watch topics or identify internal experts who could become valuable contributors to your projects.

6. Create a magazine

If you have one or multiple Competitive Intelligence projects, consider creating a magazine that lists your projects, defines the objectives of your projects, and describes the processes, purpose, and uses of the information you gather. Be sure to use graphs, figures and visual representations of your data.

This internal publication can serve as:

• A reference point to keep track of your ongoing projects
• A visually appealing method to communicate the key points of your projects to your organization
• A demonstration of how organized and effective your projects are
• A method to generate interest in your projects and encourage feedback from the recipients of the catalog
• A chance to peak the interest of readers  and encourage them to select a project of interest and start contributing

7. Create a video

To highlight your market intelligence efforts and generate interest in your project, consider creating a video. To encourage understanding of Competitive Intelligence projects, you could make a video about what market intelligence is, what your project does, how you monitor the market and analyze the information, and how it helps key decision makers.

You could also use video as a high-quality deliverable to communicate the data and the trends you have identified through your monitoring efforts and to analyze how those trends will shape the strategy of your organization.

8. Create an e-learning module

An e-learning module will help your users take ownership of the platform. Thanks to the flexibility of e-learning, you can tailor your learning modules to the specific needs of the users. E-learning modules can help users become autonomous when using monitoring tools and improve their experiences interacting with your Competitive Intelligence projects.

Typically, users should have the following levels of proficiency:

• Moderators should know how to set up a project, how to add specific sources, validate information and how to configure deliverables.
• Contributors should feel comfortable validating information and creating deliverables.
• Readers should know how to access the platform, how to subscribe to a project, and how to read and share validated information.

9. Organize an internal Users' Club

Creating an internal users' club is an easy, low-cost way to foster a sense of community, create interest in your projects, generate ideas, and draw new people to your platform. 

Users' clubs provide an opportunity to:

• Announce new topics and projects
• Discuss feedback and project results
• Introduce new features and launch new deliverables
• Set common objectives, KPIs, and standards for deliverables

Users' clubs create an excellent opportunity to invite employees who are interested in launching a project of their own. Meetings create an opportunity to see what others are doing and what they can expect from their own projects.

We hope that you are ready to use these internal marketing tactics to build your Competitive Intelligence community. Email Team Digimind if you have other ideas. We would love to hear about your unique methods.

Don't miss out on Digimind's upcoming webinar where you can learn how to meet your organization's goals, create deliverables, and engage your audience. Register now while there's still time!