What if you could tap into your competitors’ minds and instantly understand their strategies, why they’re making those moves, and how they respond to market shifts? You can access insights that let you stay several steps ahead and drive more impactful campaigns.
For CMOs in 2025, there is the power of marketing intelligence.
Marketing intelligence-driven decision-making
Marketing doesn’t have to be guided by intuition and creative direction. While those elements will always hold value, they’re no longer enough. With the pace of change and the overwhelming amount of content available, CMOs today need insights that will help them pivot quickly, predict trends, and refine strategies in real time. Marketing intelligence empowers you to do just that.
It’s more than tracking your competitors’ moves. It’s about understanding what is behind it. When analysing their content, you gain critical insights that can impact your next big move. Furthermore, it’s the difference between reacting to a trend and setting it. Using a tool that can analyse and interpret volumes of content that competitors publish, mail, and upload to their websites can help you understand what they are planning and where they are focusing, so you can adjust to keep your place and differentiation.
Marketing blind spots cost CMOs millions
Operating with blind spots can be one of the most costly mistakes in today’s marketing landscape. CMOs risk misallocating up to 40% of their budget without a clear view of their competitors’ strategies, leaving critical opportunities for competitors to snatch up.
In modern B2B marketing, costly decisions are made constantly and many months in advance. Should you participate in an event? Should you invest the extra budget to be a keynote speaker? Are your competitors participating? How can you stand out if they have taken over the event? Not knowing is a blind spot.
Imagine one of your competitors adding a new product line and moving quickly to capture an additional buying persona. If you don’t follow their content, you have a blind spot. When you realize it, they made the first move, and if you were planning to go there, you will have to re-create their campaign.
Marketing intelligence eliminates these blind spots by providing you with analysis of their content, messaging, and newsletter. It lets you monitor your competitors, track trends, and react before it’s too late. Marketing intelligence is a more qualitative analysis with interpretations, like having a marketing consultant discuss issues with you daily.
How to monitor and respond to competitors’ marketing strategies
Staying ahead means more than just scanning competitors’ social media or visiting their websites occasionally. To truly understand their strategy, you must analyse their blogs, case studies, newsletters, paid ads, webinars, PRs, and event participations, which is overwhelming.
What are they focusing on? Which messages are resonating with their audience? Marketing intelligence tools allow you to gain these insights at scale, so you’re not just observing one competitor or two; you are watching and actively learning from a list of competitors you know are the most influential in your space.
Once you understand what they are doing, it’s time to assess how you can respond. Is there a shift in messaging that you can capitalize on? Can you refine your content strategy to outperform theirs? With the right intelligence, you’ll be in the driver’s seat, ready to adjust your plan and maintain your competitive advantage.
Knowing what your competitors do doesn’t mean doing the same thing
When you understand what your competitors are doing, following their lead is tempting. They often have huge budgets and have been in the business for so long that you respect their perspective, but copying their moves doesn’t guarantee success for your brand. As a CMO, your job is to differentiate your brand and craft a unique message that resonates with your audience.
Marketing intelligence helps you do just that. By understanding your competitors’ strategies, you can decide whether to counter them, refine your positioning, or entirely ignore their approach in favour of something better suited to your audience’s needs.
Marketing intelligence gives you the clarity to do this. It lets you see what your competitors are up to, but more importantly, it helps you understand why they’re doing it. With these interpretations, you can make smarter decisions about positioning your brand, whether responding directly to their actions or going in a completely different direction.
The key is to be proactive, not reactive. Understanding your competitors’ content from a strategic perspective helps you use that knowledge to sharpen your strategy and never copy what they’re doing.
Bringing your marketing teams together with shared intelligence
One marketing team that can include several members working in brand, content, communications, field marketing, product marketing, and performance marketing has challenges to be aligned on one strategy. These teams often work in separate silos, making it challenging to execute a one strategy. But with the right marketing intelligence, you can break down those barriers and create a unified, agile approach that drives better results across the board.
When you have a daily, shared understanding of your competitors’ content strategies and marketing directions, everyone on your team can be informed and updated and better understand each other’s actions. This level of alignment means that your team can move more quickly and confidently. Product marketing can tailor product storytelling for sales enablement based on insights into competitors’ actions. Content marketing can adjust its strategies to deliver timely, relevant, differentiated, distinct blogs, guides, research, and social content to the competition.
By breaking down these silos and ensuring that every team has access to the same competitive intelligence, you create a process that makes collaboration happen.
CMOs who embrace marketing intelligence will have the power to make smarter, more proactive decisions, ensuring they can be differentiated and distinct from the competition. As the marketing leader, you can be proactive and take your competition into consideration, so the team can drive stronger campaigns and stay ahead of market shifts.
At Oktopost, we’ve built Marketing Intelligence to help you do that. With the right tools, you can make smarter decisions, spot opportunities faster, and be one step ahead of the competition.
Author
By Daniel Kushner, CEO and Co-founder, Oktopost
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