Summary

• Monitoring competitors’ promotional activity in your market is essential but time-consuming.
• AI-driven retail analytics tools offer automated insights into competitor strategies.
• These tools help retailers refine their own promotions and stay competitive.
• By processing vast amounts of data, this technology provides efficient trend analysis across multiple channels.
• Tracking competitors’ marketing and promotional activity historically and in real time helps optimize calendars, pricing, and product assortments for market success.

The Need for Retail Analytics Tools

Sifting through old emails, newsletters, and other promotional materials just to see when, where, and what your competitors are promoting is exhausting. And, let’s face it, you don’t have the time in your day to thoroughly conduct these searches. However, one of the key strategies for achieving an edge in the increasingly competitive retail space is to closely monitor and analyze your competitors’ promotional activities, both historically and in real time.  

What if you didn’t have to spend valuable hours of your day finding and manually analyzing this information? What if there were a tool that did this for you?  

Cue retail analytics tools within an AI-driven retail intelligence platform. 

Importance of Monitoring Promotional Activity

Understanding your competitors’ promotional activities can be a game changer for your own retail strategy. By keeping a close eye on your competition, you gain insights into successful promotional campaigns, discounts, and marketing tactics that resonate with your shared customer base. This knowledge can help you refine and enhance your own promotional strategies. Retail intelligence is the key to unlocking these valuable insights, providing a comprehensive view of trends and campaigns across various channels, including emails, web pages, and category landing pages.

How Does a Retail Analytics Tool Enhance This Process? 

Retail analytics software has the ability to process vast amounts of data, taking competitor analysis to the next level, and offering better, faster, and more automated insights compared to manual methods. With AI-powered retail technology, you can say goodbye to sifting through countless emails or manually scanning web pages.  

Because you can more quickly and effectively analyze trends and campaigns advertised across competitor email communication and messaging on retailers’ direct sites, you are able to make better, data-driven decisions.

You can: 

1. Visualize how competitors position their products across their promotional and marketing activity.
2. Analyze your competitors’ promotional campaign archives to understand promotional activity of the wider market.
3. Understand how marketing for holidays, products, seasons, trends, and themes is different across time and regions. 
4. Examine which days had the highest mention of keywords and on what dates retailers started communicating about them. 

When, Where, and What – Tracking Promotional Activity

By tracking when players in your space run, or have historically run, promotions, you can align your own promotional calendar to maximize impact. For instance, if you notice a competitor consistently offers discounts just before major holidays, you can plan your promotions to coincide with these peak shopping periods. Moreover, monitoring discounts across the industry allows you to adjust your pricing to remain competitive or strategically position yourself as a premium or value brand based on pricing in your market. 

Knowing where your competitors promote their products provides insights into their market positioning. If a competitor heavily emphasizes online channels, it may indicate a shift in consumer preferences toward ecommerce. Understanding this allows you to adjust your marketing and sales channels accordingly to remain competitive.

Analyzing what your competitors promote helps you enhance your product strategy. You can identify which products or categories competitors in your space (and customers) prioritize and which ones they may be trying to clear from inventory. This information is invaluable for making decisions about your own product assortment and inventory management.

Conclusion

Analyzing when, where, and what your competitors promote provides critical insights that enable you to make data-driven decisions, stay competitive, and adapt to changing market conditions. With the help of retail analytics tools from an AI merchandising experience platform, you are able to fine-tune strategies, optimize product offerings, and enhance overall market positioning. 

As a retailer, it’s time for you to embrace these tools to stay ahead of the competition and, ultimately, deliver a more satisfying shopping experience for your customers. Request your demo today and see how EDITED can take your business to the next level.