• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 6, 2022

Every company has vast amounts of unstructured data -- from customer feedback found in public forums, reviews and ratings to information on employees, brand performance, and products.

This data, along with valuable details about competitors, posts on public sites that consumers base purchase decisions on. The trick is to aggregate the data and put it to good use.

Reputation, a company that helps marketers manage experiences, introduced additional insights and analytics to better understand the “why” behind competitive analysis of a company’s online reputation. The insights are available through a new platform called Competitive Intelligence.

“The challenge is for brands to sift and gather all of that information in a timely manner, and even more difficult to make sense of it, understand the impact, and what actions to take next,” Pranav Desai, Reputation CPO, wrote in an email to Search & Performance Marketing Daily.

Garner estimates unstructured data represented between 80% and 90% of all new enterprise data in 2020.

Competitive Intelligence breaks down public comments with help from machine learning and natural-language processing. It aggregates and analyzes all types of publicly available data, allowing businesses to compare and discover more about competitors to find opportunities in the market, Desai wrote.

Several beta customers have begun to use the product in a variety of ways. One way is to use category sentiment to learn where one of their brands might outperform the competition, using that data to run location-specific ad campaigns to gain market share in specific geographies.

The data also helps to identify competitors or industry peers that perform well, which also could help to identify potential acquisition targets.

Companies also use the data to find and leverage their competitors' weaknesses, and compare and integrate this into their own brand’s point-of-sale training and messaging workshops.

The data is collected through aggregated publicly available content such as ratings and reviews. Then the AI engine analyzes all aggregated unstructured data to deliver category, sentiment, and impact insights in near real-time. The score updates daily.

“The initial setup time depends on the scope and how much competitive data needs to be collected,” Desai wrote. “A new client’s Reputation Score typically calibrates within the first 30 days, so those using the platform can expect to see the most reliable competitive Reputation Scores after a month of use.”