If you’re running competitive intelligence within your business, there’s a handful of deliverables that you need to be sharing regularly within the organization.

One of the most important? Your competitive intelligence newsletter (or as we at Klue call them, Intel Digests).

That’s why we tagged in Josh Gladstone, Manager, Services at Klue, to walk through the best ways to build a Digest in Klue.

You can watch his walkthrough below or keep on reading.

1. Identify Your Audience

Before building a newsletter, it’s essential to identify the target audience. In our case, we have various audiences with different needs. For instance:

  • Sellers: Interested in product updates, corporate challenges, and mergers & acquisitions that can be leveraged during sales cycles.
  • Executives: Focus on financial updates, leadership changes, and strategic elements of competition.

For this demo, we will concentrate on the sales audience.

2. Set Up Alerts in Klue

To get started, we will simulate a scenario where our company, Pied Piper Tech, competes with heavyweights in the payments industry like Square, PayPal, and Stripe. We begin by navigating to the alerts module in Klue:

  1. Navigate to Alerts: Go to the Discover section and click on Alerts.
  2. Filtering Alerts: Use filters to narrow down relevant information. Focus on key competitors and select topics pertinent to sellers, such as product updates and mergers & acquisitions.
  3. Time Frame: Expand the time frame to the last seven days for a broader view.
  4. Recommended Alerts: Use the recommended alerts feature to prioritize critical updates based on previous triaging activities.

3. Triage Alerts

Triaging alerts efficiently ensures you capture the most relevant updates:

  1. Triage Mode: Switch to triage mode, enabling quick actions like “Important,” “Interesting,” “Archive,” or “Delete” using keyboard shortcuts.
  2. Summarize Alerts: Use Klue’s AI tools to generate high-level summaries of alerts. Choose the format (bullets or paragraphs) and length (short or long).
  3. Categorize Alerts: Mark important alerts for inclusion in the newsletter.

4. Add Intel from Internal Sources

Relevant insights also come from within the organization. To incorporate these:

  1. Select Internal Sources: Navigate to all Intel and choose sources like Slack, in-app messages, or emails.
  2. Add to Digest: Identify pertinent internal discussions and add them to the digest, complementing external insights.

5. Create the Digest

With alerts and internal messages in place, it’s time to craft the digest:

  1. Digest Overview: Go to the Share section and open the Digest module.
  2. Customizing the Digest:
    • Title and Settings: Set the title, audience, and visibility. Use a consistent theme for easy recognition (e.g., “The Piper”).
    • Structure: Include sections such as feature articles, insights, and internal messages.
  3. Why It Matters: Provide context with the fact, impact, and action (FIA) structure:
    • Fact: What is the update about?
    • Impact: Why does it matter?
    • Action: What should the reader do about it?
  4. Digest Introduction and Subject Line: Craft a compelling subject line using the TBS (Theme, Benefit, Short) method and a concise introduction summarizing the newsletter’s contents.
  5. Save and Reorder: Finalize the arrangement of articles and save your changes.

6. Ship It!

Send the newsletter immediately or schedule it to be sent automatically. Additionally, create templates for recurring newsletters or new one-time digests tailored to different audiences.

7. Monitor and Optimize

Improvement is a continuous process.

Monitor the performance of your newsletters through metrics like open rates and click-through rates. Use these insights to refine your approach, testing different elements like subject lines and content tone to enhance engagement.

Keep Your Entire Team On Top of the Competition

The Intel Digest is one of your best ways to keep your business on top competitor moves, win stories, and new updates in the market.

Don’t have Klue to do so yet? Not a problem, check out our free template walking through how you can build one yourself.

competitive intelligence newsletter