Any company needs to stay on top of market developments and rival businesses. For years, this information has been called "market intelligence." Market intelligence has recently developed into analytics that aids in enhancing corporate estimates and models. To run a successful business, you need to understand your market with market intelligence better.
There are many different ways to utilize the word "marketing intelligence." Given the abundance of platforms, technology, and data available today, it's a phrase that gets bandied about carelessly.
What is Marketing Intelligence (MI)?
The gathering of information that is pertinent to a company's marketing initiatives is known as marketing intelligence. Informed judgments on the actions of competitors, product trends, market opportunities, and customer trends can then be made using the data that has been collected.
An organization's capacity to remain competitive is influenced by its understanding of its industry, competitors activity, and the shifting customer landscape. Marketers can analyze their efforts and optimize them based on their own insights and the insights of the entire industry using this information, also known as marketing intelligence.
You can get valuable insights into how to grow your company by collecting and analyzing market data:
- Market intelligence is your information about your industry or market segment. This can inform your strategy and give your business a competitive edge.
- Market intelligence is a collection of sales, customer data and survey responses.
- Consider the market intelligence that your company collects, along with broader industry trends, to identify new opportunities in advance of your competitors.
- This article is intended for small business owners that want to use market intelligence to help position their company to grow and succeed.
Any company needs to stay on top of market developments and rival businesses. For years, this information has been called "market intelligence." Market intelligence has recently developed into analytics that aids in enhancing corporate estimates and models. To run a successful business, you need to understand your market with market intelligence better.
There are many different ways to utilize the word "marketing intelligence." It's used loosely because so many platforms, technologies, and data are available nowadays. We've written a handbook to assist marketers in understanding what marketing intelligence is and why it's so crucial. Please look closely at marketing intelligence and why it's essential for marketers.
Why Is Marketing Intelligence Important?
Your team's decisions should be influenced by marketing intelligence. By gathering and examining contextual data on market and consumer trends and behaviors, marketers can better understand their initiatives' efficacy. This gives companies a competitive advantage over rivals, enabling them to understand their target market better and offer insightful product information.
You can use marketing intelligence to set future goals. Clear goals can help you maximize the effectiveness and scope of marketing intelligence. Determining the role that you want to play with this information will make it easier to find the data across all media. Determine the KPIs for your marketing intelligence to determine whether your efforts are moving towards your goals.
- Quantitative KPIs: They can be measured directly. They look at items like the total revenue of your competitors or the number of products.
- Quality KPIs: Qualitative KPIs are harder to measure, but they give teams a better understanding of business and marketing strategies. Marketers can use indicators such as customer surveys, quizzes and assessments, or comment forums.
Types Of Marketing Intelligence
Marketers can derive actionable intelligence from a wide variety of different methods. Here are some common ways teams can better understand the market they're trying to sell to.
Focus Groups
Focus groups are created by hand-selecting people to represent a representative sample of the target market. Moderators ask participants pre-determined questions to stimulate further discussion. Marketers can gain insights into their audience's more profound opinions and make better data-driven decisions for future campaigns.
Polls
In contrast to questionnaires and surveys, polls typically concentrate on one question. Polls are more accessible to answer than open-ended questions, which may be used in other methods. This leads to a greater response rate.
Field Trials
Businesses can use field trials to test new ideas and initiatives for their products or brands. This allows marketing teams to minimize waste while still experimenting with innovative concepts. New products can be tested at select stores, or a new message may be applied in a particular geographic area. These initiatives may be expanded to a broader audience based on their performance on a smaller scale.
Questionnaires
Marketers can reach a broad audience by using a survey. This can be done both online and offline, and it can give marketers both qualitative and numerical data about their customers.
Forms
Forms are a terrific approach for marketers to learn more about the characteristics of their target market. They are frequently carried out by academics who want to learn more about objective facts rather than a client's or potential client's opinion or feedback.
Sending Mail Surveys
Reaching huge audiences is affordable when done by mailing surveys. Although technology usage in online surveys has increased recently, organizations conducting outreach in places where access to technology may be limited might still benefit from this approach.
What Is The Difference Between Marketing Intelligence And Marketing Research?
Marketing ROI can be raised by enhancing campaigns with marketing intelligence. But it needs to be more frequently mistaken with marketing research and business intelligence.
Both phrases are employed to support organizations in decision-making regarding campaigns informed by data. But they have different objectives. The key difference between marketing intelligence and market research is that marketing research is a sort of study that concentrates on the efforts of the organization and aids in the clarification of some aspects of campaigns. It offers no perspective on outside factors. The goal of business intelligence, on the other hand, is to maximize efficiency across all divisions and locations of an organization by bringing together data from various activities and processes.
When done right, marketing intelligence plans have four distinct sides to help marketers make successful strategic decisions:
- Competitive Advantage: Marketing intelligence is the process of collecting competitor data to extract insights that can then be used to develop more effective business strategies. Understanding why consumers buy from competitors can help brands better align their marketing efforts.
- Product Intelligence: Product intelligence is analyzing the products and how they compare to other products on the market. Organizations can better understand the competitive advantages and differentiators in their products by talking to consumers, surveying them or engaging them through surveys. The teams can then better align their products with consumers' unique interests and problems to help increase conversion rate.
- Marketing Understanding: This type of marketing intelligence is based on examining the marketplaces populated by clients or prospects. Do they read magazines, industry journals or books? Are they members of any organizations? Knowing where your target audience is most active will help you determine the best media mix and touchpoints to use and the media channels and platforms your product can fit in.
- Consumer Understanding: While most businesses concentrate on increasing revenue, maintaining client loyalty is just as crucial. Depending on the sector, acquiring a new consumer can cost a brand five times as much as retaining an old one. Your retention rates will increase, and you'll be able to target new clients with less money spent on marketing.
Think about these issues:
- Who are your potential customers?
- Why do they buy from you?
- Do they feel satisfied with the level of service received?
- What can you improve?
- What challenges can your team help them overcome?
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our consultants!
5 Tips To Improve Marketing Intelligence
Making sure that marketing intelligence is successfully obtained across the marketing landscape is possible in several different ways. These include acquiring accurate intelligence information, making wise decisions, and using insights.
Join The Sales Team
Sales teams are in a great position to support marketing intelligence initiatives for B2B and B2C audiences. As they interact directly with customers and prospects, sales teams are uniquely positioned to support marketing intelligence activities. They have an insider's perspective on market trends, the advantages and disadvantages of rival products, and what customers want from a solution.
Create A Customer Advisory Board
Given the significance of direct communication, creating an advisory group for direct customer interaction can aid marketing intelligence operations. By doing this, businesses will be better able to comprehend the wants, needs, and difficulties that prospects face, which can aid in developing a more effective message.
Data Quality Is The Focus
Through agreements with outside partners or services that take advantage of these agreements, organizations can acquire access to a variety of online and offline data. Think about a few of these reliable data sources:
- Subscriber lists with geographic location
- Subscriptions to cable and television boxes that show ad airtime and reach
- Zip code and radio broadcasting range
- Data indicating engagements with third-party touchpoints, channels and touchpoints
- Third-party resources and studies are used to measure brand authority.
Use A Marketing Analytics Platform Appropriate
Using marketing analytics software that goes beyond media-mix modeling and marketing attribution can help you acquire greater insight. Do they favor social media platforms over television advertising? Does a specific inventive ad format resonate with your target audience?
To develop these linkages and respond to market changes, marketers must discover a flexible tool for measuring marketing performance. It will assist teams in making thoughtful media planning decisions.
Collecting Customer Feedback
By reaching out to existing customers, you can better understand the perceptions about campaign efforts, brand authority and product satisfaction. This information can help to better focus marketing strategies on areas where they are strong. Use marketing intelligence tools like polls, feedback prompts and surveys to gain insights about customer perceptions and brand equity.
What Are Some Examples Of Marketing Intelligence?
Making business decisions for the entire business requires the consideration of marketing intelligence. Borders is an excellent illustration. As consumers shifted to internet buying due to its convenience and usability, Borders concentrated on its physical presence. Instead of leveraging the shift in online presence brought about by the digital revolution by outsourcing to online retailers, Borders unwittingly allowed Amazon access to its consumer base.
As consumers preferred the online experience, Borders needed help to compete with its competitors and the shifting market. In the end, the organization's incapacity to utilize pertinent retail marketing intelligence was a significant contributing element to the store's demise in 2011.
Using marketing intelligence, one might learn about the strategies adopted by rivals. Consider that an employee of a car manufacturer learned that a rival recently lowered the cost of a particular car model. They might learn that the rival intends to introduce a new product and is hastily offloading the current one. By taking into account all the variables that could affect your decision, this information can assist you in making better choices.
What Is Marketing Intelligence Strategy (MIS)?
A robust marketing intelligence approach can help you stay up with and outperform the competition regardless of your industry. By implementing a marketing intelligence strategy, a corporation can be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to changing market conditions, consumer purchasing trends, technological advancements, and other outside influences.
What is the purpose of a Marketing Intelligence Strategy?
A marketing intelligence plan is a potent instrument that businesses can utilize to accomplish various goals. By utilizing trends to alter product offers, alerting customers to potential changes in their views towards a particular industry, and informing them when rivals are likely to drive them out of the market or the company, among other strategies.
In the Borders case study mentioned above, executives at Borders could anticipate or even stop the eventual demise of Borders at the hands of online booksellers like Amazon if they had implemented a more successful marketing intelligence plan.
How does a Marketing Intelligence Strategy get developed?
- What is the goal of your marketing intelligence strategy? What are you hoping to achieve with your marketing intelligence strategy for your company? What are you trying to achieve, and what are you trying to avoid?
- Decide on metrics: What metrics will you use to measure your marketing intelligence strategy's success? How will you measure the success of your marketing intelligence strategy? Customer satisfaction? customer experience? What else? Define your goals and how you will measure your progress.
- Create a research strategy: Decide where and how you will gather the data needed to inform your market strategy.
- Analyze your data: Turn all the information you have gathered from your research into actionable insights.
- Knowledge into action: Execute the steps necessary to achieve your goal and move your business forward.
Marketing Intelligence Examples
While many firms need marketing intelligence strategies, not all need a complete overhaul of their operations or a significant change in their approach. Many firms utilize marketing intelligence tactics to carry out repetitive or routine operations, such as creating products, segmenting the market to ensure their marketing is targeted correctly, estimating client lifetime value, and maximizing campaigns for ROI.
Determining If Marketing Intelligence Is Right For Your Organization
Like with any investment, businesses must weigh the benefits and drawbacks of a proposed project about how it can affect their bottom line. A sizable volume of marketing data is needed to develop correct marketing intelligence. Online, offline, and outside marketing are all included in this. Conversely, brands will conflict with rivals and audiences if they build their marketing tactics on false information.
Although the upfront costs may deter some businesses from implementing different types of market intelligence, failing to consider the market trends in the four areas mentioned above could be a grave risk to an organization's bottom line.
Market Intelligence Vs. Business Intelligence
Market and business intelligence often need clarification, but they're different. Market intelligence is concerned with general trends, whereas business intelligence is focused on data about a specific company. Business intelligence is information that relates to the internal performance of a company. This includes the number of products shipped and total sales for a given month.
On the other hand, market intelligence focuses more on external data, such as the demographics of customers, geographical information and what they buy. It also examines the competition to determine how your business compares to others on the market. All of these factors can be used to analyze business intelligence. Business intelligence does not consider the competition of your company. Market intelligence does.
What Are The Ways That Companies Use Market Information?
Market intelligence helps answer questions about your target customers, competitor activities and other stakeholders. It also helps you determine the goals of your business. Here are some of the questions that market research can answer:
- What areas should I focus my company's resources on?
- What markets should I enter next?
- What is the purchasing pattern of our best customers?
- What products can be sold to existing customers through cross-marketing?
- What demographic segments can I target with my new products and services?
- How can I perform a market study?
Market intelligence allows businesses to analyze their operating environment. This allows your company to identify potential risks and new growth opportunities. Most companies use these four criteria to assess their business.
Competitor Intelligence
Data gathering and market analysis go into competitive marketing intelligence. By examining the advantages and disadvantages of your rivals, you can learn important information about your business.
For instance, a competition analysis report is a frequently used marketing tool to evaluate the degree of service a product offers. The report might include product specifications and costs to target markets and demographics. Businesses may utilize all of this information to create customized products on the basis of customer behavior for their target market and steer clear of the issues they have already faced.
Product Intelligence
Analyzing your service or product's quality is a component of product intelligence. When you offer physical goods, you must assess your production procedure to see whether you are creating the product effectively. Utilizing the data you get, you may raise the value of your product.
Since all you have to do is evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of competing products, gathering this kind of information is simple. This evaluation covers all aspects of the product, including packaging, retail displays, and production costs and procedures.
Market Understanding
Understanding the market is about knowing where your product or service fits in. This research will help you determine how you are performing in those markets and whether you have any additional markets that you can expand into.
To gain a firm grasp on the market, you need to combine competitive analysis with product intelligence and identify the top performers. Once you know what is selling, you can gather end-user information to determine why the top performers are so popular.
Customer Understanding
Understanding your customers is about knowing their motivations for buying from you. You can also use it to better understand the challenges you face when dealing with customers in order to increase customer satisfaction and customer retention rates. You can use the information to improve future marketing campaigns.
Marketing departments often create customer personas that include demographics, interests, and problems that customers face. They also provide solutions to these problems. These insights into customer reviews can benefit an entire business, from product developers to quality assurance engineers. Market intelligence is a way to get a complete picture of where your company stands in the market. It compares your business with your direct competitors and analyzes the behavior of your target clients.
How To Gather Market Intelligence
There needs to be a standard plan on how to gather market intelligence. However, most companies perform high-level analyses. Here are four strategies that you can use to gather marketing intelligence.
You can also contact your current customers
The senior vice president of market intelligence at Blueocean Market Intelligence, Ajith Skaran, asserts that businesses frequently disregard customers as data sources. In order to obtain consumer data on an effective and affordable basis, Sankaran indicated that small enterprises might set up a procedure to manage client lists and develop a program for customer feedback.
Your sales team can also provide valuable market intelligence. Sales reps are uniquely positioned to provide market intelligence as they speak with prospects and customers regularly. Customer relationship management (CRMs) are often the most effective way for companies to gather and share customer information.
Surveys
You can gather information for market research by sending online questionnaires or polls to your customers. This strategy may be beneficial, mainly if your customer list is appropriately managed. Use tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to get started. You can also print a link to a customer survey on their receipt.
Website Analytics
You can view the consumer journey on the internet, he said. Who are they, how many, and where are they from? What will they do after they get there? How many individuals reach the basket? "Market intelligence is used to improve offers by looking for patterns, then testing new content, taglines, and sign-ups, and offering different promotions. CRM analytics is a simple way to gain insights into your customer preferences and behavior and marketing performance. Our comprehensive guide explains how CRM analytics works.
A specialist in-house
If your business is large enough, you could employ a market analyst. The analyst can get a more complex understanding of the market because they are experts in the area. This will be accomplished by corresponding with the businesses responsible for producing and distributing your firm's products. Along with complex data and market research, this kind of conversation is the foundation of market intelligence. You can identify profitable market prospects after processing the data.
How Can You Use Market Intelligence To Grow Your Small Business?
To remain competitive and gain market share, small firms must stay abreast of current market insight and developments. Data is the new currency, and you can use it to your benefit with proper analysis, organization, and judgment. Market research is the solution. Market intelligence is a process that involves gathering and analyzing data about the market that is important to your organization to help it grow and increase sales. A marketing intelligence system gives your company an edge over rivals and gives you a comprehensive awareness of shifting consumer trends.
People often interchange these terms when any organization is involved in a sales-oriented campaign. There is only a tiny difference between the three terms, which lies in their final objective. Market research tool is a type of analysis that focuses on a specific business's initiatives and helps with campaigns in specialized areas but does not consider external issues. Business intelligence is the collection of data from different business operations to improve the productivity of an organization.
Market intelligence is gathering data from various sources to offer a more comprehensive understanding of a company's market. It analyzes the company's customers, sales, and product offerings, prices and helps the business decide what steps to take next. Finding competitor strategies and weaknesses is also simple. Market information can assist businesses in comprehending and incorporating new trends into their business plans.
How can Small Enterprises use Market Intelligence Effectively?
Create a Marketing Persona
Create a fictional character to represent your customer base and help you understand their needs. This will help your team gain insight into potential consumer preferences and needs and create strategies tailored to different age groups. Your company can sustain itself if you build an emotional connection with your buyer.
Establish a Sales Team
A knowledgeable sales team will monitor market size, trends and rivals' developments. The sales team will have a comprehensive understanding of the inadequacies of your business and whether there is an opportunity for improvement. Purchase the top marketing analytics software.
A marketing analytics tool can assist a business in streamlining its campaigns, concentrating on the most crucial touchpoints, and gaining insightful market intelligence data on demographics, consumer behavior, and acquisition costs. With the correct tools, your company may become the center of attention.
Collect Regular Customer Feedback
Pay attention to your clients. An organization can test its marketing efforts and spot flaws through regular feedback. You can gather data regarding the client experience by conducting mystery audits, surveys, and other research techniques.
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our consultants!
Conclusion
You may expand your firm with a practical market intelligence approach. Small business owners that employ the appropriate framework can apply quantitative and qualitative techniques that are more appropriate for their organization and make educated decisions.
Market intelligence gives you a better understanding of your industry and can help you find new business growth opportunities. It's only valuable if you get accurate information. Unfortunately, it can take a lot of time for small firms to stay current with industry information. You may gather, analyze, and preserve your market intelligence using various internet tools.
