Running any company requires keeping an eye on your competitors and the state of your sector. This knowledge is typically referred to as “market intelligence.” In recent years, gathering market intelligence has expanded to include analytics that can help you improve your company model and forecasts. Market information can help you better understand your market to run a more profitable company. Market intelligence tools give you the information you need to make informed decisions about your firm. However, this blog post will discuss what market intelligence is and why it’s essential for the success of your business! What Is Market Intelligence?
Market intelligence uses multiple information sources to create a comprehensive picture of your company’s existing market. Evaluates your company’s clients, problems, competition, and opportunities to develop new products and services. You can gather market information by looking at sales records, customer data, surveys, and checking social media metrics. Market information can be extensive; it contains all the data your organization collects about the markets you trade (or intend to trade). The data may include demographics, trends, regulations, competitors or geographic client areas, etc. And from that data, your company gains meaningful insights that help you identify and refine market segments, market penetration, and market opportunities. Because market intelligence encompasses competitive, product, and industry intelligence, it provides a holistic market view. In turn, it enables you to see the big picture, connect the dots, uncover insights, and make better data-driven company decisions. 
This type of information allows your company to understand better how the industry changes over time, which can help you plan for the future. Here are some key terms to learn for MI:
- Key performance indicator (KPI): A measurable value that reveals whether a firm is operating effectively and accomplishing its objectives.
- Market: Every company and consumer in a specific location, including nations, states, and cities.
- Industry: A group of companies and organizations concentrating on a specific market, good, or service.
Market Intelligence vs Business Intelligence (BI)
Although they are different, market intelligence and BI are frequently mistaken. Market intelligence focuses on broad trends, whereas BI refers to information about a company. In general, BI is information about the company’s internal performance. This covers the number of goods sent and the overall number of sales for the month. In contrast, market intelligence focuses on outside data such as customer demographics, locational data, and what consumers purchase. It also analyzes the competition to see where your firm stands in the rest of the market. All of these can help create a company intelligence analysis. Market intelligence also considers what is happening to your company’s competition, which BI completely ignores. Market research is used extensively when evaluating and developing a marketing strategy. It’s also an essential part of product development and is often at the heart of branding decisions. Market research should be an essential part of due diligence when planning the production of goods and services for startup companies. Market intelligence is a broader understanding of the market. This includes understanding both the competition and the target group. Market intelligence is critical to building your marketing position and creating a marketing plan. 
Market information covers a broader range of topics and gives you an overview of current trends and perspectives. A flexible firm can use market intelligence to introduce new offerings to meet expansion needs. It’s easy to see why these and many other marketing terms are often used together. Although the procedures vary, research and market intelligence is required to develop a marketing plan.
How Do Companies Use Market Intelligence?
Successful market intelligence answers inquiries about your company’s and potential customers, rivals, and organization objectives. The following are some issues that market intelligence can resolve:
- Where should my organization concentrate its marketing efforts more?
- What markets need to attempt to penetrate next?
- What purchasing habits do our best clients have?
- What goods could be promoted to current customers in many ways?
- What demographic groups should you target with new and existing products?
- How do I carry out a market study?
Market intelligence enables businesses to analyze the environment they operate in general. These aid in identifying fresh growth prospects for your company and potential threats.
The Core Components of Effective Marketing Intelligence
Research Goal
MI teams frequently set an overarching objective for their marketing intelligence research projects. Usually, it discusses the demands of existing clients, prospective clients, and rival plans. This procedure might aid a team in selecting a research approach, enabling them to make the most of their data resources. For instance, if a team looks at a technical industry, they can determine what kind of technology appeals to a particular community.
Research Area and Method
Marketing departments frequently focus on one piece of data, such as a company’s annual sales in a specific sector or the financial statements of a rival firm. A team may choose a data gathering strategy based on their priority. For instance, if your company is preparing to collect information for video-editing software geared towards film professionals, it may focus its research efforts on the average income of a film professional or the entire revenue for software in a specific industry. 
After that, you may evaluate the learning approaches that have proven to be most successful.
Data Sources
The data that your marketing teams gather comes from a variety of sources and scenarios. Some groups look at online public government databases or third-party company reports. Others might get information from salespeople or distributors to get a different viewpoint. You can also set up your poll on a social media website or review the results of online polls. By choosing participants for a focus group, your team may use market research to compile more detailed information about your company.
Analysis Process
Teams of marketers look at data to find trends and decide what information to focus on. Some people may utilize specialized marketing software to categorize lists and tables of data into understandable, straightforward groups. Other teams could want to utilize a marketing analysis method, like a trend analysis that contrasts several poll findings or a cross-tabulation to identify particular data points that are related. A sentiment analysis, which looks at the feelings and moods of customers during crucial interactions, may be helpful if your team incorporates market research in their intelligence efforts.
Reports and Presentations
Marketing professionals combine information from obtained data into actionable documents for company owners or stakeholders. They might show the data visually using graphs, charts, or pictures. 
A team can create a presentation for stakeholders using marketing intelligence software to organize material logically. They can share that report with other company employees to improve the caliber of their work practices and better understand industry standards.
Types of Market Intelligence
Competitor Intelligence
It entails obtaining and evaluating data regarding your competitors. Finding out more about your organization and the reasons why clients don’t always choose your product or service can be accomplished by examining the strengths and shortcomings of your competitors. For instance, a competitive analysis report, which evaluates the quality of a product’s service, is a standard tool in most marketing operations. A competition analysis report might cover everything, from product characteristics and pricing to target markets and important demographics. This data may be combined to produce a robust product that meets client needs while avoiding issues other companies have encountered.
Product Intelligence
Analyzing the caliber of your good or service is part of product intelligence. When selling physical goods, you must consider the manufacturing procedure and whether you produce the item as effectively as feasible. You may raise the value of your product by using the information you collect. 
Gathering this kind of information is simply because it involves examining competing items and determining their advantages and disadvantages. This evaluation covers every aspect, including the product and its packaging, retail displays, production procedures, and expenses.
Market Understanding
Market awareness is awareness of the various markets in which you sell your goods or services. This study gives you a sense of how well you’re doing in particular markets and whether you have room to grow in other ones. Combining competition analysis, product intelligence, and identifying top performers in the industry can help you get the information you need to have a firm handle on the market. Knowing what is in demand will enable you to gather end-user intelligence to discover why customers like those top performers.
Customer Understanding
Understanding your clients better entails discovering more about them and why they choose to transact with you. To increase customer satisfaction and retention rates, it can also assist you in understanding any difficulties you may have with those clients. Future marketing initiatives you run with the information you gather may also be successful. 
Customer personas, which include information about a person’s demographics, interests, issues, and the solutions a company may offer, are frequently created by a marketing department. These client insights frequently benefit the organization, from product developers to quality assurance engineers.
Importance of Market Intelligence in Business
Secure a Bird’s-Eye View of the Market
A sound market intelligence plan gives your company a continuous bird’s-eye view of the market. Additionally, when you have a bird’s-eye view of the marketplace, your company can stay adaptable in uncertain marketplaces and make swift pivots when necessary.
Gain a Competitive Advantage
Market data, known as competitive intelligence, can show you how well your company is doing compared to its rivals. When competitor information is combined with other market intelligence, it is possible to monitor your competition, enhance your offers and positioning, and expand your target market penetration and market share.
Anticipate What Lies Ahead
Your insights and marketing teams may monitor, foresee, and take advantage of market opportunities before, or at least in time with, future market movements and impacts if you have access to market and competitive intelligence.
Invest in the Right Projects
The company can prevent losses and make the appropriate project investments when your firm takes the lead with its market knowledge. To fully understand the market, your consumers, and your competitors, it’s essential to keep all of your market knowledge in one location. The company can quickly validate and invest in new initiatives, goods, and services while preventing time- and resource wastage since it “knows what it knows.”
Understand Your Target Customer
Market information is your primary element if your company wants to boost client satisfaction and retention and fulfill market needs. 
Your team may use their in-depth knowledge to make customer-centric decisions if they have a firm, contextualized grasp of their target audience and clients.
Launch Products and Services With an Iron-Clad Strategy
Successful and profitable new products and services are supported by market information from concept to prototype to launch. Every stage involves knowing the consumer’s issue and developing the product with features driven by the market. You are aware of your target client’s media and frequent stores. Additionally, market data can assist you in maximizing your marketing budget and reaching your revenue projections while growing incremental sales and profitability.
Drive Operational Efficiency
What additional advantage does market information offer? You will save time and money if your company optimizes its market intelligence strategy. You’ll start observing time savings in your staff’s time looking for information. 
You’ll also be aware of any knowledge gaps, which will save your company from paying for unnecessary market research and saving you money and resources.
How to Collect Market Intelligence
Although there is no prescribed method by which businesses should obtain market intelligence, many do so by conducting various in-depth analyses. Let’s examine four distinct approaches to gathering marketing intelligence.
Your Current Customers
Businesses frequently overlook customers as potential data sources. Small firms can set up procedures to keep track of their client lists and implement programs for gathering customer feedback to gather customer information in an efficient and mainly affordable way. Additionally, your sales team is ideally situated to offer assistance with market intelligence. Sales representatives can offer extra insights into market trends because they frequently communicate with prospects and clients. The ideal way for a company to share this client data in one location is frequently through a CRM.
Surveys
Sending online surveys to your clients might help you collect market research data. This strategy may be beneficial, mainly if you keep your customer lists up to date. To get started, you can utilize programs like SurveyMonkey or Typeform. A link to a survey can also be included on the customer’s receipt.
Website Analytics
Utilize the data you currently have easy access to, such as your business metrics. The customer’s journey on the website can be observed.
- How many people show up, and from where?
- What happens once they get there?
- How many can get their hands around the basket?
- How many individuals leave?
By looking for patterns and experimenting with different content, taglines, signposts, and offers, market intelligence is used to improve the offer.
An In-House Specialist
You might be able to hire a market intelligence analyst if your organization is big enough. The analyst can create a more complex market picture as a specialist. 
They will accomplish this by corresponding with the businesses engaged in producing and distributing your company’s goods, such as the distributors, clients, and manufacturers. Most market intelligence comprises this kind of conversation, factual facts, and marketing studies. Once this data has been evaluated, you can utilize it to identify lucrative market prospects.
Don’t Know if Investing in Marketing Intelligence Is Right for Your Business
Like with any investment, businesses must consider the advantages and disadvantages of a new initiative as well as how it might improve their bottom line. Comprehensive data from the internet, offline, and external marketing landscapes is necessary for accurate marketing intelligence. On the other hand, basing marketing direction on tactics without reliable intelligence causes businesses to lose touch with their target markets and rivals. 
While the up-front fees may discourage your organization from marketing intelligence activities, ignoring market trends in the four areas described above can seriously jeopardize your organization’s financial stability.
Conclusion
Market intelligence can help your company streamline its consumer research and become an industry leader. Many organizations use this information when creating a business plan to ensure that a product or service can meet customer needs and achieve high sales. By learning the basics of market research, you can determine which marketing strategies and aspects best fit your company’s goals. Market intelligence can help you better understand your industry and identify new expansion opportunities. But it’s only applicable if the information you get is correct. Unfortunately, keeping track of market information can quickly become a waste of time for small business owners. Because of this, many online tools are available to help you collect, analyze and store your market information. 
While a person can do much of the market research work for a small business, you may need to dedicate more time to data analysis as your company grows. As the number of information increases, it may be necessary to use more complex statistical tools and technologies to manage and manipulate the data. If you are unwilling to own a software package or hire an in-house analyst, an outside specialist can help you get the most out of your market insights. This allows you to understand your current market environment and make the most of your business’s opportunities.