No company exists in a vacuum. To not only survive, but thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape, companies need the right insights. Making better decisions about your company’s future, your products, and even your promotional strategies, begins with market intelligence.
Market intelligence is the term used to define information or data collected by a business about the wider market it inhabits. Through market intelligence, companies gain a deeper understanding of their target audience, and the factors that drive sales for their organization. Market intelligence can also highlight new opportunities in a company’s future and show them the threats they face when it comes to outshining the competition.
Through a successful analysis of market intelligence, business leaders can make data-driven decisions which pave the way for constant growth.
Why Is Market Intelligence Important?
Offering an overview into everything from your product’s USPs to your position in the market in relation to your competitors, market intelligence acts as a compass for business success. The more information you collect, the more you can understand why certain customers choose you over your competition, or where you should next consider launching your product to make the most revenue.
Market intelligence allows you to understand your position in your industry, and how you can improve it, by leveraging industry trends and building a better understanding of what makes your audience tick.
With a sophisticated market intelligence platform, companies can even track their changing position in the marketplace, as industries continue to evolve, and customer trends transform. Access to up-to-date information means you don’t have to worry about falling behind the competition with your product development and marketing campaigns.
What Are the Different Types of Market Intelligence?
The term “market intelligence” is actually quite a broad one. When you collect market intelligence, you gather data from multiple different environments to help develop a clear map for what you need to do next to accelerate your growth.
Market intelligence strategies often start with a “benchmarking” process, which involves understanding where you currently stand in the market when it comes to key performance indicators, compared to your competition. From there, you can conduct various forms of market research to help build a strategy which drives business growth.
Here are three of the most common forms of market intelligence.
Competitor Intelligence
Competitor Intelligence is a critical instrument in any company’s plan for long-term, and short-term growth. Every business has competitors it needs to outshine to capture the attention of its target audience and earn their long-term loyalty. Understanding your competition can help you to discover new strategies for growth and determine where your strengths and weaknesses lie.
Gathering competitor intelligence doesn’t mean spying on the competition. Instead, you focus on collecting important publicly available information which can guide you towards better decisions for your company. For instance, knowing exactly how many visitors are going to the website of another company in a certain period helps you to benchmark the kind of visitor numbers you should be aiming for.
You can also use your competitor research to come up with ideas on:
- Which kinds of customers to target (similar audiences, or under-served markets)
- How to differentiate your brand (by offering things your competitors don’t)
- Which marketing campaigns and platforms to use (based on competitor success rates)
Customer Intelligence
Customer intelligence is probably one of the most important forms of data any business can collect today. The more you know about your target audience, the more you can adapt your marketing and sales strategies to suit their individual needs.
Customer intelligence is the process of gathering and analyzing crucial information about your target audience, through everything from surveys to evaluations of global market reports. The information you collect can inform your customer personas and help you to understand what pain points and desires drive your customers to make a purchase.
Customer intelligence can also give you a stronger insight into potential opportunities where you might be able to expand your business. Researching different kinds of customers, and the drivers that push them to engage with your company, can help you to discover new markets and revenue opportunities.
For marketing and sales purposes, customer intelligence tells you everything from what kind of language your audience uses, to where they’re most likely to see your advertisements when they’re displayed online.
Product Intelligence
In the context of the market intelligence landscape, product intelligence involves analyzing the quality, potential, and unique selling points of your product and service. You can use product intelligence to analyze your business processes and supply chain, to determine whether you’re producing items as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.
Product intelligence can also help you to increase the value of whatever you sell. By learning about how customers feel about your product, and how your product or service compares to that offered by competitors, you can understand what makes your offering special.
Gathering product intelligence can even help you to decide what kind of complementary products or services you might need to add to your portfolio in the future to increase your revenue.
Leveraging Market Intelligence
Market intelligence is a crucial tool in setting your business up for long-term success and growth. The right information will show you how to accelerate the potential of your business by investing in new products or services or pursuing new segments of your target audience.
The more you collect market intelligence and develop your understanding of the data you gather, the more successful your business will become.
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