Running a business requires you to do everything all at once, and one of these responsibilities is keeping track of your competitors. Nowadays, people are investing their money and time to collect and utilize market intelligence.
Definition of Market Intelligence
For a business, it is essential to gather real-time market data. This will help any company to understand their customers. Moreover, you can also understand the trends and behaviors of the customer. Market Intelligence, is composed of three major activities, namely:
- Information Acquisition - Gathering market information is the main agenda of this step.
- Information Analysis - It analyzes the gathered information.
- Information Activation - Understanding and implementing the analyzed data to develop a market plan.
The basic agenda of Market Intelligence is to meet the requirements of your existing and potential customers. Every company has been making a business plan to allure as many customers as possible. So, you as a company also need to pick the pace of this game and start using it for your business as well.
Difference between Market Intelligence and Business Intelligence
In many cases, Market Intelligence is confused with Business Intelligence. But in reality, they are different things. Market intelligence talks about comprehensive market trends and customer requirements whereas; Business Intelligence is company-specified data. While Marketing Intelligence can be used in various aspects like management team, marketing team, and production team, on the other hand, Business Intelligence is exclusive to the sales of your company.
How to Use the Acquired Market Intelligence?
To extract the best out of your market intelligence, the company should find answers to these important questions below that will help them to reach their target customer base easily:
- Which aspect of my company should devote more funds to?
- Which business forte my company should try to enter subsequently?
- Understand the buying patterns of the best of our customers.
- Which product would be the best option to cross-market to our present customers?
- Which demographic segment would be the best option to push our fresh and existing products?
- Best options to conduct further market Analysis.
If you are willing to grow as a business then you need to work on your market Intelligence and answering these questions will help you to gain a better foothold in your business sector. To understand this process, companies mostly look into 3 criteria of market intelligence:
Competitor Intelligence - In simpler words, this is nothing but understanding your business competitors. Here, you need to look into their releases and works.Let’s check some aspects that will allow you to understand your competition.
- Content
- Campaigns
- Social media posts
- SEO ranking visibility
- Trade events
- Marketing strategies
- Product offering
- Market Reputation Management Skills
- Product Intelligence
These options are very useful when it comes to understanding your competitors where you need to know, how your rival companies are benefitting your target audience. In this way, you can be prepared with your pitch to entice your audience into your business ecosystem.
Market Understanding - To ace the race you need to understand the market like the palm of your hand, and to that, you can various aspects like the internet, social media, business websites, online profiles, etc.
Customer Understanding - This step involves understanding your current customers so that you can easily understand how customers react and what are the recent trends in this market. This will help your business to grow prolifically.
How to Collect Marketing Intelligence?
Now, the only question is how you can systematically acquire data for your market intelligence. These are the most effective ways:
- ‘Let Us Know Forms’ for Current Customers
- Surveys
- Website Analytics
- In-house Specialist
Researching on a market to ensure more popularity and growth of your business is a mandated step for every business sector. There’s no question that you mustn’t overlook market intelligence and this will be the key to your success.
