Do you think that every person with a high IQ score can win the market?
Businesses should use market research to keep track of the market, make better decisions and accomplish business goals. Whether you are starting or developing your business, research is necessary to understand your target audience better and boost your sales.
You should have a clear understanding of what is happening in your industry, and you should monitor your competitor’s processes to improve your business success.
Market intelligence is the information that will help you analyze and understand the market. Nowadays. More business use analytics to gather market intelligence data and build business models and projections
Market intelligence will help you better understand your target audience and customers and run a more profitable business. This article will discuss the definition of market intelligence, its impact on business growth, and its different methods and advantages.
What is market intelligence?
Market Intelligence refers to the gathered data by a company or business regarding a particular business or market to build a constructive business strategy. Market intelligence includes analyzing trends, learning about customers’ habits and behaviors, and deciding on investments.
You can collect market intelligence using different analytical methods, such as evaluating statistical information, doing online research, or working with other businesses. Gathering this information will help businesses recognize the industry changes and prepare professional plans for the company’s future.
Market intelligence will help companies identify market distribution, opportunities, and metrics. In addition, market intelligence is necessary for understanding the market situation and enabling the business to gather information about its competitors, leading to a more profitable business.
Market intelligence is a major part of running a successful business, and some of the most significant aspects of its importance are as below:
- Improves a company’s industry ranking
- Offers a company with beneficial objectives
- Predicts a product’s general success
- Increases sales revenue
There are different methods that marketers can use for executing practical marketing intelligence. Below are some of the most productive ways businesses can use to understand better the market they are competing in.
- Analysis
- Reports and presentations
- Data collection through different surveys such as:
- Online Surveys
- In-person surveys
- Telephone surveys
- Mail surveys
Mail surveys can be done through different methods, such as:
- Focus groups
- Polls
- Field Trials
- Questionnaires
- Forms
- Personal Interviews
- Observation
How to improve your businesses by using market intelligence?
Practical market intelligence should provide solid answers about the current and potential target audience and competitors and help companies define their ultimate goals.s Market intelligence can help businesses evaluate their working process to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Market intelligence will lead companies to find new opportunities and develop. Most businesses use the below market intelligence methods.
Competitor Intelligence
This method includes collecting and analyzing data about your competitors in the market. Evaluating your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses can help companies acquire important information about their own company and find out why customers chose a competitor’s products or services instead of theirs.
Product Intelligence
This method involves analyzing your products or service’s quality. For example, when selling a product, you should consider the production process and whether your product is practical and high-quality. The collected information can help you to increase the value of your products.
Market Understanding
This method is about understanding or perceiving the multiple markets you are selling your goods or services. This research method will help you realize how good you are in those markets and if there are additional markets in which you should expand your business.
Customer Understanding
You should understand your customers better by gathering information about their interests and why they choose you as a brand or business. This method will help satisfy clients and prevent losing your long-time or potential customers.
By using one of the above methods of market intelligence, you can improve your business and help it to grow. Using marketing intelligence methods can help businesses to:
- Understand their customers better
- Evaluate the usefulness of their marketing
- Find new opportunities
- Gain insights about new product features
- Gain brand awareness
- Understand their position in the market
- Analyze their products
- Know their target audience
- Perform competitor analysis
- Invest in the suitable projects
How to collect market intelligence?
Different methods can help a business or company perform marketing intelligence through data collection across the market. These methods will ensure that brands collect the correct data, make accurate decisions, and use the gathered insight with the proper strategy. Some of these methods are as below:
Choose a Goal
Before entering the market intelligence path, you must create some business objectives. Next, you should what are goals you want to accomplish with market intelligence research. Therefore, make a goal list, big or small, to determine the extent of your market intelligence.
Choose Your Metrics
You should also determine some metrics for market intelligence, which depend on the goals you want to accomplish. Metrics are diverse based on the type of your business. So, after analyzing all the details about your business, you can choose one of below metrics:
- Market size
- Pricing
- Customers
- Competition
Prepare Your Research Strategy
After determining your market intelligence goals and clarifying your budget, you can choose a research strategy for your business as below:
- Online Surveys
- Consulting with experts
- Online Research:
- Data Analytics
Collect and analyze data
After you collect your data, you have to convert it into helpful and practical information. Then, prepare a report and send it to your manager or supervisor. This report should include the next steps of the process and the tasks that each company department should handle to get the organization closer to the desired results.
Engage the Sales Team
Sales teams have a significant role in marketing intelligence because they have a direct connection with customers and can provide productive insights about the trends, competitors’ activity, and clients’ needs and concerns.
Interview with other associates
You can meet with your business partners or outside companies selling your products because other people working in different fields of an industry can offer exciting suggestions and ideas about market trends and conditions or provide helpful feedback about your brand.
Build a customer advisory board
Making a customer advisory board will help businesses understand customers’ interests, needs, and concerns, which can help improve the marketing intelligence process as well because having direct communication with clients and customers is one of the essential criteria for every business’s success.
Use proper marketing analysis tools
Using marketing analysis tools will help businesses gain valuable insights about the products or services that are impressing clients and the reason behind that. Companies should choose a flexible marketing tool that can determine the connections between customers and brands.
Gather customer feedback
Obtaining and analyzing client feedback will help brands better understand their brand authority, customer experience, customer satisfaction, and campaign outcomes. You can use surveys to find out about customers’ feedback and insights about your brand status.
Hire a consultant or agency
If you have an extensive customer base, you can hire another company or agency to help you with market intelligence because many agencies have access to broader resources and more effective tools for gathering data.
Benefits of market intelligence for business
Market intelligence will help companies to differentiate their brand from other competitors in the market and also help them to obtain crucial information to keep up with the competition. Some of the other advantages of using market intelligence are as below:
- Finding new markets Market intelligence will help you to discover new markets your business has to step in.
- A comprehensive insight from the market: MI can obtain data from the market in the actual time and offer valuable insights into customer’s behaviors and trends,
- Decrease risks: Wrong decisions can have expensive costs. Market intelligence help companies can make more logical and wise decisions and less recklessly.
- Keep customers for a long time: MI will help customers to identify unsatisfied customers and the reason behind it so they can keep the client and prevent losing even one.
- Stand out from the competition: MI will help companies stay one step ahead in the competitive market or beat the competition if you have ever been stuck in it.
- MI will help businesses to identify and use strategies to differentiate their brand from others and prove their authority to the target audience.
- Boost Sales: If appropriately used, market intelligence can help you increase your sales.
Best market intelligence tools
Marketers have used many marketing intelligence tools and techniques in the past few years to find new opportunities and successfully reach a company. These intelligence tools will help businesses track and monitor the market and its competitive aspects. These aspects can involve social media mentions, reviews, competitor’s website traffic and ranking, content, posts, backlinks, keywords, email marketing strategies, sources, etc. Some of the best market intelligence tools are as below:
- HubSpot’s Marketing Hub
HubSpot has many marketing tools that can help companies manage, track and organize their data collection tasks. This tool has free and paid monthly membership from $45 to $3200.
- Crayon
Crayon is a comprehensive market intelligence tool that can help brands monitor, follow and analyze their competitors’ tasks and projects. In addition, this platform will provide a competitive intelligence report on brands and companies, such as video content or social media posts.
- SEMrush
This platform has comprehensive tools. For example, it can track your competitor’s performance in SEO and has many other features, such as keyword search and difficulty, domain overview, etc. As a result, you can gain valuable insight into your competitor’s methods and performance.
- Survey Monkey
This tool will help businesses to gain insight into customers’ feedback on products and services. Survey Monkey will help you customize surveys and gain the necessary information.
- Metadata
Metadata is a software-as-a-service company that helps businesses create more demands for their products, goods, and services. This platform will help you to find an audience, perform experiments and follow the sale process
.
- Google Forms
One of the most significant features of Google Forms is its straightforward UI (user interface). You can prepare a survey in just a few minutes and send it to your customers to obtain data. You will also receive a notification every time someone answers your survey.
- Social Rank
This marketing intelligence tool will help businesses to identify, manage, and organize their customers and target audience on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms.
- VisualPing
This software is an excellent and convenient tool for analyzing website changes. You can choose the field you want to track a website, and then VisualPing will let you know when any changes happen in that area.
- Quantcast Measure
This tool is one of the most powerful platforms for market intelligence. This software will provide businesses with demographic and geographic information about their target audience for their websites and your competitor’s website.
- Follow
Companies can gain insights on any websites with follow. As a result, more than 30,000 smart people are using this tool to obtain more valuable information and make more thoughtful decisions for their brands.
Conclusion
Market intelligence will provide businesses with a more comprehensive insight into the industry they are working in and help them to find new opportunities and extend their brand.
Companies can develop their customer research through market intelligence and become a leader in their industry. Many brands use the data derived from market intelligence for making a business plan to ensure their product or service can meet their customer’s needs and reach the highest level of sales.
You must learn and understand the fundamentals of market research, and after that, you can decide what marketing strategy and methods can fit your business’s goals in the best way.
But, you can only use the data and information derived from market intelligence in practice if they are accurate and authentic. Sometimes, following up with market information and changes can only waste time and money for small businesses. Therefore, many online tools can help these companies to obtain, analyze and save market information.
This article discusses the definition of market intelligence and how it affects business growth. We covered different subjects in this article such as different methods, strategies, tools, and collection methods for market intelligence. We also talked about the benefits of MI for businesses. This is a comprehensive guide for any brands and businesses who want to decide if they should use MI for their business and if they do, this article can help them to start the journey and guide them through the path.
