Marketing Intelligence refers to the collection and study of data sets fetched from a given market to derive meaningful insights that ensure a competitive edge. By using this method, the company can unlock key details around market penetration, untapped opportunities, market segmentation, and so on. Market intelligence renders a clear view of how the market is performing and what potential the market has for emerging products. It can be understood as a systematic approach to unlocking a potential market and gaining a competitive advantage. Marketing Intelligence is a boon for emerging businesses eyeing to curve a significant positioning in a saturated market. Also, established businesses can leverage the same to extend their product portfolio or market reach.
Who should use Marketing Intelligence?
Marketing Intelligence is meant for businesses that want to:
- Unlock new market opportunities
- Become customer-centric
- Access meaningful data around key metrics
- Reduce uncertainties regarding product targeting and marketing segmentation
- Evaluate product performance
- Dig down competitor presence
Understanding the Significance of Marketing Intelligence
Most emerging businesses often have trouble carving a formidable position in the given market. This often happens due to the lack of analytical resources and marketing know-how. This is where Marketing Intelligent comes into play. Let us understand the significance of marketing intelligence
Let us suppose a company wishes to comprehend which is an ideal customer base for a smartphone they are about to launch. a profile survey can enable the company to narrow the list of its target audience based on the type of smartphone they are rolling out in the market.
Another example includes – if your smartphone appears to have bold aesthetics, but its features make it an ideal gaming device, a survey will consider participants who are fond of gaming, are belonged to the age group of 15-30 years, and people from a specific income group.
Once you know who your customer is, product launch and marketing become easier. Market intelligence is often confused with Business intelligence. The latter deals with the billing rates internal processes, headcount, and so on, whereas, the former deals with the accumulation and analysis of data of a given market. However, both can be used in conjunction to ensure a better view of corporate performance in the given market conditions.
Three heads of Marketing Intelligence
Marketing intelligence is closed related to market research and broadly categorized under three different heads:
Competitor Intelligence
Competitor intelligence refers to the method of data collection from sources like public records and government databases. Japanese car makers are the first who leveraged Competitor Intelligence to their advantage. It helped them capture the major portion of the US market.
Market Intelligence
Marketing understanding is comprehending the competitors’ market shares, prevailing market trends, market size, and target market. Knowing market demand with extended accuracy will aid companies to boost their presence as well as sales. In-depth market research can render meaningful insights into the customers’ preferences and market segmentation, allowing businesses to hone their targeting to perfection.
Let’s take a look at the following marketing data
Marketing Region: Alaska
Target Age-group: 20-45 years
Income group: Upper middle class
Customer preferences: Being fit via cross-fit training
Gym-based businesses can use this information to tailor their services and extend their reach for growth maximization.
Product Intelligence
Product intelligence is accumulating data concerning competitor products or identical products in the market. A smartphone maker needs to keep a tab on the pricing of the competitor’s products in the same price bracket. A price drop in the product can be an indicator of a new product’s arrival. By using this information, the company can figure out an ideal launch date for their next product and therefore ensure a competitive advantage.
Types of Marketing Intelligence
While market research is an extensive field and can be accumulated via different qualitative and quantitative methods, most organizations rely on fundamental methods to gather market intelligence.
Surveys
Survey research entails a long list of questionaries that help gather meaningful data from the target market. Companies can further study this data to extract invaluable market intelligence. The accuracy of the survey has everything to do with the amount of data collected. Therefore, perform the survey research on the scale to avail of better insights.
Online survey
Most companies prefer conducting online surveys because they find it cost-effective, time-saver, and impactful. interacting with unreliable data sets Is not uncommon for most online surveys, but the advent of newer tools in the market has mitigated that possibility. Online survey adheres to improved accuracy and delivers valuable insights in no time. Since most customers leverage online communication, online surveys can be an effective method for gathering market intelligence.
Emerging companies can use online surveys to promptly fetch information about competitors’ product launches, customers’ preferences, and market segmentation. By using all such information, the company can hone its product and its launch accordingly to outrank its competitors.
In-person survey
the in-person survey is more precise and accurate in terms of data gathering and information quality, though it can be time-consuming and costly at the same time. As the name suggests, it involves one-to-one interactions with prospects in the target region. When used strategically, the In-person survey can render the following benefits:
- The amount of information gathered will be accurate and to the point
- Provide the leverage of demonstrating the product in front of the customer
- Undermine the uses of expensive tools used for fetching insights from gathered data
- Save time on account of data segregation and examination.
Telephone Surveys
These surveys are relatively more affordable than in-person surveys. Sadly, most customers are unlikely to respond to telephone surveys because they find it irritating and time-consuming. Despite this, various companies leverage this method of data collection because of its accuracy and quality. A telephone survey involves questioning prospects regarding product performance, preferred features, pricing, and so on. Further, it undermines the dependency on costly data mining tools to extract valuable information from the collected data sets.
Advantages of Marketing Intelligence
Market Intelligence makes the brand visible in the saturated market by rendering information that expedites business growth. Listed below are the frontline benefits of using market intelligence in the status quo.
Unlock market potential
Knowing what customers want and what competitors are doing is the biggest perk for any business. With market intelligence, businesses can get access to such information that can be used to design competitive products.
Improved Customer Retention
Customers are always subjected to numerous choices in the marketplace. Convincing them to buy a new product can be daunting for any company. This is where market intelligence can be beneficial. It can help companies to have a holistic view of customers’ behavior, tastes, choices, pain points, and so on. All such information would be enough to ensure improved better customer retention, which is imperative for sustainable growth.
Amplify Process Efficiency
Market intelligence enables companies to amplify overall efficacy and productivity by pinpointing gaps, rendering productive insights to craft meaningful strategies and provides a company with analytics and real-time data.
