What Is Market Intelligence And How To Use It

What Is Market Intelligence And How To Use It

Market intelligence refers to gathering and analysing information relevant to a company’s market – trends, competitor and customer monitoring. It is a subtype of competitive intelligence, which is data and information gathered by companies providing continuous insight into market trends like competitors’ and customers' values and preferences.

The ultimate goal of collecting market intelligence is to help drive data-driven decisions about the company and not just your marketing efforts. The data points in market intelligence include industry-level trends, competitor analysis, consumer insights, and product sales.

Market Intelligence Vs. Business Intelligence

Market intelligence and business intelligence, both areas of knowledge, are vital for a company’s success, and they each have their own use cases.

Business intelligence is a set of technological processes for collecting, managing, and analyzing organizational data to yield insights that inform business strategies and operations. Business intelligence analysts transform raw data into meaningful insights, driving strategic decision-making within an organization. BI tools allow business users to access different types of data, historical and current, third-party and in-house, as well as semistructured data and unstructured data like social media.

Benefits of BI include clearer reporting, consolidated data, creating new efficiencies, deeper data insights, faster decision making, increasing customer satisfaction, and increasing employee satisfaction

Since market intelligence emphasizing external factors, the data sources include customer surveys, economic and consumer pricing data, demographic and geographic analysis, consumer behaviour reports, user testing, and 3^rd party tools.

On the other hand, business intelligence strictly looks inwards. Gathering internal intelligence, data sources may include profit & loss statements, data warehouses, project management tools, and employee satisfaction surveys.

The key differences above should make it easier to help determine what type of intelligence data your company needs at any given time.

How To Use Market Intelligence

Whether a brand-new company or a well-established business, there are many ways to use market intelligence to your advantage. In order to understand the use of market intelligence, first identify your goals.

Market intelligence essentially analyzes the external environment (or market) that a brand is a part of. Different categories of market intelligence analysis include competitor trends, consumer behaviour trends, and external market factors.

Competitor Trends: Conducting competitor analysis is a part of using market intelligence, and the goal of reviewing competitors helps your brand identify what their strengths and weaknesses are compared to brands, as well as key product differentiators or similarities. This ultimately helps better position your product or service in the market.

Consumer behaviour trends: Market intelligence is used to dig into consumer behaviour around your product or service. Using this data to understand what their pain points or challenges are, and why they choose to buy from you in the first place. This intelligence ultimately aids in optimizing retention and engagement for existing customers, as well as acquiring new customers.

Market intelligence around consumer behaviour also helps frame your ideal customer and their key characteristics, including browsing & purchasing behaviour, interests, where they spend their time, how they spend their money, and household status or household income range. Understanding these key factors ultimately helps in shaping your marketing and awareness efforts.

External market factors: Analyzing the market that your brand is currently in or where you may want to expand is another way of using market intelligence. Using this type of data aids in identifying how your product or service performs in its current market, and can also be used to identify the pros and cons of expanding into new markets and what opportunities or risk factors are associated with it.

How To Collect Market Intelligence

There are two types of marketing intelligence data: qualitative and quantitative, which work together to help form a complete picture of a company’s marketing presence.

Quantitative data can be counted and expressed in numbers. Examples of quantitative data include customer ratings, website traffic, and net promoter scores (NPS). Make sure the data is a reliable reflection of their target market by checking that the survey respondents' demographics align with the overall customer demographics.

Qualitative data is any data that can’t be expressed in numbers. Examples of quantitative data include customer comments, focus group recordings, user screen recordings, interview logs, and other expressions of information that aren’t numbered.

For example, a comment on an ad like “I don’t get what this is for” offers insight about what a potential customer thinks that is hard to infer from quantitative data alone.

Ways of collecting marketing intelligence

A focus group is a group of people, either potential or current customers, that a business gathers to provide feedback on its marketing.

Surveys include a series of questions for people in the target audience. These involve a series of responses to pre-set questions. E-commerce brands send post-purchase customer surveys to their customers to better understand why they purchased and whether they are satisfied with their purchase.

Competitor research refers to the practice of analyzing your competitors for insight that informs your own decision-making. It further includes a review of competitors' products, pricing, promotions, distribution channels, and customer experience.

Social sentiment tracking involves monitoring and analyzing digital channels like social media platforms, online forums, and review sites to gauge public sentiment about a brand, product, or industry. The kind of research showing that customers repeatedly complain about the product’s price point or appreciate your fast shipping times.

First-party digital audience data refers to the data collection and analysis related to online consumer behaviour, interactions, and customer preferences. It further includes brand data like annual sales records, website analytics, and social media analytics.