Intelligence In Marketing
Daily data helpful to a company’s marketing objectives is known as marketing intelligence. Once obtained, this data may be evaluated and used to make informed decisions regarding market prospects, consumer patterns, and the actions of competitors.
What is Marketing Intelligence?
Market intelligence is information or data gathered by a company from the market in which it operates or wants to do business to help with market segmentation, market penetration, market potential, and existing market metrics. Success requires a thorough awareness of the state of the market and gathering competition information.
On the other hand, business and market intelligence are not the same. Market intelligence gathers data from external sources to provide a thorough picture of the whole market, not just your company. In contrast, business intelligence focuses primarily on internal issues like billing rates, headcount, procedures, etc. But merging market data with business intelligence techniques will provide corporations with a thorough understanding of ongoing company performance in particular market conditions.
What is the importance of marketing intelligence?
Your team’s decisions should be based on marketing intelligence. By obtaining and analysing contextual data on consumer and industry trends and behaviours, marketers may thoroughly understand what is and isn’t working. Organisations may get a substantial competitive edge from this, learn more about their target market, and gain new perspectives on their different products.
Future objectives may also be developed using marketing intelligence. Your marketing intelligence activities might become more effective and comprehensive if you set clear goals. Additionally, clearly stating the purpose for which you need this data makes it simpler to select the correct data to extract from the media mix.
Advantages of Marketing Intelligence
Market intelligence gives businesses crucial information to help them stay in the game and get better at it, in addition to assisting them in differentiating their brand from that of rivals. The benefits of market intelligence include the following.
1. A holistic view of the market
A thorough grasp of the sector might quickly lead to business success. Market intelligence is gathering data from the market in real-time and better comprehending customers, trends, habits, and other factors to enable a business to stay competitive and meet market demands.
2. Enhance the sales process
Businesses with a broad range of products and a sizable clientele occasionally struggle with deciding which products to promote to which groups. Market segmentation is made more accessible by market intelligence, which also enables businesses to determine which products would appeal to specific demographics.
3. Boost sales efficiency
Process efficiency may be improved by using market intelligence, which helps businesses find gaps, offer actionable insights to create crucial strategies, and provide real-time data and analytics.
Types of Marketing Intelligence
Marketers may use various methods to gather insightful marketing data. Let’s examine some of the most popular techniques used by teams to gain a better understanding of the market they want to sell to:
1. Focus groups
Focus groups need to carefully select a group of participants to provide a representative sample of their target market. A leader asks each participant a series of predetermined questions to encourage more discussion among the group members. As a result, marketers may understand their audience’s more nuanced perspectives and use that information to inform their future advertising decisions.
2. Polls
In contrast to questionnaires and surveys, polls frequently focus on a single topic. Polls have a higher response rate than open-ended questions used in other strategies because they can be completed quickly and easily.
3. Field Trials
By allowing marketing teams to test out novel ideas without wasting money on advertising, field trials enable businesses to assess various elements relating to their product or branding. For instance, new products may be tested in particular stores, or a new message might be used in a specific area. These initiatives may be expanded to a larger audience depending on how well they perform on a smaller scale.
How do businesses use marketing intelligence?
Successful market intelligence helps your company identify its internal objectives and offers precise responses to questions about current and potential customers and competitors. Examples of questions that market intelligence can respond to include:
- Where should my company make more significant investments?
- What industries should I try to enter next?
- What purchase preferences do our top clients have?
- Which products may you cross-sell to your present clients?
- What may age groups my company use for marketing new and existing items?
- What steps should I take to do a market analysis?
Market research helps businesses analyze their whole operating environment. This allows your business to discover potential risks and fresh opportunities for expansion.
Examples of Marketing Intelligence
Marketing intelligence is essential for a company to make the best decisions possible. For instance, take the book and music store Borders. Borders kept its focus on brick-and-mortar stores while consumer demands for simplicity and convenience pushed the transition to online shopping. By outsourcing to online retailers and making money off the shift to online shopping brought about by the digital revolution, Borders accidentally ceded its clientele to Amazon.
Customers preferred the online experience as the market, target audiences, and competitors matured, leaving Borders unable to compete. Lastly, the organization’s failure to use the proper retail marketing expertise greatly influenced the store’s closure in 2011.
The use of marketing intelligence may also be made to learn about the strategies used by competitors. Let’s say a worker at a car company discovers that a rival has recently lowered the cost of a certain kind of vehicle. They may learn via relevant marketing expertise that the competition is preparing to release a new product, explaining why they need to sell the current model quickly. This information can help your team reach more informed judgments that consider all essential impacting elements.
Final words
Like with any investment, organizations must weigh the benefits and cons of a proposed project against its potential to affect the bottom line positively. On the one hand, accurate marketing intelligence requires a sizable amount of data from the marketing environment’s online, offline, and external areas. However, a marketing plan using ineffective tactics puts a company at odds with its competitors and target market.
Neglecting market trends across the four criteria listed above can pose a severe threat to an organization’s bottom line, even while the upfront costs associated with marketing intelligence programs may deter organizations from completing them.
