In order to improve your strategies and get a larger share of the market for your company, you need to sharpen your company’s competitive edge and gain useful information or insight. Winning in business doesn’t necessarily mean that you are the first to cross the finish line, it simply means that you can gain and maintain your lead in a competitive market without being suddenly overtaken by a competitor or being displaced by innovations or market trends that you failed to monitor. Market intelligence is a vital aspect of maintaining your lead in the market because it helps you strategize using vital insight and information about your market.
What is market intelligence?
According to Gartner, market intelligence is the information, processes, and tools used to gather and analyze data to determine market opportunities, market development metrics, and market penetration strategies. Market intelligence is therefore the collection and analysis of all relevant market insights that can help you make informed decisions within your company. These market insights include:
- Business intelligence (current and historical data about customers and finances that is owned by your company) can be used to improve strategic decision-making and provide a competitive advantage.
- Competitive intelligence (data related to your competitors’ businesses) can be used to create a competitive advantage and make informed company decisions.
- Market research (data about your consumers, products, industry, and competitors) can be used to pinpoint market opportunities, develop penetration strategies and promote company growth.
Markets are constantly changing, as is their nature, and every company needs a strategic approach that will provide a bigger perspective. In order for a company to develop an efficient strategic approach, they need to track their competition, understand the broader landscape, assess new developments and emerging trends, and monitor opportunities and threats. This gives the company a chance to anticipate what’s in the future.
Every company wants to stay ahead of the curve, and this can be done by collecting and using relevant data proactively instead of reactively. Recent research from a Deloitte report shows that CEOs who make decisions based on the data they have collected have a 77% chance to reach their company goals compared to those who don’t make data-driven company decisions.
To continually acquire, develop, and share the insights you need to create a winning strategy, you need a reliable and trustworthy market intelligence platform. The volume of data produced and shared today is astronomical and quite difficult to keep up with. Each year, this volume dramatically increases each year and through a good market intelligence platform, you can easily access and process that information.
Frankly, the massive universe of data you can use is sort of a double-edged sword. Almost 98% of that data is not significant to you, but by using the right market intelligence platform, you can organize and make sense of the 2% of trusted and relevant data that you need to build upon.
How to use market intelligence
Using the right market intelligence platform is like finally being able to see outside the box and understand what your competitors are doing. You can finally recognize the tactics you have never tried, the audience you have never reached, how other market leaders are doing things, your level compared to other market competitors, and emerging trends that you should be aware of.
Investing in market intelligence can significantly improve your market performance. Often, most market leaders fail to realize that market intelligence is quite complex, but once you realize it’s true value, you can completely turn around your company’s future for a better one.
If you want to invest company resources into market intelligence, then you have to have a clear and effective marketing intelligence process.
- Choose competitors for benchmarking.
Always remember that the competitors for marketing intelligence are those who compete for your audience’s limited attention, not those who sell products like yours. Choosing the right competitors can help you to learn things from market leaders and how you can hold your specific audience’s attention.
- Choose the metrics to measure
Based on the goals of your digital marketing strategy, you need to be deeply aware of your audience and competitors in order to determine what is more important between brand-focused and performance-focused metrics. The right market intelligence platform can help you decide what your company needs using valuable data and market insight.
- Gather audience and competitor intelligence data
Intelligence gathering, although quite vital, is surprisingly misunderstood. Almost every company gathers marketing intelligence data, and it takes a lot of expertise to make sense out of the data collected. Using the right market intelligence platform can help you to reduce the cost of labor, avoid confusion, and take advantage of available opportunities.
- Design a competitive analysis
For any data collected, you need to provide context. Your marketing intelligence needs to pair every insight with a recommended action so that the insight can be used to make the company better. Every insight needs proof so that it can be used by anyone in your company in order to positively impact your audience and keep you in the lead.
With every piece of information collected, you need to make sure that the right people in your company see it so that they can do their job better. It is also wise to share this information while it is relevant, and ensure that everyone believes and understands it so that your company can see better results. Additionally, remember that not everybody needs to sift through information that is not relevant to them. Make sure that they see what they need to see for optimum performance and improved company growth.