Editor’s note: Brooke Harper is a sales consultant from software firm Tenfold, Austin, Texas. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the title, “What is marketing intelligence.”
With the rise of global-scale competition, the need for intelligence data is fast becoming a necessity to keep up with consumer and market trends. While business intelligence data concentrates on the inner workings of an enterprise – whether metrics are within industry standards, processes ISO-compliant and more – market intelligence data is sourced from external factors. As the name implies, it is gathered from the consumer markets. This includes data points such as consumer trends and age group to spending power ratios, as well as marketing penetration in the different sections of the economic spectrum.
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Imagine this scenario: you are a small business trying to make your mark in a certain industry. All your competitors have been around for decades, and any of them can box you out using reach, influence and experience. However, on your side, you have all the data about your competitors: their strong and weak seasons; blind spots in logistics and distribution; pricing systems; major customer sentiments about their products; and level of market penetration.
Suddenly, intelligence data levels the playing field simply by knowing how your competitors are moving about in the market. And this is just the tip of the market intelligence perspective called competitor intelligence. Market data also covers social media, customer purchasing power and almost every sales-related statistic out there.
To successfully integrate market intelligence data into an enterprise’s decisions, extensive marketing research is needed. Studies such as feasibility and accessibility research; market penetration evaluation via surveys and double-blind consumer tests; and identification of target markets such as potential B2B clients or B2C channels can help in gathering a snapshot of the state of the current market.
Riding the trend
With 93 percent of companies investing in market intelligence (MI) saying that it helped them extensively in their business, there is no better time than now to ride the trend and leverage its benefits. But how does one even start in adopting this concept?
One basic requirement is revamping the company’s IT infrastructure. Marketing research, in theory, sounds like a small thing. However, with millions of markets and billions of potential customers, the seemingly small data points add up to become extremely large.
Tools such as Web analytics software, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, data mining, visualization and dashboard software can contribute to housing data better and morphing them into meaningful information for decision-makers.
Additionally, specific intelligence reps and analysts can be fielded to understand the story on the ground – this could be done by tracking social media sites such as Twitter, Reddit or Facebook, or by being physically present in consumer conventions and gatherings, which is always a rich source of real and timely data.