How To Stay Ahead Of The Competition With Market Intelligence?

Any business that wants to succeed in this digital era needs data. If you want to scale up your brand’s profit margin, then it is pertinent that you make the most out of data. There are lots of marketing insights that you can get by playing around with data. In recent times, markets are evolving faster than ever. Any slight change in customer perception or trends can make the market shift away in favor of a competitor in your niche. In the course of this article, we would be looking at how to take advantage with market intelligence and stay ahead of your competition.

What is Market Intelligence?

Market Intelligence can be defined as the data related to a given marketing niche or product that you can use to interpret information regarding a business.

The data that is gotten through market intelligence can be used to influence the creation of new sales conversion strategies. You can use these new strategies to move prospects further down the sales funnel.

It can also provide further insights into customer behavior and how they relate to other competitive brands.

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Why does your Brand Need Market Intelligence?

We are guilty of stalking our competitors’ online platforms in a bid to understand what they are up to. The challenge with this common practice is that they do not get up-to-date data. Because by the time they see any updates, they must have implemented the marketing strategy.

In a bid to stay ahead of your competition, you cannot afford late data from your competitors.

  • Marketing intelligence is actionable data about your marketing niche, competitors, and prospects.
  • Just like weather forecasts, market intelligence is a guide that helps you in making decisions about your business.
  • With marketing intelligence, your business can get deep insights to improve your sales conversion strategies.

Things you should not do with Marketing Intelligence

The number one rule for implementing marketing intelligence is “Be ready to change your business strategy on the fly”. The data that we get from marketing intelligence is dynamic. You need to continually monitor your marketing strategies about data getting from market intelligence.

The fact that you are adopting marketing intelligence does not imply that you have the freedom to become lazy. With it, the sales team of any company should increase their work rate. Swift changes in data gotten from marketing intelligence can demand a lot from a sales team. So, you should train your sales reps to be ready to move with the tide as it comes.

Some businesses go out of the competition because they were lazing about with data gotten from marketing insights. If you do not want your brand to lose its market share, you need to monitor what everyone in your business niche is doing. This does not only apply to brick and mortar companies; it also applies to companies that are independently online.

For example, online micro-niche bloggers can use market intelligence to get ahead of the competition with other blogs in the same competitive niches. With marketing intelligence, a blogger enthusiast can also discover profitable blog niches that have low competition.

The 4 Elements of Market Intelligence

Market intelligence should not be limited to one type of data. The data can cover information that cuts across a lot of actionable marketing insights. The broad question is; what are the elements that makeup data got from marketing intelligence. In the following paragraphs, we would be looking at the four main elements of market intelligence.

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#1. Competitor Intelligence

With competitor intelligence, you can get a feel of what is the most trending insight in your marketing niche. You can use this data to tell what your competitor’s strengths and shortcomings are. Then, you can evaluate where your product is in the market and then re-strategize to take the market by storm.

Your brand gets a competitive advantage with competitive intelligence, allowing them to grab market opportunities before anybody sees them.

#2. Product Intelligence

After researching competitive intelligence, it is time to look into how your companies product is faring. With the aid of product intelligence, you can get a better insight into how your product or service performs in the market. 

When you zero into the problems that your product can solve for your customers, you can get better insights on improving your product line. With the use of product intelligence, you have access to consistent data that you can use to develop your product line all the time.

Another added advantage of Market Intelligence is that it is used to validate your product and see if your outbound sales strategy yields the right results. It helps brands to understand the features of their products that are most popular among their customers.

Product intelligence as an element of marketing intelligence helps your business gain insights into what your competitors with similar product solutions are doing. You can analyze what your competitors are missing out on and take advantage of the gaps before anyone figures them out.

#3. Customer Understanding

Product intelligence and customer understanding are two elements of marketing intelligence that go hand-in-hand. When you have a better product solution, you will get a better customer experience. With this fundamental element of marketing intelligence, you get an insight into the kind of user experience that your customers are looking for.

If your brand needs to maintain high profitability, then it needs to adopt strategies that you can use to retain customers. What better way to do this than to use customer understanding. With the data getting from marketing intelligence,  your brand would have an eye-opener as to why they should prioritize customer retention.

How a customer sees your company can vary based on some factors. With a CRM tool, a brand can also get deep insights into how customers perceive their product solutions.

#4. Market Understanding

Imagine investing in upgrading a product, and after a couple of months, the product features your upgraded becomes obsolete. All of this can happen because, in very competitive industries, the rules of the game are continually changing.

In reality, your business is not the only one that is solving a particular problem. There are lots of other companies in the same marketing niche that have the same product solutions. This is where you deploy this fundamental element of marketing intelligence; “Market understanding”.

When you understand the demands of customers of a particular product, your business can increase its market revenue and share. They can also see if there are new areas that have profit potential in the market.

Here are additional benefits of Market Understanding:

  • You can understand where your product fits into the market.
  • The problem that your company is planning to solve with a  product release.
  • If your product solution is still needed.

How to Effectively Exploit Actionable Data Gotten From Market Intelligence?

After gathering all the necessary data from all your sources, the next step is to exploit this data and do something actionable with it effectively. With data, you can get deep marketing insights into what everyone is doing.

Here are some of the things that a brand can do with data gotten from marketing intelligence to stay ahead of the competition:

  • Deploying keywords that you have not been using for your content creation strategy.
  • Targeting audiences with effective advertisement campaigns
  • Using themes and hashtags can help you get your content at the forefront of everyone’s social media pages.
  • Researching why your leads are not going down your sales funnel.
  • Finding the right affiliates to partner with.

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