When it comes to Market Intelligence, there are 4 things that you must know to succeed. Market Intelligence helps organizations cultivate strategies to navigate their unique market and competitive landscape.
These 4 components help frame successful campaigns to outcompete competitors:
1. Competitor Analysis
Competitor Analysis involves gathering data on competitors that can be used to direct future business strategies and understand where competitors, and thus the industry, are headed with their products and services. This is about evaluating your own organization’s strengths and weaknesses against your competitors to create strategies that can beat your competition. Conducting a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threat (SWOT) Analysis is a fantastic way to see where your organization succeeds and where your organization may need assistance and more resources.
The overall goal of this a competitor analysis is to perform a deep dive into the competition your organization may face and understand the strategies implemented by your competitors to counter them. A Competitor Analysis is never complete. Just like you are always evolving, so is your competitor. To continuously keep up with your competition, a competitor analysis is ideally updated once a quarter – with major alert tracking setup for big announcements.
Discover where you can improve based on how your competition performs by learning more about Insightsfirst.
2. Product Evaluation
Product Evaluation requires exactly that, a thorough evaluation of your organization’s products and/or services with comparison to they stack up against similar products and services on the market. The goal of a product evaluation is to increase the value you can give to your user. Whether it is a product or service, evaluate the various components in the operations process to decide the strengths and weakness of your product or service. Find trends within the process that may or may not work and adjust those accordingly.
Forewarning you, it is tough to give yourself an objective review and communicate “needs improvement” areas to execs. To make this more objective, gather feedback from demos, customer conversations, review sites, surveys, polls, etc. It’s best to engage a few departments for their perspective as well. Sales will certainly have different feedback than product!
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The Forrester Wave™: Market & Competitive Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2023
3. Market Analysis
Market Analysis uses data and observations in your industry to determine where your customers are most active so you can be present in those markets. Analyzing your assets, media, and resources will help determine where your current market focus has been. Conducting a paid, earned, shared, and owned (PESO) media analysis can help establish where your resources have been spent and where customers are engaging with your brand the most. Once you have an idea of where engagement is most active, you can determine what market your customers are spending their time and money and focus more of your resources into those markets.
Discover what markets you may be able to expand into with your product or service and expand into those markets.
4. Customer Understanding
Understanding your customers is imperative to the success of your Market Intelligence research and efforts. To do this, identify the challenges your product or service helps customers solve, the challenges your customers face while using your product or service, and the challenges your customers face that your product could solve in the future.
Creating buyer personas is a useful tactic when trying to understand who your customers are. Creating surveys, polls, and inviting customers to participate in reviews are also useful tools in helping you understand who your customers are and the challenges they face.
Then you will want to determine why your customers purchase your product or service; determining why your customers choose your product will help you find what you do better than other competitors and how you can continue to perform better in those areas compared to your current competitors. During this exercise, it is best to break the feedback into categories like highest paying customers, enterprise, strategic industries, happiest/least happy customers, etc. You’ll find more strategic patterns appear to capitalize on.
Conclusion
The 4 components of Market Intelligence can help any organization determine the best strategies to improve their ranking among a competitive market. Understanding your customers, the market, your products, and your competition will help your organization not only determine better strategies moving forward, but also help your organization determine its specific needs from a market intelligence platform like Insightsfirst.
Market Intelligence programs can significantly enhance impact by integrating AI and generative AI. To learn more, check out our Ultimate Guide to Integrating AI into Competitive Intelligence Programs.
