Market Intelligence (MI)
Market Intelligence is data and other information collected regarding a specific industry or market to help understand the position, competitors, customers, growth opportunities, and current or future problems a company faces. These insights help partners identify and design a competitive strategy for the company’s products and services.
Overview
What does Market Intelligence do and how can you use it?
90% of businesses report their industry has become more competitive in the last 3 years. Businesses are shifting their efforts toward Competitive and Market Intelligence. With an estimated 40,000 Google searches every second, market intelligence has become an increasingly important component of business.
Market Intelligence can provide better insights on customers and market needs to strengthen the position of their organization, products, or services across various channels. It can provide direction of where your company can attribute more resources in order to meet SMART goals, tap into new target markets, and identify trends among your consumers, competitors, and other stakeholders.
If you want to become more competitive among your market, it’s become an increasing need to invest in Market Intelligence. There has been a general increase in the competitive landscape, especially for large enterprises. In 2019, the average number of competitors per business was 25, that number has risen to 29 in 2020. About 56% of sales opportunities in the last year have become competitive, and 50% of those are won. With Market Intelligence, those rates can be increased by understanding your competition. So how do you get started?
To get started in Market Intelligence, you first need to identify direct competitors in your industry, you should identify metrics you want to measure, you should gather data regarding your target audience to analyze, and you should research market intelligence software that can assist in your analysis.
Market Intelligence
Insightsfirst
AI-driven market intelligence that transforms insights into actionable decisions, guided by domain experts.
Capabilties
Components of Market Intelligence.
With 60% of large enterprises investing more than $100,000 of their budgets into Competitive and Market Intelligence, it’s safe to say businesses should understand Market Intelligence in order to better target customers, competition, and enter new markets. Market intelligence consists of 4 main components: understanding competition, product evaluation, market analysis, and customer personas. Below is a chart that explains the 4 components of Market Intelligence.
Competitor Analysis
Discover where your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses are to identify the best strategies to beat them.
Conducting a SWOT Analysis is a helpful way of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors in comparison to your own.
The goal is to perform a deep dive into your competitors and discover where you can improve based on their performance.
Product Evaluation
The goal of a product evaluation is to improve the user experience. Whether it is a product or service, evaluate the various components in the operations process to determine the strengths and weakness of your product or service. Find trends within the process that may or may not work.
Market Analysis
Discover what markets you may be able to expand into with your product or service. What markets may benefit from your product or service?
Conduct a paid, earned, shared, and owned (PESO) media analysis to establish an understanding of where your resources are utilized and find where your audience is most interactive and show up in those markets.
Customer Understanding
Identify what challenges your product or service helps customers solve. Build out a buyer persona and determine why your customers purchase your product or service.
Identifying buyer personas and determining why your customers come to you helps establish targeted campaigns and further develops market intelligence.
Data Collection
How do you gather Market Intelligence data?
Now, how do businesses gather Market Intelligence data? Well, it can be gathered through various methods and collecting this data is important for having a thorough evaluation of your Market and Competitors. Businesses can actively and passively gather this data for evaluation of their products and services to gain better Market Intelligence.
Active Methods
Gathering Market Intelligence data are methods when a business is investing its time and resources into directly interacting with their customers to evaluate the given product or service. These interactions typically occur face to face. Some methods may include:
- Focus Groups
- Interviews
- A/B Tests
- Events
- Social Media Interactions
Passive Methods
Gathering Market Intelligence data are methods when a business invests time and resources into quantitative data that can be accumulated without direct interaction with customers. These methods typically occur online and may include:
- Competitor Tracking Analytics
- Online Surveys
- Polls
- Forms
- Observations
- Social Media Analytics
Data Usage
Using Market Intelligence Tools.
In today’s day and age, there are multiple platforms that can be utilized to gather, analyze, and establish Market Intelligence. When utilizing these tools, you should be mindful of potential pitfalls of those platforms to avoid a fragmented view of the landscape, overstimulation with information, siloing intelligence and insights, and relying on inconsistent reports when making decisions. To know exactly what you need in a Competitive and Market Intelligence Platform, we have outlined 5 essential questions to ask when evaluating your Competitive Intelligence Platform.
One way to avoid these potential pitfalls, answer all of your potential needs, and have a one-stop-shop is to use Insightsfirst, a market and competitive intelligence platform backed by internal and external data, domain experts, and actionable templates.
If you are looking to scale your market intelligence program, Insightsfirst provides you access to over 1,000 domain experts, multi-lingual support, domain-specific artificial intelligence power, and customizable workflows to meet your organization’s Market Intelligence needs. Request a demo of Insightsfirst today.
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