With big companies, businesses and large corporations competing against each other on a global level, the need for marketing intelligence data has reached greater heights. This sudden rise in need for marketing intelligence data can be attributed to the cropping up of new competition from various parts of the world in the form of startups. It looks like it is mandatory for companies to keep track of the latest consumer and market trends so that they can keep the competition at bay. According to Wikipedia, marketing intelligence is the everyday information relevant to a company’s markets, gathered and analyzed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making in determining the market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development metrics.

Marketing intelligence data in general is gathered from external sources like the consumer market as opposed to business intelligence (BI) data which is collected from the company’s own metrics. This includes data such as consumer trends, age group to spending power ratio and marketing penetration in different sections of the economic spectrum.

Investing In Intelligence Data To Beat Competitors

Let us assume that you are a small business trying to make yourself heard in an already crowded consumer segment specializing in selling a particular product or service. Since all your competitors have been in the market for longer periods of time than you ( more experience), they would surely have a greater reach, control and influence in the market. But what if you had access to all the data needed to learn about and beat your competition – their strong points, weaknesses, blind spots in business processes, cumulative consumer feedback data, level of market reach and penetration, etc. You can easily climb to the top, thanks to the power of intelligence data!

With access to this market intelligence data, you will be able to level the playing field with your competitors and if you are smart, you will be able to beat them at their own game. This is not what everything market intelligence is about, this is just a part of the intelligence data commonly referred to as competitive intelligence. According to Investopedia, competitive intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing information about competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in a legal and ethical manner to enhance business decision-making. Market intelligence data also encloses information about the social media reach, consumers spending power and every other sales related statistic.

Being a business of any scale, extensive market research is needed to properly integrate the marketing intelligence data into everyday decisions the company takes. Extensive market research can give you an idea of what may be the next best hot-selling product or service in your target market. Also, you can learn whether or not you are meeting your consumers’ needs and expectations from your existing offering – such is the power of market research. Feasibility and accessibility research, market penetration and market development, double-blind consumer tests, consumer surveys, identification of potential B2B & B2C clients and channels, etc can provide you with a view of the current state of the market.

Utilizing Big Data In Marketing Intelligence

With more and more companies admitting to the fact that investing in marketing intelligence (MI) helped them in rapidly grow their business to a whole new level, it looks like their investment is really paying off. According to one study held by the Global Intelligence Alliance (now acquired and rebranded as M-Brain), the vast majority of respondents overall felt that their company has benefited from market intelligence, with 52% strongly agreeing and 40% somewhat agreeing. So, it is high time you start investing in it and reaping the benefits.

But before you can start adopting MI in your business strategy, you need to upgrade your company’s IT infrastructure so that you can manage the sheer amount of data that is collected. Market research might look small from outside but once you dive into it, it is like an ocean of unadulterated data waiting for you to process it. You can make use of tools like customer relationship management (CRM) software, web analytics software, data mining and visualization, data processing, etc to gather meaningful data from it using which the decision makers can reach a conclusion before deciding on any business aspect.

You can also field sales and marketing intelligence reps and analysts to collect and process data from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as they are a great source of rich real-time data.