Marketing Intelligence

Marketing Intelligence is the external research data collected on the specific market by a company. It helps the organization do thorough research and analysis of the market and its competitors. Thus they can make investment and marketing decisions that benefit them before entering a new market.

The importance of market research is that it helps organizations to stay ahead of the competition in the market, studying where competitors stand out in the business so that they can optimize and adjust themselves in the future based on the insights and evaluation of the market conditions.

• Marketing intelligence is the company's external research data on a specific market.
• It enables the organization to conduct extensive research and analyze the market it wishes to expand before making an investment decision.
• It aids in understanding the market from a broad perspective. It helps them stay ahead of the competition by gathering market information in real-time, from understanding customer preferences, trends, and behavior, to delivering products and services.
• Marketing intelligence is more concerned with analyzing the business's overall functionality while considering all aspects of the target market. In contrast, market research evaluates a new product's functionality through research-based questions with target customers.

Market intelligence helps businesses keep pace with the changing dynamics of the market. It helps in figuring out various target audiences of the businesses, the growth potential of the market, competitive analysis, and futuristic growth. The research guides leaders in making business decisions by helping them invest in the right projects and simultaneously avoiding losses. Data collection and analysis methods previously inefficient and broad can now be simplified and specified with big data and machine learning.

Big data is an umbrella term for collecting and studying data in the digital landscape. This allows companies to study their consumer on a unique and personal level. They can do this by enabling web mining, search data, and transaction tracking. Machine learning is an automatic learning system that enables a computer to understand patterns and make predictions.

Nowadays, in the digital environment, market research has evolved with time with an increasingly digital consumer base. The emerging technology has helped businesses track online activities through smarter and artificial intelligence technologies. Data analysis and collection have become efficient with simplified big data and machine learning. This allows marketers to track consumer preferences and transaction tracking seamlessly and frictionlessly.

The different types of marketing intelligence methodologies are mentioned below: 

Survey research involves a set of questions to gather data from the study's target population. The larger results help in the collection of the day more precisely. The surveys can be collected online, in person, by telephone, and by mail. 

1. Online surveys: They are the best method of collecting data efficiently. With the advancement of technology, people have become more digitally savvy and hence prefer online surveys as the best method to gather data as a part of market intelligence.
2. Telephonic Surveys: Telephonic Surveys are best for collecting information hand-on-hand from the customers. Most companies use telephonic marketing after selling their products to customers to gain better insights, thus increasing response rates. 
3. Mail surveys: Mail surveys are the most rapid method of collecting information and one of the cheapest ways to conduct surveys.
4. Polls: Polls are close-ended questions rather than subjective questionnaires
5. Questionnaire: It helps collect quantitative and qualitative data from the audience about a particular product, and research can be conducted offline and online.
6. Field Trials: These help the marketing teams to promote their product and see their results on the field rather than spending huge time on the advertisement of the products. It helps businesses experiment with their products and services and gain better insights.
7. Focus Groups: Focus groups are a selected group of people that help evaluate the customer demands and opinions through the feedback and thus give insights into a particular area the business needs to progress.

Let us look at the marketing intelligence examples to understand the concept better:

Example #1

Infographics are the best way to collect data on marketing intelligence. It enables businesses to gain market insight through visual data patterns. The entire market intelligence process can be done easily through ML and predictive data analysis and data analytics to gain knowledge and other product performance features.

Example #2

Per their convenience and preferences, borders, an American multinational music and book retailer company encouraged customers to deviate towards digital online shopping. As a result, they unknowingly shifted their customer base to the Amazon platform. As a result, they could not compete with the market and meet the demands of their customers. By applying better marketing intelligence strategies, they could have made informed decisions and thus would have been able to sell their products quickly in the market. 

The advantages and disadvantages of marketing intelligence are:

Advantages

• It helps in understanding the market from a panoramic point of view. It helps gather market information in real-time, from understanding customer preferences, trends, and behavior and delivering the products and services by being at the top of the competitors in the market.
• It helps boost the revenue and overall efficiency of the business by identifying the gaps in the market, devising the strategies per the changing scenario, and stepping forward to serve customers in real-time.
• It gives a competitive advantage and helps businesses compete, thus giving them the first-mover advantage, which is only possible via marketing intelligence strategies. In addition, it gives the advantage to the company to launch its products with uniqueness first in the market compared to the other competitors. 

Disadvantages

• It is an expensive method of collecting data through machine learning-based models and artificial intelligence-based technologies.
• It is only effective if the customer provides complete information or closed-ended responses about the product. The customers may not want to fill in responses to the questions that may require too much information about the product.

• Marketing intelligence is more about analyzing the functionality of the whole business by considering all the aspects of the target market. In contrast, market research is used to evaluate the functionality of a new product through research-based questions with the target customers.
• Marketing intelligence includes variables such as market share, market trends, competitors, suppliers, and wholesalers, whereas market research includes customer perception, consumer behavior, customer preferences, customer retention, product features, etc.
• Market intelligence is a broader spectrum that covers insights into the larger market, such as surveying the larger audience with a focus on futuristic outcomes and implications. At the same time, business intelligence is about business performance in marketing, product, and strategy.

This article has been a guide to what is Marketing Intelligence. We explain its comparison with marketing research, examples, types, advantages, and disadvantages. You may also find some useful articles here -

• Conversion Marketing
• Competitive Intelligence
• Sales Forecasting