What is Market intelligence?
It understands the market and consumer behavior to achieve sales goals. They may use it for marketing, sales forecasting, pricing, or competitive analysis. It informs and improves a company’s marketing activities and strategic decision-making. It can help a company to make more brilliant product/marketing decisions, set better pricing strategies, and evaluate market demand and competitive activity.
Common Market Intelligence Tools
1. Data Mining
Data mining is a set of automated procedures that extract information from an extensive data database and organize it in ways that help decision-making. It is a powerful but time-consuming, complex, and expensive technique. It involves digging into your database to find patterns or trends in your stored information.
2. Questionnaires and Surveys
Questionnaires are self-administered and are used to collect opinions or to gather information on a subject. A questionnaire may contain both open-ended questions, with no right or wrong answer, and closed questions that demand a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Various statistical procedures can analyze the results of a questionnaire.
3. Focus Groups
Focus groups are small groups of 4-9 people who meet to discuss issues in their own words. Focus groups are a form of qualitative research focusing on the individual participants and their thoughts, feelings, and opinions.
4. Web Intelligence
Web intelligence analyzes a website to understand the content, users, and the site’s performance and behavior. Web Intelligence may be used for diagnosing how users utilize websites, identifying competitors, and how businesses can use online blogs effectively.
5. Social Networks
Social networks are one of the fastest-growing marketing tools, and nowadays, marketing companies are using social network sites to gather information about users. Marketing companies use social network sites to build their communities and target them with suitable offers. Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn were the most used in 2012.
Ways How Businesses Can Integrate Market Intelligence In Their Operations
1. Strategic Planning
Businesses can integrate market knowledge by identifying their short-term and long-term goals and the market for each. Market knowledge can be integrated into strategic planning by collecting market data on the viability of new product introductions, trends in customer buying behavior, best sales channels, etc.
2. Monitoring Competitors
Businesses can optimize operations by integrating market knowledge into monitoring competitors through products and services, pricing strategies, sales volume, and market share. It also lets businesses stay aware of competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, new products and services, and marketing campaigns.
3. Customer Relationship Management
Businesses can maintain strong customer relationships by integrating market intelligence into customer relationship management. Market knowledge can help companies understand customers’ behavior, usage patterns, and buying preferences so that they can be targeted more effectively with customized products and services.
4. Pricing
The most common way of integrating market knowledge is to use it to develop an effective pricing strategy for the product and services. It can help businesses determine the prices to charge for the products and services. Pricing strategy can also be based on key market factors like customer preferences, purchasing habits, user experience, and cost of goods.
5. Marketing Campaigns
market knowledge can be used by marketing campaigns to anticipate and influence customers’ purchasing behavior by anticipating customer trends. Market knowledge can be integrated into marketing campaigns by using surveys, focus groups, web intelligence, and other forms of market research.
6. Competitive Analysis
Market analysis involves identifying the weaknesses and strengths of the organization’s competitors. Market knowledge should help in gathering relevant data on competitors’ strengths and weaknesses so that they can use it to develop strategies to counter them. Market knowledge can be used as input to analyze market trends and identify hot products, new technologies, and services.
Market Intelligence is the foundation of all marketing decisions. Businesses must take it seriously and integrate market intelligence into their decision-making process. It will help companies to make the right decisions at the right time.
