Understanding Market Intelligence: Description and Advantages

 

Market intelligence is the information or data derived by any organization from its market or the market the company plans to enter. This information helps make decisions about market segmentation, market opportunities, market metrics, and market penetration knowledge.

Market intelligence is undeniably an essential aspect of understanding the market's current state and its related prospects. Along with this, the study helps to get an idea about competitor intelligence. This knowledge, in turn, aids in gaining a competitive edge in the targeted market.

Practical marketing intelligence efforts can lead to increased ROI and improved campaigns. The term is often confused with two different business-related studies, business intelligence, and marketing research.

Marketing research focuses entirely on an organization's efforts to gain clarity into business campaigns without considering external factors. On the other hand, Business intelligence focuses on gathering data across various business functions and dimensions to optimize its efficiency for all its departments and locations effectively.

Market Research study involves various steps. These are:

1. Identifying the problem
2. Developing a research strategy
3. Performing intensive research
4. Analyzing results
5. Finding good reports
6. Taking appropriate action

Why should a company invests in a Market Intelligence study?

Market intelligence is vital to any organization's success. It is the foundation of effective marketing. The overall process involves steps like data collection, analysis, and final use of the derived information.

Market intelligence helps companies distinguish themselves from their competitors and provides valuable insights to stay in the game and excel at it. Mentioned below are some of the cons that market intelligence offers.

• Ensures customer retention – Irrespective of how old a client is to a company; it is monitored regularly and attacked by other companies in the same domain. They attempt to understand when the customer is dissatisfied with the services and prevent losing its valued customers. Market intelligence can help the company analyze and obtain insights into diverse areas of improvements needed by the consumers and help the company retain and better understand the customer expectations.
• Gives a competitive advantage – Deciding the best opportunity to launch a product in the market is one of the benefits of market intelligence. This knowledge helps the respective company keep a watch on its competing businesses and upcoming market trends. Considering all this, the company gets a picture of the market, which allows it to make mindful decisions about penetrating the market and ways to capture a high market share by product/feature launch. Thus, providing them a competitive advantage.
• Enhanced process efficiency – Market intelligence helps businesses boost their overall productivity by recognizing gaps, giving in-depth insights to suggest useful strategies, and providing real-time data and valuable analytics.
• Improved sales process – Businesses with various products and many consumers often face a problem relating to which product to target to which sectors. In this, market intelligence results help the company successfully determine the market segmentation, thus letting it decide which product will flourish in which market.
• Holistic idea of the market – Understanding the market in its entirety can lead a company to success in a relatively lesser time. Market intelligence involves gathering real-time data from the market and understanding the customers, trends, behaviors, etc. This feat enables a company to remain competitive and meet market demands.

Market intelligence helps the company become more consumer-centric, better understand market demands, and consumers' opinions. Its other uses include collecting relevant real-time data, boosting upselling opportunities, reducing risks, capturing higher market shares, and giving a competitive edge. All these benefits are indispensable to the success of a company. Hence, market intelligence is one of the most crucial constituents in executing effective strategies for a business's prosperity in the market.