Monitoring competition and whatever happens in the market is an integral part of any successful business. Any company needs to understand the state of the market where their target audience lives and everything that can affect their development and performance.
Market intelligence is used to gather and analyze market information that will be used to guide the decision-making process of a company. However, it is different from business intelligence because business intelligence often takes into consideration the internal factors that are affecting the company, either positively or negatively.
The information collected is used to understand the activities that happen in the business environment in which the company fits.
It constitutes of four major parts:
- Competitor intelligence that involves collecting every detail about your competitor. The information gathered can be used to distill insights that can be used to develop more effective business strategies.
- Product intelligence.
Here, you gather information about products from your competitor or other products in the market.
- Market understanding
- Customer understanding
This involves understanding what the market size is, what share of the market your company has, and what the market trends are. That way, you will know where many of your customers are and whether to expand your products to other markets is a good option or not.
Understanding your customer is the key aspect in the life of any product. This is because it is usually hard to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an already existing one.
Therefore, you need to understand who buys from you, why they buy your products, the challenges they face, and how your team can help them in general.
You also understand what customers want and at what level of demand.
Why should I have Market intelligence?
- It will help you understand the market completely
- It helps in retaining customers.
It doesn’t matter how old a customer is to a company. The fact remains that competition will keep on monitoring and attacking them. When you understand when the customer isn’t satisfied and the reasons for the dissatisfaction, you can strategically retain them.
- It helps you improve on how you conduct your sales.
Market intelligence will give you an understanding of a product that will do well in a certain market. That way, you will be able to direct your goods and services to the best market.
- It will give you an edge in the competitive market.
Keeping watch on the market trends and the competition in the market will help you to grab the market share by releasing a new product or a product with new features at the most appropriate time.
- It gives good predictions so that you can be well prepared for any changes in the market.
The most common Market intelligence tools include:
- Google keywords tool
- KeySurvey
- Questback
- Google Analytics
This tool checks how consumers search online for products or services that are similar to yours.
It is a tool that allows you to create online questionnaires as long as you get your participants.
It is a service that connects a company to its target audience. It can do research and give feedback as quickly as possible.
Google Analytics gives you information about how customers are behaving on your website, which products have many views, and what social media channels your customers are responding to.
In conclusion, it is necessary to truly improve, evolve, and craft products and services that customers need and want. Market intelligence will help you to know what the customers require. That way, you’ll retain your customers and even get more.