Written By:
Team Contify
Introduction
Trying to navigate the current market without market intelligence is like fumbling with a bunch of keys in the dark; you try one key after another in the hope that one of them might open the lock. The same goes for your business. Trying different business strategies one after another without any actionable information to back them will only increase frustration, while your competitors power ahead of you. Market intelligence empowers you with information on your market, consumers, and competitors, unlocking opportunities that will result in success and growth for your organization. But to use market intelligence solutions effectively, you need to understand its need and its process. In this article, let us discuss the 6 steps to follow in your market intelligence process that guarantee absolute results.
The need for a market intelligence process
A market intelligence process is vital for an organization as it provides a foundation of information, on which business strategies are built. Effectively executing business strategies is what keeps an organization successful. The key-word here is ‘process’, as without a proper process, your market intelligence efforts may get mired in complexities, and not reach the respective stakeholders. In fact, Forbes defines market intelligence as “the data – and the process – of using it to guide marketing decisions.” It is due to the lack of a proper process that a number of companies give up on market intelligence and fail to realize its true value. The following points will further detail the need for a market intelligence process.
1. Understanding your position in the market
A well-built market intelligence process will give you insights that will not only help you understand the market in-depth, but also your position in that market. You’ll aggregate information on what the market demand is, who your competitors are and what they are doing to meet the market demand, who your target audience is, and what they need, to name a few things. As you analyze this information using various reports, metrics and tools, you’ll be able to evaluate your position in the market and make strategies accordingly to improve it.
From market demand and audience expectations to competitor activities, you gain a 360° perspective. Utilizing this intelligence, often delivered through marketing intelligence software, helps organizations assess their positioning and make necessary adjustments.
2. Evaluating your product or service
Using market intelligence services, you can benchmark your offerings against current market standards and competitors’ products. These insights feed into your business intelligence process, helping you evaluate your product/service, and make strategies to modify it for better sales.
3. Targeting the right audience
Accurate marketing intelligence reports enable precise customer segmentation. There are a number of market intelligence techniques you can use to do so, depending on your organization’s position in the market, its nature, and its maturity. Determining the right target audience will aid in making better marketing strategies, and save the effort spent in chasing customers that don’t fit into your customer personas.
4. Conducting competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is often considered a discipline of its own within the broader marketing intelligence system. However, with structured market intelligence analysis, organizations can understand their competitors’ strategies, identify gaps, and capitalize on opportunities. This in turn will allow you to understand their failures and successes, learn from them, and then devise strategies to outperform them.
Download Competitive Analysis Template
A robust sales and marketing intelligence system helps businesses:
– Understand the market demands and consumer opinions
– Become customer-centric
– Boost their upselling opportunities
– Reduce risks
– Capture higher market shares
– Give them a competitive advantage
Market intelligence input to the strategy and planning process
Strategy and planning is the domain of the executive or leadership team in an organization, which usually includes the C-suite and the board of directors. Market intelligence is most valuable when it informs decision-making at the executive level. A good business intelligence process flow provides actionable insights around:
– The competitive landscape
– The key trends and driving forces in the market
– Customer and potential customer profiles
– Competitive success factors
– Industry tiers and market share
– The market (and competitive) intelligence capabilities of their competitors
The leadership will then use these insights to inform and support their strategies, plans, and decisions on things such as:
– Market and investment opportunities,
– Market penetration, diversification, and/or expansion strategies,
– The 4Ps, i.e. product, price, place and promotion,
– Market development metrics.
Other strategic areas in which market intelligence plays a significant role include:
1. Decision-making
Real-time market updates, delivered via marketing intelligence tools, allow for fast, confident decisions. When appropriately configured into a market intelligence process, market intelligence in the form of real-time daily or weekly market reports give the leadership instant access to actionable information, which means more efficient decisions.
2. Marketing strategy
The modern marketing ecosystem is largely based on digital, mobile, social media platforms and online campaigns. However, calculating the ROI of all these marketing activities, determining whether they will work or not, and deciding whether to allocate budgets on them can be difficult, particularly when you have no data to compare to. A marketing intelligence system is indispensable for digital-era marketing. With data from comparable campaigns and competitors’ strategies, your team can allocate budgets with greater confidence and measure ROI effectively.
3. Sales strategy
Market intelligence can help make your sales strategy more effective by providing you with your competitor’s turnover, budget plans, future expansion plans, sales numbers, competitors, and much more. A well-integrated market intelligence system will also provide you market research on sales techniques and trends prevalent in the market, which will further reinforce your sales strategy.
4. Business model
When updated regularly, a market intelligence system feeds your organization with crucial insights that inform positioning, marketing investment, customer experience, and long-term growth strategies. This is the foundation of an agile, results-driven business intelligence process.
How to create a marketing intelligence process in 6 steps
A marketing intelligence process is like the third-eye which allows you to see all that is happening in the market. It’ll allow you to reach your target audience, learn new business tactics, understand why market leaders succeed and what they do that makes them successful, in addition to identifying trends, even the ones which aren’t so obvious. Here’s how you build a market intelligence process in 6 steps.
1. Identify your competitors
This seems like a simple enough step, but all is not as it seems. You likely have a good grasp on who your direct competitors are, but do you know who your indirect competitors are? Your direct competitors sell or market the same products as your business, and while indirect competitors might not do that, they still compete with your business. For example, let’s say your product is an energy drink, then your direct competitors are other organizations that sell energy drinks. However, your customer might just as easily choose a carbonated beverage instead of an energy drink, which makes the organization producing that beverage your indirect competitor. You can identify direct and indirect competitors through in-depth market intelligence analysis. Identifying all players in your competitive ecosystem is the first essential step in the market intelligence process flow.
2. Choose the metrics you wish to measure
The metrics an organization chooses to measure depend on their goals, and the strategies they deploy to achieve that goal. Organizations generally fall in two categories – ones that are brand-focused, and others that are performance-focused. Brand-focused organizations give more weightage to the aspects of their brand, their category, and their competitors. Performance-focused organizations, on the other hand, give more weightage to demand generation, and their sales efforts. Naturally, it is these respective metrics that they should focus on to gain a competitive advantage.
Brand-focused organizations should measure and pay attention to metrics such as brand advocacy, affinity, appeal, association, awareness, loyalty, perception, personality, reputation, recall, preference, strength, sentiment, salience, trust, usage and of course, competitors’ performance & tactics. Pay special attention to the kind of content your audience likes. These should be tracked using a sales and marketing intelligence system, and delivered to teams via alerts, dashboards, or periodic marketing intelligence reports.
Performance-focused organizations should measure and pay attention to critical sales metrics such as their competitors’ annual recurring revenue, sales budget, average revenue per user, win rates, conversion rates, acquisition channels, sales tactics, and the like. A market intelligence process that allows your sales team to constantly be aware of these metrics should be put in place. Integrating your sales enablement tool to your market intelligence system is a great way to streamline things in this case.
3. Understand how to use market intelligence effectively
In 2021, almost every business uses market intelligence in some form or another. From a small company that does basic or unstructured research using the internet on their target market and competitors, to huge enterprises that pay millions of dollars for data on their competitors and the markets. Neither of these organizations is using market intelligence effectively. In fact, 50% of organizations don’t know how to use M&CI properly in decision-making. When an organization creates a market intelligence process, there are 3 things they should look out for to ascertain its ROI.
– Data costs
– Labor costs
– Cost of poor decisions
Now, the company that does basic research has no data cost, as surfing the internet costs nothing. Little to no labor costs are incurred, as there’s no team of analysts decoding data that is fetched. However, the cost of poor decisions is probably immense, which is why this company is still a small company even after being in the market for a long time.
On the other hand, the enterprise-sized organization is paying through their noses for data, labor costs to analyze that data are probably high too, as the organization likely has teams of analysts for this specific job. However, their cost of poor decisions is really low, which explains why they are an enterprise-sized business. They do, however, hemorrhage money in labor and data which could be saved with a more effective MI process.
A smart solution is to implement a marketing intelligence software platform that strikes a balance between affordability and actionable insights, reducing the cost of poor decisions significantly.
4. Perform a market and competitive analysis
The next step would be to perform a market and competitive analysis. Using the insights gleaned from your MI process, design a market and competitive analysis that can be shared with your organization’s stakeholders for easy interpretation.
A well-documented market intelligence process example includes routine analysis reports with:
– Provide context
Not everyone in your organization may be used to understanding how numbers and visual representations in the analysis work. Next to every statistic in the analysis, provide some context about what these insights mean for the organization, whether good or bad. Adding a benchmark to measure statistics would be a good idea too.
– Provide recommended actions
Statistics in themselves are no good if you or your stakeholders don’t know what to do with them. Every statistic is either an opportunity or a threat that must be taken advantage of or dealt with. Describe a plan of action as to what should be the appropriate response to every statistic you put in your analysis.
– Provide Proof
Although your stakeholders are not going to doubt the information you put in the analysis, it is always better to furnish them with specific resources for better understanding. Also, they might have to explain it to a customer, client, or another stakeholder in the future, so an attached resource to any statistic or a methodology on how you reached a conclusion is a must.
– Keep it short
The stakeholders in your organization, particularly the leadership, are busy people who have a schedule to stick to. Lengthy analyses that take hours to comprehend will waste their valuable time, and more likely not be paid adequate attention to. So skip the granular details, and provide information that can be quickly consumed and understood.
Using a marketing intelligence system ensures that the analysis is standardized, relevant, and useful for all stakeholders.
5. Deliver market intelligence throughout the organization
Effective dissemination of insights is just as important as their collection. A good business intelligence process ensures that information:
– Gets to the right stakeholders
– Reaches them in a timely manner
– Is easy to understand
Doing all of this requires figuring out an appropriate delivery process. Doing this manually is labor-intensive and prone to faults, even if you use a CMS. Markets are highly-dynamic, and the number of insights you get each day, each week and each month can be overwhelming. Then there’s the question of turning them into daily insights as well as weekly, monthly, and/or quarterly reports for the stakeholders to understand the trends better. Finally, you need to send them to the right stakeholders. Not difficult, but laborious.
Instead of relying on manual distribution, opt for a marketing intelligence tool like Contify. It integrates with your CMS, automates report generation, and personalizes delivery based on stakeholder roles.
6. Transforming insights into action
The goal of a market intelligence process is for a business to be able to make smart and strategic decisions with the information it provides. This generally means more sales, better products or services, a larger market share, more customers, more brand awareness within the target audience, in addition to other business objectives the organization might have. For this to happen, intelligence, strategy and action need to have a direct link, in order to be defined as a process. Organizations need to establish this link on their own, as market intelligence is just one piece of the puzzle. The process should ideally look like this:
– The market intelligence process provides insights
– Those insights are given a context by your market intelligence team, if you have one, or by the stakeholders themselves in case you don’t
– The information is translated into specific business questions, that need to be answered with strategies
– Strategies should be formulated after determining the best course of action in the present and future market landscape
– These strategies should be communicated to everyone involved in their execution
– Actions should be taken based on these strategies
If you follow this process from insight to action accurately, the results will speak for themselves.
Download M&CI Process Template
Conclusion
Today’s world is data-driven, and organizations that use a market intelligence process are able to take full advantage of it. Similarly, an inefficient market intelligence process, or worse no process at all, can quickly become a burden on an organization. The market intelligence process described above will hopefully give you some ideas on how to set up a similar system for your own organization, and enable you to be more competitive.
Whether you’re building a business intelligence process from scratch or enhancing an existing setup, adopting advanced market intelligence solutions can dramatically accelerate success. A platform like Contify delivers tailored market intelligence services and helps streamline your end-to-end marketing intelligence system, turning insights into action, and action into impact.
Get started with your market intelligence journey today, take a free trial for the Contify platform.
Frequently asked questions
What is a market intelligence process?
A market intelligence process is a structured approach to gathering, analyzing, and distributing data about your market, competitors, and customers. It typically involves a series of intelligence process steps, from identifying competitors to distributing actionable insights, allowing businesses to make informed, strategic decisions.
Why is a market intelligence framework important for businesses?
A market intelligence framework ensures consistency, scalability, and alignment across your business intelligence activities. It transforms raw data into meaningful insights using a repeatable business intelligence process flow, which supports smarter decisions across marketing, sales, product, and strategy teams.
What are the benefits of using a market intelligence platform?
A robust market intelligence platform like Contify provides real-time alerts, automated reports, and stakeholder-specific insights. It streamlines your market intelligence system, helps you monitor trends and competitors, and supports faster, data-driven strategic planning.
Can market intelligence tools improve strategic planning?
Yes. With consistent inputs from a marketing intelligence software platform, leadership teams can better understand customer behavior, anticipate market trends, and build agile go-to-market strategies, making strategic planning far more effective and evidence-based.
