What Is Marketing Intelligence and Why Is It Important in 2022
What Is Marketing Intelligence?
Marketing intelligence refers to data that marketing teams use to improve their decision-making process and guide their marketing efforts.
Marketing intelligence is vital to organizations because it deepens their market understanding. When marketers gather intelligence, they’re examining their competitors, product performance, consumer base, the state of the industry, and more.
Organizations often use software and platforms such as Owler Pro to learn more about their industry.
Collective knowledge gathered across an entire industry brings many advantages. For example, marketers may use newfound data to optimize marketing strategies for a competitive edge, learn more about their audience, and define key performance indicators (KPIs) to improve activities in a market segment.
In short, marketing intelligence gives businesses the actionable insights they need to market more effectively.
Differences from Competitive Intelligence
While both help organizations learn more about their industry, marketing intelligence and competitive intelligence have different focus points.
Marketing intelligence paints a clearer picture of the market at large. Data gathered from marketing intelligence covers many aspects of the market and may include information on competitors.
Meanwhile, competitive intelligence specifically targets your business's competitors.
Also referred to as corporate or competitor intelligence, the research process analyzes the competitive environment to improve your business decisions. You might conduct a competitor analysis and use tools such as a SWOT analysis to gather this information and assess your competitors’ weaknesses, strengths, challenges, etc.
Marketing Intelligence vs. Market Research
You may also be wondering how marketing intelligence differs from market research. Though both are key to developing a winning market strategy, neither process is interchangeable.
Firstly, market research isn’t as broad as marketing intelligence. It focuses solely on your company and strives to learn more about your customers’ needs, attitudes, and preferences.
Unlike marketing intelligence, this information isn’t necessarily readily available. Companies use various tools to gather customer feedback and study consumer trends to conduct market research.
Neither term should be confused with business intelligence. Like market research, business intelligence is focused on internal factors. However, unlike market research, business intelligence explores your company's technical infrastructure and performance.
Your organization will gain a holistic view of your activities in specific market conditions to improve business strategies by utilizing all three.
Types of Marketing Intelligence
Due to how broadly we can define marketing intelligence, there are many ways you and your team can gather actionable data.
Here’s a summary of the most common methods:
Focus Groups
A focus group comprises individuals who are representative of your target market. Building rapport is critical, so focus groups must be conducted live and online, if not face-to-face.
A moderator will ask predetermined questions about a topic during a focus group. The topic may range from the reception of a product or service to personal feelings about a subject.
Group conversations are also encouraged to reveal consumer insights that previous market research may not have uncovered yet.
A focus group can provide qualitative research on consumer attitudes by accurately portraying your key demographics. Marketers may then use this information to steer marketing campaigns and build a stronger connection with your target audience.
Surveys and Polls
Polls focus on a particular question, often with predetermined answers. Since they usually take seconds to complete, polls are easy to circulate on social media, allowing for a high response rate.
Meanwhile, surveys are usually more detailed. They can provide qualitative and quantitative insights on key marketing metrics to deepen customer understanding.
Both tools are used in market research and may help businesses identify a market opportunity (i.e., a need unrealized by rival companies). However, this depends on your goals for marketing intelligence.
Marketing Analytics
Given the broadness of marketing intelligence, organizations need a way to extract meaningful information from their activities.
Analytics enables effective marketing intelligence by capturing and transforming knowledge into actionable and understandable insights for your team.
Market analytics software enables this process. With analytic tools, marketers can quickly gather information and identify correlations in marketing data — allowing them to understand their audience better, craft more personalized ads and campaigns, achieve a higher ROI, and more.
Benefits of Marketing Intelligence
No target market is stagnant. To keep up with a constantly evolving landscape, organizations use marketing intelligence to identify challenges and opportunities across their entire industry.
When combined with other processes, such as market research, marketing intelligence can offer strategic insights and deepen comprehension in many areas, including:
Product Intelligence
Product intelligence gathers data and analyzes how customers are interacting with your products. It provides a complete picture of the customer experience, articulating where and how your product stands out against competitors.
This also plays a role in the development of new products. By learning more about your audience, you can identify unmet needs in your consumer base and optimize future products and campaigns to align with these unique needs, boosting conversation rates.
Market Understanding
Effective marketing examines the boundaries and intersections of existing markets, where else your potential customers and prospects may be active, market share, size of the market, and trends.
For example, what non-competitive brands or organizations does your consumer base have in common? How do your products or services fit into these elements, and is this potentially a new market your business can explore?
Marketing intelligence can help you generate new ideas and opportunities for outreach and growth by examining market trends, media channels, and your market performance.
Consumer Understanding
Improving the customer experience and boosting customer retention are two important business goals.
Market intelligence can reveal a lot about your consumer base, including what they’re looking for in a brand. By having an open dialogue with your customers and learning more about their lived experiences, you can gather customer feedback more effectively, build strategies to enhance future interactions with your brand, and promote customer loyalty.
Competitive Advantage
Marketing intelligence can also offer insight into improving your market position and gaining an edge over competitors.
By examining your industry, you empower the competitor intelligence process, allowing for in-depth examinations and competitive analyses of your top competitors.
The data extracted from these processes will help you develop more effective business strategies to counter your competitors.
Furthermore, by learning more about your competitors, you can shift your marketing efforts and outperform other companies with a new product or campaign distributed at the right time to capture market share better.
Acquire Marketing Intelligence with Owler Pro
Marketing intelligence can supply valuable insights into your industry and help your marketing team discover new ways to connect with your audience—but to be helpful, data must be both accurate and timely.
Owler Pro’s comprehensive business network delivers real-time intelligence on your industry. Backed by complete company data and news updates, companies who use Owler never miss the latest trends affecting their partners, competitors, and potential customers.
Join our thriving community and gain access to exclusive features today to help you learn and grow in your market.