As a business professional, you are probably responsible for making many important decisions, whether it be something as simple as drafting a social media post for the company account or coordinating the arrival of a revolutionary product to market.
But with the burden of this many decisions, how do you know if you are making the right ones for your business?
The first step to making wise business decisions is collecting accurate information. It is possible with the help of a marketing intelligence process.
Let’s dive deeper into what marketing intelligence means, and how it is driving business growth.
What Do You Mean by Marketing Intelligence?
Marketing intelligence is subset of business intelligence that focuses on analyzing data (often captured daily) that is related to the marketing campaigns of a business.
The data collected is utilized to interpret information about a business, forecast consumer trends and products, and identify the behaviors of competitors, so that more informed decisions can be made to improve the performance of the business.
Marketing intelligence can be collected from various sources such as websites, survey forms, advertising campaigns, and can be supplemented with.
Social media sentiment analysis tools or third-party data, such as market research reports that highlight what audiences think about your company online. This leads to the question of who will get the most value out of marketing intelligence.
STP marketing for new customer acquisition
The Value of Marketing Intelligence
It helps marketing professionals, managers, and decision-makers enhance the efficiency and productivity of their business operations.
Having a robust marketing intelligence set up allows your organization to:
- Maintain a competitive position in the market
- Look for opportunities in innovative market sectors and fresh partnership arrangements to minimize geological expansion
- Develop a deep knowledge in connecting the product and audiences
- Set future goals to move towards boosting overall operational performance
Marketing intelligence deals with identifying target audiences and their behavior. A deeper understanding of your audience will result in more consistently displaying relevant products to the targeted audience group.
Further, you can have a superior understanding of what type of problems your customers are facing, how your products solve their problems, the existence of similar products in the market, etc.
What are the 4 Types of Marketing Intelligence
The four types of marketing intelligence are:
- Competitor intelligence
- Product intelligence and data collection
- Understanding market trends
- Understanding customer
Competitor intelligence: Competitor Intelligence focuses on evaluating how your competitors are marketing and reaching customers as a means of identifying new opportunities for business growth.
This will help you discover your own marketing strategy’s weaknesses and strong points. Competitor intelligence also facilitates better market positioning and the implementation of the relevant strategies to win new customers.
Product intelligence and Data collection: The goal of creating a product is to answer the need of a customer.
For this, polls, interviews, surveys, focus groups, and field trials are often used to obtain data from the target audience either by studying their behavior or asking questions. This will result in a smoother analysis of the product’s performance.
This information will act as a key for business decision-making that helps in building impressive and great products.
Understanding market trends: Market trends are not always constant, and they vary with advancements in technology and fluctuations in the economy.
Further it can be difficult to see the full scope of where the market is going. Consider the example of a smartphone.
Companies launch fresh products almost every year, and with each wave of new releases, the products launched in the previous year become outdated due to advancements in technology for the present year.
In the same way, the logic and strategies employed using today’s understanding of the market may end up being outdated and unusable in the future.
Market Trend Intelligence allows you to look at the outcomes that previous changes in the market had, and use that to make more informed predictions about what future changes, and thus what strategic decisions, your business should make.
Understanding customer: A product’s customer retention and acquisition strategy depends solely on how they experience it.
A customer will tolerate a passable product they love, but no amount of bells and whistles can’t convince them to use a product they hate.
Hence, you shouldn’t ignore customers’ sentiments.
Customers’ points of view towards your product may change over a period of time based on market conditions and the introduction of fresh products into the market.
They might also change due to environmental changes such as your key demographic aging past the product being a good fit.
Thus, pay special attention to how customers behave with your product and how they view it.
Different Examples of Marketing Intelligence
Let us see some examples of marketing intelligence to better understand the concept:
Example 1
An online retailer can take advantage of marketing intelligence services such as visitor satisfaction surveys and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to get complete knowledge of visitor sentiment and make changes to their retail platform such as implementing a loyalty system, reorganizing the website layout, or investing in faster shipping options for better customer retention.
Example 2
A software or IT organization can get information related to customer loyalty and usage.
The organization may utilize marketing intelligence solutions including text analysis, user feedback forms or surveys, and web analytics to understand user behavior and add highly sought-after features to their next distribution of their software/services.
Example 3
A New Jersey-based restaurant is looking to analyze consumer interests for particular items on the menu.
The restaurant may adopt marketing business intelligence strategies and sentiment analysis techniques to identify the likes and dislikes of customers related to menu items.
They can also look at what specials of the day had the best ROI, and test a menu where those specials are a more frequent featured item.
Win new customers with customer journey mapping
What Does Marketing Intelligence Involve?
It is suitable for all types of businesses.
With the use of tools such as Survey Monkey and Hootsuite, as well as free social media channels, businesses of all sizes are capable of effortlessly accessing marketing intelligence.
Let’s look at what marketing intelligence involves:
Campaign and content performance: Measuring the effectiveness of campaign and content performances.
This includes metrics including ROI, CTRs, and conversion rates.
Predictive analytics: Forecasting eventual trends and consumer behavior using statistical and data modeling techniques.
Use of tools and technology: Use of numerous MarTech channels and tools for collecting data, analysis, and automation.
Integration of feedback loops: Set up a process for feedback loops between product development, sales, customer service, and marketing.
In addition to these, it also involves market research, segmentation and analysis of trends, competitor analysis, customer insights, and consumer feedback and surveys.
Role of Data in Marketing Intelligence
As is the case in many major parts of business today, data plays a pivotal role in empowering marketing intelligence.
Let’s see it in brief:
Segmentation and user profiling: Based on behavioral, psychographic, and demographic data, companies can segment their customers, making sure that marketing campaigns are accurately targeted to particular groups.
Data enables marketers to create comprehensive profiles of users.
ROI tracking: Data acts as a medium to measure and track the ROI of different marketing efforts.
This enables the enhancement and allotment of resources for major channels.
Risk reduction: Data-based insights can assist in the identification of possible dangers and critical challenges in marketing efforts.
By looking at these, companies can take precautionary steps to reduce them and maintain their brand value.
Pillar of wise decision-making: The use of accurate data in business operations helps organizations to develop useful intelligence related to the market and grow their sales pipeline.
However, insufficient or poor-quality data will result in imperfect conclusions regarding both customer and market trends.
Benchmarking in Marketing Intelligence
Benchmarking in marketing intelligence is the process of tracking and evaluating the effectiveness of a business’s overall performance against historical data, industry trends, and competitors.
Let’s elaborate on it in detail:
Establish a performance baseline: Benchmarking offers an initial point against which a company’s marketing campaign can be tracked.
It produces a performance baseline, providing a clear vision of where the organization stands based on industry norms.
Areas of advancement: Companies can identify underperforming sections of their marketing operations through benchmarking.
This concept leads to targeted advancements, improving complete marketing efforts.
Measuring customer experience and satisfaction: The customer experience and satisfaction metrics opposed to direct competitors offer a substantial measure of how well a business is matching the needs of its niche audiences.
Measuring digital presence: In today’s digital world, benchmarking digital presence is important.
This includes evaluating the traffic to a website, social media performance, etc. to enhance the online presence of a business.
Apply customer segmentation to acquire new customers
Marketing Intelligence vs. Marketing Research
Businesses use both marketing research and marketing intelligence to make intelligent data-driven business decisions related to campaigns. However, what differentiates the two? The answer is that they serve different overall objectives.
Marketing research mainly deals with the efforts of a particular company, helping to obtain a vision of some features of campaigns without offering needed insights into any external sources.
Moreover, business intelligence deals with the collection of data across business functions and operations to enhance the efficiency of all departments and regions of the business.
Analysts who have expertise in financial management, product management, and business analysis can analyze marketing intelligence because it requires extensive analytical knowledge.
Analysts who have expertise in mathematics and behavioral sciences can analyze market research.
Marketing Intelligence vs. Business Intelligence
Nowadays, businesses are realizing the significance of marketing intelligence. Earlier, the universal business intelligence market was valued at $23.1 billion in 2020, and now it is expected to cross $33.3 billion in 2025.
Sometimes, people fail to find out the difference between marketing intelligence and business intelligence even though both follow data-driven concepts.
Marketing intelligence concentrates more on user needs and the market landscape. Business intelligence systems concentrate more on sales, operations, finance, billing rates, headcounts, and so on.
Using marketing intelligence, organizations can make powerful strategic decisions to be active in the industry and drive business growth.
Furthermore, the integration of business intelligence and marketing intelligence can help you easily reach your targets.
5 Ways to Collect and Enhance Marketing Intelligence
Organizations can use various techniques to make sure they are collecting suitable intelligence data.
Let’s see what the different methods are to gather marketing intelligence data:
Appoint the sales team: Sales teams can play a crucial role in helping with marketing intelligence campaigns for B2B and B2C clients.
As sales teams interact directly with prospects and clients, they regularly keep updated with recent industry trends, competitor positive and negative points, and challenges faced by clients, making them experts when collecting data related to marketing intelligence.
Set up advisory boards for clients: Looking at the significance of direct interaction with clients, marketing intelligence campaigns can be boosted by setting up client advisory boards to approach them directly.
By carrying out this task, companies will be able to know the likes, challenges, and demands of prospects to produce impactful messaging.
Focus more on data quality: Through contracts or agreements with multiple external partners, companies can access different offline and online data.
Use a suitable marketing analytics platform: The use of a suitable marketing analytics tool that goes after marketing mix modeling and marketing attribution can provide you with detailed insights into what’s connecting with your clients.
Marketing professionals should look for an adjustable marketing performance tool that can manage these correlations and adapt to modifications in the industry.
Gather feedback from clients: Reaching out to existing clients for honest feedback on campaign efforts, product satisfaction, and customer experience.
With these details, marketing strategies can be directed towards regions of strength. Use tools such as feedback prompts, surveys, Q&A, and polls for insights into brand loyalty.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Marketing Intelligence
Some of the major advantages are early identification of upcoming trends and client demands, enhanced profitability and sales, and a holistic view of the market.
Here are few more advantages:
Early identification of upcoming trends and client demands: A Marketing intelligence strategy helps businesses identify upcoming trends early and enable them to make adjustments accordingly.
Enhanced profitability and sales: By analyzing the consumer base, companies can produce powerful marketing strategies that bring in more sales and enhance profitability.
A holistic view of the market: It can offer businesses a holistic view of the market, enabling them to discover new opportunities and possible threats.
Client retention: It doesn’t matter how loyal clients are to the company; they are always under the watchful eye of competitors.
Analyzing their dissatisfaction and the possible causes behind it can stop the loss of clients.
Marketing intelligence processes can suggest regions of improvement that are required by the clients and thus retain them and measure CLV.
Disadvantages:
- It is not an easy option to gather information via ML-driven models and AI-driven technologies.
- It works only when the client provides full data or close-ended inputs regarding the product. The clients may not like to fill in inputs to the questions that may need enough information regarding the product.
Use behavioral modeling to acquire new customers
6 Marketing Intelligence Challenges
Businesses use it to determine market penetration and present market metrics, but they can find multiple challenges related to market intelligence.
Here are frequently seen challenges:
Data overload: Managing the constantly increasing quantities of data obtainable today can be challenging because of its varying relevance and uselessness.
Differentiating useful data from inappropriate data requires valuable staff and expertise.
Data quality: Intelligence analysis provides accurate results if it receives good-quality data. Poor quality and inaccurate data result in erroneous analysis.
Data privacy: Companies need to be careful regarding their data-gathering processes and approach due to the increased inflexibility of data privacy laws.
Quick changes in the market: The market is constantly changing and progressing, making it complicated to stay updated with the recent trends.
Perception and analysis: Marketing intelligence analysis is usually conducted by people and can be subjected to individual opinions and inaccurate judgment.
Data integration: Merging data from various origins can be complicated because of its varied structure.
Segmentation and Targeting for Marketing Intelligence
The success of any marketing strategy depends on the segmentation of their clients and targeting them effectively.
These concepts include the breakdown of a wide market into manageable clusters and later customizing marketing campaigns to suit the demands or needs of each cluster.
This is a major phase in collecting marketing intelligence because it ensures a better understanding of clients.
The use of marketing intelligence in segmentation and targeting processes involves the following steps:
- Analysis of the collected data
- Competitive research
- Feedback mechanisms
- Artificial Intelligence and predictive analytics
Privacy Concerns in Marketing Intelligence
At present, marketing intelligence is used by the majority of organizations to engage their audiences perfectly. This demand for data-driven marketing has raised crucial questions regarding privacy.
Maintaining the privacy of individuals and managing their needs has become a major issue for companies.
Data collection and transparency: How and why the data is collected is one of the major concerns. In the majority of cases, audiences don’t have clarity on why their data is being collected.
This leads to doubts about privacy and transparency. Companies must have a clear vision of what type of data they are collecting and how they are going to use it, providing audiences with a chance to subscribe or unsubscribe.
Data breaches and security: As every business collects huge amounts of data associated with audiences, the dangers of data security and breaches arise.
This can impact the credibility and brand reputation of the company. Adapting powerful security measures and sticking to data protection policies is vital.
Legal use of data: This step includes protecting users’ privacy, respecting their confidential information, and using that data in a legal way for the benefit of users and companies.
Illegal approaches like misleading audiences or manipulating them based on their sensitive information will end up damaging the reputation of the company.
Audience trust and brand loyalty: Trust is the foundation of strengthening a relationship with customers.
When they feel that an organization is protecting their privacy, they can frequently visit the website and stay loyal. Once an organization breaks their trust, it’s difficult to regain such customers.
Integrating Marketing Intelligence into Operations
Marketing intelligence can be merged with operations processes to make smart decisions and expand business.
Decision-making based on data:
By integrating data from industry trends and competitive analysis, businesses can make timely decisions associated with pricing strategies and product optimizations.
Customer-oriented operations:
By understanding customer interests and their preferences along with their feedback and behavior, it is easy to deliver specific products or services that resonate with customers.
Segmentation and Targeting: With operationalized marketing intelligence, companies can segment their audiences into unique groups according to geo-location, psychographics, and behavior.
Optimization of resources: Marketing intelligence enables effective optimization of resources.
By keeping consumer touch points, messaging, and efficient marketing platforms, organizations can allocate their spend and staff to ensure organizational operations run more smoothly.
Innovative products and development: For fresh product development, it is necessary to consider the likes and dislikes of consumers.
Retail businesses use retail marketing intelligence to create market-focused products or services.
How Companies Use Marketing Intelligence for Growth
Let’s take a brief look at how companies use marketing intelligence for growth:
Market positioning: Companies can compare themselves with competitors to see how they are unique and look for new business opportunities.
They can focus more on their strengths and study present market positions to develop a strong marketing strategy.
Predictive analytics: Predictive analytics in marketing intelligence can detect possible risks.
Also, the technology can look at past user behavior to forecast the future.
Build a strong user experience: A customer behavior analysis in marketing intelligence can help businesses serve better content with a better browsing experience to achieve higher engagement rates.
Measuring ROI: Marketing intelligence reports and analytics can provide more detailed information related to pricing optimization, and product development.
In an unpredicted business environment, it is an incredible tool for businesses that are looking to stay active in the market.
Voice Search and Marketing Intelligence
When marketing intelligence is combined with voice search, it can result in higher brand value and a better customer experience.
Let’s see some benefits of integrating voice search and market intelligence:
Local SEO strategies: By monitoring local intent in voice searches, companies can optimize information for local search results using marketing intelligence to attract local customers.
Featured snippet-based content strategy: Nowadays, many websites rely on voice assistants to receive information that appears in featured snippets of search engines.
Customizing content according to this information can double the possibility of getting more traffic by appearing in the top voice search results.
Mobile optimization: According to the study from Statista, today’s approx. 59% of overall web traffic is generated from mobiles.
It is because a large portion of voice searches happen on these devices, so marketing intelligence can provide inputs related to optimizing mobile-friendly websites and loading speed to enhance keyword rankings.
Emerging Technologies in Marketing Intelligence
Following are some of the advanced and emerging technologies that are transforming marketing intelligence:
AI and ML: Businesses use both AI and machine learning techniques to process incorrect and accurate data in large quantities.
Machine learning algorithms make better predictions than traditional analytics.
Natural language processing (NLP): NLP is used by businesses in voice search and content optimization to monitor the results of social media and customer service.
Conversational marketing and chatbots: AI-enabled chatbots can help you build long-lasting relationships with your customers.
Conversational marketing ensures genuinely created content is served to customers, and builds brand reputation.
Internet of Things (IoT): IoT can connect to the internet through embedded devices to provide seamless communication between users and processes.
The objective of relying on this technology is to share and collect valuable data with less human intervention, so businesses can expect enhanced productivity and higher operational efficiency.
Prospect new customers with lowest churn and highest LTV
ROI of Marketing Intelligence Initiatives
Here are some ROIs of marketing intelligence initiatives:
Accuracy in targeting: Various firms use this concept to prepare a customized marketing strategy to minimize the costs of customer acquisition by understanding their audience’s expectations.
Increased marketing spend: Marketing intelligence can optimize the marketing budget by allocating resources and spending the budget on marketing activities properly.
Churn rate reduction: Customer churn can reduce the revenue and ROI of any organization.
Surprisingly, 3 out of 5 businesses don’t have a proper strategy to prevent customer churn. They can reduce it by analyzing the possible reasons for their unhappiness and acting on improving those areas.
Real-time analytics: It’s a combination of automated marketing and behavioral analytics to offer customers relevant suggestions based on their activities.
Marketing intelligence companies use it to offer personalized, dynamic content and recommend products based on specific customer behaviors.
Why Do You Need to Invest in Marketing Intelligence for Your Organization?
In the competitive world of modern business, having a thorough knowledge of your market is essential to achieving success. Hence, there is a need to invest in marketing intelligence.
Here are some reasons to invest in marketing intelligence consulting services for your organization:
Customer-oriented approach: It allows companies to understand the pain points of their audiences and come up with content, products, or services that truly match them.
Adapt to market conditions: Nowadays, the business landscape is not the same.
So, organizations rely on intelligence techniques to adapt quickly to the modifications in emerging technologies and recent trends in the market.
Reduce risks: All business decision-making involves some risks. Such risks can be reduced using data-based insights provided by marketing intelligence.
This ensures the company can make confident and intelligent moves by reducing the possibility of making the wrong decisions.
Encouraging innovation: It encourages your employees to experiment with new concepts and develop fresh approaches to their marketing strategies to expect better outcomes.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Marketing Intelligence Efforts
Establish clear targets
Businesses strategize various targets that can deliver expected results.
Determine suitable investments
Organizations should have a clear roadmap on which regions will drive them awesome results and where they should allocate their resources.
Choosing KPIs
Performance evaluation involves KPIs such as wholesales, market share, suppliers, CLV, competitors, and conversion rates.
Among these, market share is highly important to evaluate the sales performance of a business.
However, companies prefer to choose long-term KPIs as it will be easier to measure the performance of the necessary data.
Implement modern analytics techniques
Modern analytics techniques can examine different marketing data to indicate concerns related to campaign performance and market trends.
These techniques can help businesses refine their campaigns and spend wherever necessary.
User satisfaction surveys
Businesses need to conduct user satisfaction surveys and collect reviews or feedback via different platforms to offer valuable insights into complete satisfaction stages.
Analysis of this data can reveal the regions that require more filters to be added to upgrade the marketing performance.
Attribution modeling
The attribution modeling concept is used by marketing professionals to analyze and distribute credits across numerous touchpoints to check whether marketing actions affect the whole sales cycle.
With this, marketing teams should keep an eye on each user’s purchase lifecycle from the beginning to the purchasing stage.
Constant evaluation and modification
The final step is to evaluate and compare the results against pre-defined goals or targets.
Organizations need to look at user reviews, NPS, and ROI to measure their MI effectiveness and improve the challenges.
Conclusion:
Marketing intelligence is a valuable asset for companies that want to move ahead in their respective sectors.
With the extending features of artificial intelligence and the rapid increase of large amounts of data generated daily, it will be challenging to achieve marketing goals without the intervention of marketing intelligence.
At Express Analytics, our professionals can help you capitalize on strategic elements instead of low-value and recurring tasks. We provide accurate and relevant information across a huge range of sectors such as retail, market research, eCommerce, finance & banking, and consumer goods.
Want to improve your customer service capabilities more than before? Get in touch with us.
References:
What is Marketing Intelligence?
How to Implement a Successful Marketing Intelligence Strategy
Marketing Intelligence: Definition, Importance, and Benefits
Market Intelligence: What it is, Types, Benefits (2023 Update)
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