Marketing intelligence: anticipate changes in your market

Marketing intelligence, through the research and qualification of a rigorously selected information base, is an essential activity for any company: it guarantees a good understanding of market trends.

Yet, for lack of time, this exercise is all too often neglected.

To understand how essential it is, we need to define exactly what marketing intelligence is.

What are the different types of intelligence? What concrete benefits can organizations derive from it? What are the best practices to be observed and the tools to be deployed?

There's no need to glean information from the web... it's all in our article!

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What is marketing intelligence? Definition and benefits

What is marketing intelligence?

An integral part of business intelligence, marketing intelligence is defined as the ongoing research and analysis of information relating to the markets your company serves. The aim?

• To extract the essentials from the mass of data circulating in order to avoid information overload (infobesity);
• without, however, missing out on the information that is essential to your business development.

By collecting information on a regular basis, you gain a clearer picture of your competitive environment, technological advances and trends, so you can effectively guide your marketing strategy. It's for these reasons that market intelligence activities are particularly important at certain key moments: launching a product, conquering a new market, etc.

What are the benefits for your company?

• 👍 Detecting opportunities and trends. Thanks to an adapted monitoring strategy, you'll have vital information on developments in your market and the latest innovations. So you can make sure you're not left behind.
  
  
• 👍 Continuous improvement. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your products or services, and staying in tune with consumers' evolving needs, enables you to fine-tune your strategies.
  Monitoring also concerns your own brand: by finding out what's being said about you, you take care of your e-reputation and brand image.
  
  
• 👍 Competitive advantage. Knowing what your competitors are doing (e.g. launching a new product) means you won't be left behind. You can even stay one step ahead by keeping abreast of the latest trends, new technologies, socio-economic developments, etc.
  
  
• 👍 Anticipating risks. Marketing intelligence enables you to detect opportunities... but also threats! In effect, you anticipate risks: the state of health of your suppliers, regulatory changes, societal upheavals, etc.
  
  
• 👍 Efficiency gains. By targeting your business development and marketing actions more precisely and intelligently, you not only gain in efficiency, but also in ROI (return on investment).

The four types of marketing intelligence

There are many different types of market intelligence, but there are generally four main ones:

Sales intelligence

Sales intelligence focuses on your customers and suppliers.

It involves monitoring :

• customer behavior. In this way, you can respond to their demand to build loyalty, but you can also detect new niches favorable to your company's development;
• the reliability of your suppliers, so you're always at the forefront of their expectations, and can avoid unpleasant surprises.

Competitive intelligence

You can only make the right decisions if you know what your competitors are doing. What are their digital communication strategies? What kind of marketing campaigns are they developing? Who are their new customers?

Competitive intelligence enables us to identify new opportunities and areas for improvement, as well as threats (the launch of a special offer will not have the same impact if your competitor does the same, for example).

Technology watch

Technology watch, more product-oriented, is recommended to keep abreast of the latest advances in your field, and thus enable you to:

• innovate to reduce production costs and improve efficiency ;
• capture market share by making the most appropriate choices.

Environmental watch

Environmental intelligence involves the study of a variety of factors: legal, cultural, societal, political, and so on. In other words, it involves identifying how certain changes, or even upheavals, are likely to impact your market:

• new regulations,
• increase or decrease in purchasing power,
• demographic changes, etc.

Other types of market watch

Finally, other types of market intelligence are regularly discussed on the web. These include

• Strategic intelligence: this covers all other intelligence activities, and consists in identifying the best business strategy to adopt, particularly when making important decisions (repositioning your brand, for example).
  
  

• Image watch: as we've already mentioned, image watch also revolves around monitoring your own reputation. It therefore often goes hand in hand with community manager activities and social network analysis.

A few examples of monitoring

Marketing intelligence naturally depends on your field of action and your objectives. Consequently, you won't pay attention to the same information depending on your activity.

Here are a few examples:

• For a hotelier, it makes sense to monitor the prices and offers of competitors. Thanks to online booking platforms, consumers can compare different establishments in just a few clicks. The result? A price that's too high for the service on offer will drive the Internet user to look elsewhere.
  
  

• A restaurateur, on the other hand, will be interested not only in prices, but also in the new trends that are increasingly impacting the food sector. By keeping an eye on the market and competitors, he'll realize that it's a good idea to offer vegetarian or gluten-free dishes, so as not to run the risk of depriving himself of a potential clientele.
  
  

• Finally, imagine a marketing director in the automotive industry who doesn't keep abreast of the technological advances available to him or the decisions made by his competitors. You're in for a cold shower. Competitive intelligence is essential to better understand the expectations of future vehicle users.

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How do you do marketing intelligence?

Some best practices to adopt

• 1️⃣ Organize your watch around specific objectives. It's hard to retain and analyze all the information out there. You therefore need to determine the subjects you want to monitor as a priority, based on your business needs. This will determine the key words on which you will base your research, as well as your sources.
  
  

• 2️⃣ Select your sources wisely. Once you've identified your objectives, it's easier to select relevant sources of information.

  Since most of your monitoring is now done on the Internet, we recommend that you subscribe to:

  • your competitors' newsletters, for competitive intelligence,
  • newsletters from media focused on your market, if you want to keep abreast of new trends, evolving consumer aspirations, innovations and so on.
    
    

• 3️⃣ Gather information regularly. Monitoring is not meant to be a one-off activity: to be effective, it must be ongoing. To be effective, it must be ongoing, so set aside a specific time in your diary.
  
  
• 4️⃣ Process the information you gather. Reports, tables... whatever format you choose, you need to process and synthesize all the data you've gathered, so as to extract the essential information for your previously identified objectives. This work also enables information to be shared within the company.

Why use professional software to monitor your business?

We recommend the use of professional marketing intelligence software. It saves you time and reduces the risk of missing vital information.

Here are just a few examples of the software available to you:

• 🛠️ For all types of monitoring:
  
  
  • Feedly: Feedly is an RSS feed aggregator. In other words, it allows you to centralize publications from the sources that interest you and categorize them according to a tag system.
  • Google Alerts: fast, simple and free, it informs you of news relating to the keywords you've pre-selected. How does it work? By alerting you when a new page on that keyword appears.
    
    
• 🛠️ For competitive intelligence:
  
  
  • PriceComparator: this software automatically extracts daily data on your competitors (prices, stocks, promotional offers, etc.). This enables you to make the right decisions in terms of marketing strategy.
    
    
• 🛠️ For image monitoring:
  
  
  • Mention: this tool gives you a global view of what's being said about you on the Internet. It also allows you to interact with others to enhance your brand image and e-reputation.
  • Visibrain: this software sends you real-time alerts by sms, email, Slack or Telegram on your topics to monitor your reputation serenely .

By now, you're familiar with all the issues surrounding marketing intelligence, the activity that helps you stay competitive, or even one step ahead of your competitors. But you still need to devote time to it, and do it wisely! Fortunately, there are tools available to ensure that you don't miss out on any strategic information... without overloading your schedule!