Gathering market intelligence is the key strategic initiative in every prominent business across the world. It adds value to every business process and empowers marketing teams to make sound decisions. However, to understand marketing intelligence better, it's essential to learn about its meaning and benefits.

What is market intelligence?

Market intelligence, also known as marketing intelligence, is the process of gathering data from multiple sources by a company about a target market that it either a part of or wishes to enter. It assesses your business's customers, competition, problems, and opportunities for creating new products or services. This data can be gathered from internal and external sources, including manufacturers, distributors, social media, sales logs, news websites, surveys, and customers.

Generally, market intelligence is used to accomplish several marketing goals, which include making decisions regarding competitors, products or services, business trends, and customer behaviors. Here are the seven top benefits of market intelligence in business.

1. Boost operational efficiency

With the massive amount of data generated from business operations and customer interactions, your employees may become overwhelmed or confused by all this information. As a business owner or operator, you should learn how to understand and take control of such data to benefit your company.

Marketing intelligence enables businesses to improve overall efficiency and productivity by identifying gaps, offering actionable insights to devise essential strategies, and providing a company with real-time data and analytics. You can also work with a media agency such as Revelation Digital to unearth core insights and help you become a data-driven business.

2. Build a strong partner and supplier relationship

Getting intelligence about partners and suppliers is critical in business. Any positive or negative events in partners' or suppliers' organizations can impact your business. Cases such as factory fires, data breaches, or supply disruptions can cause significant damage to your business. On the other hand, suppliers and partners expanding into new markets can create new business opportunities. Market intelligence helps companies identify emerging risks and opportunities with timely insights about partners and suppliers.   

3. Gain competitive advantage

Today's markets are highly competitive, so it's essential to stay informed about existing and emerging competitors' moves. This includes new product or service launches, geographical expansions, funding rounds, and partnerships. Market intelligence includes competitor analysis that helps you see how your business compares against the competition. Integrating it with other market intelligence lets you keep track of your competitors, improve your positioning and offerings, and penetrate and capture more of your target market. 

4. Enhance customer retention capabilities

Your company's sales team may have worked extremely hard to bring in new business from competitors, but they are always at risk of being attacked by your competition. Knowing their value to you and when they are likely to leave would be very beneficial.

Although market intelligence programs mainly focus on helping sales acquire new customers, they can also be used to retain and prevent attrition of existing clients. In addition, accurate data that leads to more focused customer experiences create greater customer loyalty, minimize paid campaign expenses, and generate better retention rates through customer messaging.

5. Improve sales process

Which product to target to which group is a common problem among businesses that offer a wide range of products or services and have many clients. However, market intelligence helps you determine market segmentation, thus helping your business understand which product or service will succeed better with a particular group of people. Subsequently, this offers predictive upsell and retention strategies to boost sales count.

6. A better view of the market

Understanding the market well can make your business successful in no time. Using market intelligence, your insights and marketing team can monitor, anticipate and take action on market opportunities before or at least in time with upcoming market changes and trends. Based on market intelligence, your team can make a sound decision to get into a new market at the right time. Gathering data in real-time from the market can also help you further understand the customers and their behaviors, thus helping your company to stay competitive and meet market demands.

7. Reduce compliance and regulatory risk

Companies should be aware of local, state, and federal laws that affect their business, so getting timely intelligence about regulations is necessary. Regulatory compliance is a great challenge for companies since laws have increased in number and complexity.

Although favorable laws may lead to new business opportunities, new regulations might require compliance, leading to additional expenses and delaying business growth. Market intelligence helps companies to easily identify and monitor legal and regulatory changes, helping them to reduce compliance risk. In addition, it helps a company to categorize, store, and give regulatory updates without regularly modifying the rules and linkages set up in your system.

Endnote

Being a foundation on which marketing is based, market intelligence is critical to the success of any business. Furthermore, due to the growing capacity of artificial intelligence and continually increasing amounts of data generated daily, it will soon be non-viable to talk about marketing without referring to market intelligence. Therefore, your chief marketing officers (CMOs) need to get more insights from customers' data with the help of market intelligence to stay relevant in the competitive market landscape.