Market Intelligence: A Must to Stay Ahead of the Curve

Market Intelligence is an organized collection and analysis of data about the market, customers, and competitors. It helps you know what products and marketing strategies work the best for better revenue generation. Market intelligence gives you access to understand consumer needs, trends, and threats. It helps you to identify the areas in which there is room for improvement and development. Knowing what your customer wants allows you to specialize in certain products and services that are provided to them. Also, it helps you to monitor competitors which helps you plan and make strategies accordingly. Let's go through the various parts of market intelligence that can help you stay ahead of the competition.

Types of Market Intelligence

Market intelligence can be divided into several types, and each one serves a specific purpose in helping your business understand the market environment.

1. Competitive Intelligence: It is the collection of information about your competitor's activities, strengths, and weaknesses. This intelligence is what keeps you aware of the ongoing market situation. Competitive intelligence gives you an idea well beforehand of potential threats and opportunities. Study their marketing strategies, look at what products they offer, and how people are responding to them. With this data, you are able to simplify your own strategies and develop them so that you not only keep up with but also differentiate from competitors.
2. Customer Intelligence:  Data from multiple sources such as surveys, interactions in social media, and customer feedback helps you to understand not only the needs but also behaviors of your customers. This information is used to analyze buying trends and preferences. Through the analysis of this information, you can adjust your products or services according to customers' demands.
3. Market Trend Analysis: Market trends analysis refers to analyzing changes in consumer behavior, new technological opportunities and economic indicators that can be applied by any organization to its strategic planning process of market trend forecasting. This enables you to adjust your strategies and invest in better opportunities as these changes happen.
4. Product Intelligence: It provides information about features, performance data, and customer feedback for your product. By analyzing your product reviews and customer survey feedback and comparing your solution with competitors, you can spot areas where you need to work more. This improves your product and builds faith with loyal buyers.

Step in Market Intelligence

1. Define Your Objectives: Identify what you want from market intelligence. Know what customers prefer and how competitors are doing by market trend analysis. Specific goals help you to know what kind of data you need.
2. Collect Data: The following are the examples of different methods that are applied to gather information: 
   • Surveys: You can conduct surveys online, on the street, or over the phone. Online surveys are cost-effective and can reach a large audience quickly, while in-person surveys provide richer interaction.
   • Focus Groups: By organizing focus groups around certain products or services helps you to capture deeper insights and implications.
   • Observation: By tracking customer behavior in real-time, you can understand purchase trends. It can be through in-store activities or analyzing web data.
   • Competitor Analysis: By comparing products and prices that may involve reviewing public filings and understanding competitors' marketing strategies and customer engagement.
3. Analyze Data: After gathering the data, you need to analyze it which in turn helps you find out some useful points. By analyzing raw data with insightful intelligence, you get to understand market dynamics and the voice of customers.
4. Generate Reports and Visualizations: Converting your results into reports and visuals helps you to create visibility of insights across the organization and helps stakeholders interpret market maps, thereby also helping them make effective decisions.
5. Implement Strategies: Apply the learnings from this analysis to build and iterate your marketing strategies. It means moving your product offers, targeting customer sub-segments, or increasing competitiveness.
6. Monitor and Adjust: To keep an eye on your competitors, you need to address these trending market demands and requirements and always evolve with the trends in your customer base so that it does not become outdated.

Benefits of Market Intelligence

There are several benefits that market intelligence can provide to your business.

1. In-depth Market Understanding: Market intelligence provides you with a macro-view of your market, giving insight into all aspects of the core by collecting real-time data. It gives you all the opportunity to align your strategies and processes around that data, helping you adapt more easily with other market performers.
2. Better Customer Retention: Market intelligence offers access to information about what consumers want and where you can improve. The better you know your customers, the better their experience and the longer they stay.
3. Improved Sales: Knowing who you are selling to, how your product resonates with them, and whether it is really the right market for them can help you create market segmentations to detect which customer segments have the most potential and allow for specific customization of your offering.
4. Increased Competitive Advantage: Market intelligence is the best way to stay one step ahead of your competitors. By having an eye on the competition, anticipating trends, and shaping a complete market view, you are able to make better decisions as well as outperform your rivals.

Thus, market intelligence is all about collecting and analyzing market, customer, and competitor data in an organized way that can help you to make stronger decisions, leading to better strategies that fuel your business growth. Being sure of your business objectives and data collection from different sources helps you to know the current market and adapt your strategies as necessary to ensure you are always one step ahead. Market intelligence helps to gain new insights into your customers' requirements and emerging trends in the marketplace, and keep you one step ahead of the competition. The power of market intelligence helps you to create more opportunities for your business to succeed in this new world order where markets are ever-evolving.

At Procurement Resource, we provide a range of market intelligence and category management strategies for Industrial Products. We provide deep visibility in category trends, market dynamics, and the overall supply chains. Our services, such as procurement analytics and market intelligence, are customized according to your requirements in the supply chain management and procurement. Using sophisticated data analytics, we provide businesses with actionable insights to explore market volatility, identify areas of cost savings, and manage risks. Be a part of the successful companies that have benefited from our extensive research and rich experience in their procurement processes. Here, we guide you through strategic decisions that stand to grow and make the most of your business profitability.

Author

Aditi Bisht (Associate Business Analyst in Procurement Resource)