Being able to deliver what your market wants now and into the future is made much easier if based on accurate marketing intelligence rather than estimates, assumptions, and guesswork. Fortunately, valuable intelligence is available to many businesses and organisations thanks to the huge rise in data capture and analytics. Below is our guide to marketing intelligence:
The four areas:
1. Analysing the Market
Understanding the situation in your market is important to develop products and services that your target market requires and has a definite need for. This can identify not only what customers are buying now but what there may be a future need for.
What promotional methods are working? How do people in your market find out about what you offer? Armed with this knowledge helps you plan the most effective promotional activities using the most appropriate marketing methods. Financial data about your market can be a huge help: is more or less money being spent in your market? What demographic spends the most or least? Will future economic conditions have a bearing on how your market behaves?
2. Analysing your Competitors
Who are your competitors and how successful or otherwise are they at serving the market? What products and services are they offering and what are their USPs? (Unique Selling Proposition). What price points do they operate in?
Analysing your strengths and weaknesses against the competition can help inform where you can improve and where you’re strong and point to a possible direction to take to gain advantages over your competitors.
3. Evaluating yours and Competitors’ Products and Services
Similar to ‘analysing your competitors’ perhaps, this heading is focused more on your product or service offering as opposed to the type and size of competitor companies and organisations. Based more on customer feedback and experiences, you can refine and develop your product offering to improve and more effectively meet needs based on hard evidence and benchmark your offerings against those of your competitors.
4. Understanding your Customers
Knowing what your customers need is the ultimate aim of many marketing activities to cater exactly to your market. Sophisticated customer profiling based on many different criteria is possible with sound marketing intelligence and can help you properly learn who your customers are, how they behave, and what they spend.
Putting Marketing Intelligence at your disposal
Collecting masses of data is only the beginning: a coherent data strategy is important to put effective marketing intelligence in place. You may decide outside help is required from data analytics experts such as Objective, who can help you develop or refine your data gathering and storage routine to best enable marketing intelligence-based analytics for your business.
It would start with an analysis of your aims and objectives and your chosen technology partner, gaining an understanding of your market in order to develop a data strategy to meet your needs. Once your requirements have been established, then a look at what data you’re gathering and how you gather and store it would follow.