Companies carry our market intelligence to learn more about their customers and check on what their competitors are doing in the market. It’s mostly done by companies that want to improve their productivity and also sales.
Market intelligence is a process of collecting firsthand information about a particular market used by companies to plan and decide on how to capture specific markets. Companies use this vital information before making any plans to venture into a specific market. It is the first data about a particular market and can be related to age, spending habits, buyer behavior, local authorities’ laws, and restrictions, among other vital information. Companies use this data by analyzing it, breaking it according to their departments, before using it to venture into a market.
Difference between Market Intelligence and Research: While Marketing Research makes it to understand product movements and their consumers, the latter carries the overall company research. It can start from when the company or product is launched to feedback after product/service is delivered and consumed. It gives reports that will be crucial in decision marketing. They include market trends, competitors, and customers’ behaviors. These customers can be the existing ones, former, or the targeted. Intelligence can divide into four main categories as below:
- Competitor Intelligence: Involves learning about competitors’ strengths and weaknesses before conducting the company’s overall plan.
- Product intelligence: mostly looks into the quality and performance of products/services in the market. It starts with production and ends with the final consumer.
- Market Survey: This survey involves looking at the product movement in the market and ways it can push to gain more sales.
- Customer Intelligence: customer intelligence helps companies understand their clients better. It looks into customers’ wants, challenges, and improvements.
Data can be drawn from a company’s website, news websites, social media, and other secondary data sources, including interviewing clients physically. The primary use of these reports is to:
- Enable the company to understand the main areas to focus its products.
- Show companies the Markets they should target or avoid.
- Enable companies to understand consumers’ behavior and their purchasing trends.
- Help the company know which audiences they should focus on with their products. Depending on the product, buyers can be in different classes, grouped according to age, location, gender, and other groups.
What Market Intelligence tools do
Companies can use tons of online tools to carry on their competitive intelligence processes in the market. These tools make these processes more manageable and less time-consuming. These tools help collect POS data on markets quickly and securely and help gather, analyze, and even store the final reports. These tools can be used within the company premises or outside as Software as a service (SaaS). The instruments combine data from different sources, including websites, call centers, business intelligence, market data, and analysis before submitting it to relevant departments for deployment. Some of these tools can be found free of use, while others need payments and might require expertise. NetBase Quid is among the market intelligence tools. NetBase Quid platform came as a merger between NetBase and Quid. It is a company that delivers faster, accurate, and actionable data from social media, consumer reviews, product reviews, news articles, business filings, applications, forums, and other billions of indexed resources. This data is always aggregated, analyzed, and made visible to bring out consumer and market insights. This platform delivers clear, real-time, and actionable results that are classified as essential or not essential to help companies make decisions quickly and efficiently. These tools come with customized features and functions to carry out different tasks. They work best by automating processes and compiling vast amounts of data that could have been impossible or time-consuming if done manually.
