How Can Market Intelligence Be Used for Competitive Advantage?

Your three areas of focus will be the consumers, market and competition. Each of these fields will show any business how it can improve upon its current trajectory and decisions. To get to those benefits, this form of intelligence requires three steps — aggregation, analysis and action.

Through gathering, processing and utilizing feedback, data analytics and trends, every enterprise can get a leg up in their respective markets.

Consumer understanding

Undoubtedly, the biggest source of feedback, data and information is the general public. Consumer spending makes up 70% of all economic activity in the United States. The people are what make trends fluctuate and what influences all business decisions. It’s invaluable for each business to know exactly what consumers want to see and buy.

Social media, surveys, interviews, focus groups, polls and analytics — these are the driving factors for understanding consumers. Once professionals gather data from these resources, they can shift their strategy. Perhaps customers want more social media engagement from the brand. Other times, they may want a retired product to come back, which can create significant buzz.

It’s also vital to gather market intelligence from the social landscape. Some trends influence how people shop. Most pressingly, the pandemic solidified curbside pickup and delivery as crucial offerings. Taking in all forms of data will guide these choices strategically.

Then, companies can act. To compete and stand out in the crowd, a company may use artificial intelligence (AI) to personalize email campaigns or provide live chatbots that can answer questions and process requests at any time. The solutions ultimately depend on what consumers want and need.

Market prediction and tracking

Consumers lead the trends — they show interest in a certain product or service and businesses change their tactics to match. Other times, though, businesses must focus on the market itself as a whole to stay ahead of those changes.

A customer relationship management (CRM) system is essential for this step. This software gathers and analyzes data that would otherwise be tedious for employees to sort through. CRM systems can monitor the latest trends, buying habits and interests to then predict what’s to come. Qlik Sense, RapidMiner and IBM SPSS Modeler are all prominent data visualization systems you can use.

Moving forward, seeing how virtual tech evolves will be a prime opportunity for trend prediction. Here, market intelligence can show that telehealth, gaming and remote work are likely to grow, but the data will show exactly when to take action.

Managers may need to promote different products or services. Perhaps a new partnership will help boost sales? The end goal is to use these predictions to succeed.

Staying on top of market changes will aid in international expansion, too. Emerging markets provide almost 70% of worldwide growth opportunities. When companies want to evolve, using market intelligence is the clear solution for local and potentially global success.

Competitor insights

After using market intelligence to understand consumers and markets, it’s time to get ahead by studying the competition itself. Though they’re competitors, they’ll have strengths and weaknesses that any brand can learn from.

Social media is one immediate place to begin. Only 12.6% of companies use analytics on social media to gather all possible data. Employees can work with social media platform analytics, Google Analytics or business intelligence platforms to gather information on how consumers behave online. That will give you a quick leg up in the race against your competition.

However, market intelligence also requires knowing the competition well. Businesses can use the intelligence and data they collect from all sources to conduct a SWOT analysis, investigating strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Surveys, available competitor data and trend analyses will be vital here. Then, a company can adapt to its competitors’ strategies. It can build upon the strengths, flip the weaknesses, act on opportunities and give more attention to any vulnerable, threatened areas.

For instance, after seeing consistent backlash against big tech’s lack of data transparency, Apple went forward and announced new consumer privacy features. The company saw what its competitors lacked and jumped on the opportunity to stand out. Victories like these are possible for companies of any size.

One and the same

Though market intelligence and competitive intelligence have a few differences, they work as one to help you get ahead in your field. Using the latest technology, feedback methods and resources, any company can succeed. The three areas to focus on are consumers, the market and the competition. Then, your business will ultimately have the best competitive advantage in the game.