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Marketing intelligence: anticipate changes in your market

Marketing intelligence: anticipate changes in your market

By Jennifer Montérémal

Published: 23 October 2024

Marketing intelligence is an essential activity for any company, as it involves researching and qualifying a rigorously selected database of information to ensure a clear understanding of market trends.

However, because of a lack of time, this exercise is all too often neglected.

To understand how essential it is, we need to define exactly what marketing intelligence is.

What are the different types of intelligence? What concrete benefits can organisations derive from it? What are the best practices to be observed and the tools to be deployed to carry out this activity?

There's no need to go gleaning information from the web... it's all in our article!

What is marketing intelligence? Definition and benefits

What is marketing intelligence?

An integral part of economic intelligence, marketing intelligence is defined as the ongoing research and analysis of information relating to the markets in which your company operates. The aim?

  • To extract the essential information from the mass of data circulating in order to avoid information overload (infobesity);
  • without missing out on the information that is essential to your business development.

By gathering information on a regular basis, you can get a clearer picture of your competitive environment, technological advances and trends, so that you can effectively guide your marketing strategy. It is for these reasons that monitoring activities are particularly important at certain key moments: launching a product, conquering a new market, etc.

What are the benefits for your company?

  • 👍 Detecting opportunities and trends. Thanks to an appropriate monitoring strategy, you have vital information on developments in your market and the latest innovations. This ensures you don't get left behind.

  • 👍 Continuous improvement. Being aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your products or services, and keeping in touch with changing consumer needs, enables you to fine-tune your strategies.
    Monitoring also concerns your own brand: by finding out what's being said about you, you look after your e-reputation and your brand image.

  • 👍 Competitive advantage. Knowing what your competitors are doing (launching a new product, for example) means you won't be left behind. You can even stay one step ahead by keeping abreast of the latest trends, new technologies, socio-economic developments, etc.

  • 👍 Anticipating risks. Marketing intelligence allows you to detect opportunities... but also threats! In effect, you anticipate risks: the state of health of your suppliers, changes in regulations, societal upheavals, etc.

  • 👍 Greater efficiency. By targeting your business development and marketing initiatives more accurately and intelligently, you'll not only be more efficient, but also more effective in terms of ROI (return on investment).

The four types of marketing intelligence

There are many different types of intelligence, but there are generally four main ones:

Sales intelligence

Commercial intelligence focuses on your customers and suppliers.

It involves monitoring :

  • the behaviour of your customers. In this way, you can respond to their demand to build loyalty, but you can also detect new niches that are favourable to your company's development;
  • the reliability of your suppliers, so that you are always at the cutting edge of their expectations and avoid unpleasant surprises.

Competitive intelligence

You can only make the right decisions if you know what your competitors are doing. What are their digital communication strategies? What kind of marketing campaigns are they developing? Who are their new customers?

Competitive intelligence enables us to identify new opportunities and new areas for improvement, but also to detect threats (the launch of a special offer will not have the same impact if your competitor does the same, for example).

Technology watch

Technology watch, which focuses more on the product, is recommended to keep abreast of the latest advances in your field, so that you can:

  • innovate to reduce production costs and improve efficiency ;
  • capture market share by making the most appropriate choices.

Environmental monitoring

Environmental monitoring involves the study of various factors: legal, cultural, societal, political and so on. In other words, it involves identifying how certain changes, or even upheavals, are likely to impact your market:

  • new regulations
  • increase or decrease in purchasing power
  • demographic changes, etc.

Other types of market intelligence

Finally, other types of market intelligence are regularly discussed on the web. These include

  • Strategic intelligence: this covers all the other intelligence activities, and consists of identifying the best commercial strategy to adopt, particularly when major decisions have to be made (repositioning your brand, for example).

  • Image monitoring: as we have already mentioned, image monitoring also involves monitoring your own reputation. It therefore often goes hand in hand with the activities of the community manager and the analysis of social networks.

A few examples of monitoring

Marketing intelligence obviously depends on your field of action and your objectives. As a result, you will not pay attention to the same information depending on your activity.

Here are a few examples:

  • For a hotelier, it makes sense to monitor the prices and offers of competitors. Thanks to online booking platforms, consumers can compare different establishments in just a few clicks. The result? If the price is too high for the service on offer, Internet users will want to look elsewhere.

  • A restaurant owner, on the other hand, will be interested not only in prices, but also in the new trends that are having an ever-increasing impact on the food sector. By keeping an eye on the market and the competition, they will realise that it is a good idea to offer vegetarian or gluten-free dishes, so as not to run the risk of losing out on potential customers.

  • Finally, imagine a marketing director in the automotive industry who doesn't keep abreast of the technological advances available to him or the decisions taken by his competitors. You're in for a cold shower. Competitive intelligence is essential if we are to better understand the expectations of users of future vehicles.

How do you carry out marketing intelligence?

A few good practices to adopt

  • 1️⃣ Organise your monitoring around specific objectives. It's difficult to retain and analyse all the information out there. So you need to determine the subjects you want to monitor as a priority, based on your business needs. This will give you keywords on which to base your research, as well as your sources.

  • 2️⃣ Select your sources wisely. Once you have identified your objectives, it becomes easier to select the relevant sources of information.

    Now that monitoring is largely carried out on the Internet, we recommend that you subscribe to:

    • your competitors' newsletters, for competitive intelligence,
    • to those of the media focused on your market, if you want to keep abreast of new trends, changes in consumer aspirations, innovations, etc.

  • 3️⃣ Gather information regularly. Monitoring is not supposed to be a one-off activity: to be effective, it has to be ongoing. To be effective, it needs to be ongoing, so set aside time in your diary for this activity.

  • 4️⃣ Process the information you gather. Reports, tables... whatever format you choose, you need to process and synthesise all the data you have collected in order to extract the essential points in terms of the objectives you have previously identified. This work also enables information to be shared within the company.

Why use professional software to carry out your monitoring?

We recommend using professional marketing intelligence software. With this type of tool, you save time and run less risk of missing out on vital information.

Here are a few examples of the software available to you:

  • 🛠️ For all types of monitoring:

    • Feedly: Feedly is an RSS feed aggregator. In other words, it allows you to centralise publications from sources that interest you and categorise them using a system of tags.
    • Google Alerts: fast, simple and free, it lets you know what's new for the keywords you've pre-selected. What does it do? By alerting you when a new page on that keyword appears.

  • 🛠️ For competitive intelligence:

    • PriceComparator: this software automatically extracts a range of data on your competitors (prices, stocks, promotional offers, etc.) on a daily basis. This enables you to make the right decisions in terms of marketing strategy.

  • 🛠️ For image monitoring:

    • Mention: this tool gives you an overview of what's being said about you on the Internet. It also allows you to interact with others in order to maintain your brand image and e-reputation.
    • Visibrain: this software sends you real-time alerts by text message, email, Slack or Telegram on your subjects, so you can monitor your reputation with peace of mind .

By now you're familiar with all the issues surrounding marketing intelligence, the activity that helps you stay competitive, and even stay one step ahead of your competitors. But you still need to devote time to it, and do it wisely! Fortunately, there are tools available to ensure that you don't miss out on any strategic information... without overloading your schedule!

Article translated from French