Marketing intelligence is the data of every day that is relevant to the efforts regarding the marketing of a business.
After collecting this, the data needs to be analyzed and applied to make informed decisions related to the behaviors of the competitor, consumer trends, products, and even market opportunities.
Thus, to run a business successfully, you may need to perform effective market intelligence research.
Why is market intelligence research important?
The task of market intelligence research usually acts as the light that can successfully guide your team’s decisions.
By gathering and analyzing contextual data regarding the trends and behaviors of the industry and customers, marketers can clearly understand what is working and what isn’t.
Thus, companies can get an advantage over their competitors, inform them about the target audience, analyze insights and implement them into their products and services.
This marketing intelligence research can also be used to set future goals. Setting a clear goal beforehand can work for a long time to boost the scope and efficiency of your efforts regarding marketing intelligence.
In addition, clearly defining the roles, you wish this specific information to play makes it much easier to recognize the correct data that can work effectively.
The sources of marketing intelligence in research
1. Lifestage
Understanding the life stage of the buyers is an important building block or source of marketing intelligence research. You should know if your customers are single or married, whether they are homeowners, and many more.
Marketing to buyers who are buying a house for the first time is different from selling to retirees. Hence, the life stage of your customers can be regarded as one of the crucial sources of marketing research intelligence.
2. Demographics
Demographic can be considered as another crucial source or even element. Whenever you wish to have a complete picture of an audience, you should know about that audience by collecting demographic information like gender, age, and even his/her household income. This is an important stage in creating a complete data picture.
3. Online behaviors
You need to learn about consumers who have yet to purchase something based on signals like the content they are using and interests expressed by them through various channels like apps they are downloading or social media. These are those crucial datasets that you need to conduct successful marketing intelligence research and engage new audiences.
4. Purchase behavior
Some data available to business persons come from the method in which already existing consumers interact with a specific brand. Gathering knowledge about which products are occupying the shopping carts, browsed, or even purchased can offer some important pieces of data that may help in accurate market intelligence research. In this way, you can even determine who is your lifelong consumer and who is your first-time customer.
5. Media preferences
Business owners often pay attention to the customer’s behaviors onsite but forget a crucial part: how those consumers engage.
Collecting information regarding how long a customer is spending on the devices or what kinds of content they are using offers an important idea of which communication method can be perfect for responding to the target customers.
Therefore, while planning market intelligence research, you must carefully consider its important sources.
