What is Marketing Intelligence, and How Can it Help My Brand?
Whether you’re writing a business plan or optimizing your current marketing strategy, it’s essential to analyze your competitors, your differentiators, and the overall landscape of your industry. Without a 360-degree view of your sector’s past, present, and future, you’re at risk of missing golden opportunities for growth. For this reason, forward-thinking business decision-makers are investing in marketing intelligence.
If you're interested in how to get a comprehensive view of your industry, Ethos Copywriting, a full-service marketing firm, is here to help. In this piece, we define marketing intelligence, highlight its benefits, and give you examples that underscore its importance for any brand.
What is Marketing Intelligence?
Marketing intelligence (also known as intelligence data, business intelligence, and competitor intelligence) is the systematic practice of gathering, analyzing, and leveraging relevant industry information. Doing so typically entails gathering data on your competitors, customers, and your own company. Brands can use the insights they gain through marketing intelligence to:
Determine their differentiators
Discover their competitive advantage
Develop a more attractive company culture
Find their customer’s real wants and needs
Identify untapped opportunities
Optimize their content marketing strategy
Simply put: Marketing intelligence is about gathering the actionable information you need to make better decisions about your marketing.
The Benefits of Marketing Intelligence
From the name of your products to the look of your branding, rigorous marketing intelligence can give you insights into every aspect of your marketing strategy. Align this data-gathering initiative with well-defined key performance indicators (KPIs), and you have a recipe for success.
More specifically, marketing intelligence will:
Boost in-store & online traffic
Improve search ranking
Increase the number of sales and leads
Open up new growth opportunities
Yield deeper competitive insights
Map out your customer journey
To get the most out of your marketing intelligence initiatives, you'll want to define clear objectives to ensure you gain the right information that helps you make decisions. Whether you're looking for new markets or determining why a competitor's business is skyrocketing, you'll want to spell that out first to ensure your marketing team is working toward the most impactful objectives.
Quantitative & Qualitative Data
Price points. Customer feedback. Backlink opportunities. Industry Trends. Online traffic. You can gather data on just about anything. With clearly defined goals, a marketing intelligence professional can help you determine what data is most useful in helping you achieve your goals.
In broadest terms, marketing intelligence research will result in two types of data: quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative data is countable and measurable. In other words, it’s based on numbers. Quantitative data will give you insights into how many, how much, or how often a particular action or event happens. This type of data is objective and universal. For example, you may want to track how many followers or mentions you have on social media, how many backlinks you have from online publications and influencers, or how much website traffic or return visits you have on your website.
Conversely, market researchers need to collect qualitative data. Qualitative data requires professionals to interpret responses from or observations of a given audience. While it's subjective, it offers brands a deeper understanding of how and why an action or event happened. Researchers amass qualitative data by interviewing subjects, observing behavior, and interpreting messaging. For instance, many brands conduct consumer interviews to understand what specific features people want in a product or service, why certain brands are appealing, or how they discover new goods and services.
Competitor Intelligence
Two of the most common goals of marketing intelligence are understanding the competition and predicting how a specific industry is changing. There are nearly endless examples of brands that have leveraged the power of marketing intelligence and equally as many cautionary tales of those who didn't.
Borders is a prime example of a business that didn't pivot to online sales as fast as its competitors. Amazon revolutionized how people bought books, and other book stores knew they'd have to adapt quickly to a new market. Seeing the public's rapid adoption of eCommerce, Barnes & Noble developed its eReader, the NOOK, and set its sights on online sales in conjunction with in-store purchases. Because they adapted quickly, Barnes & Noble is still in business, whereas Borders boarded up its final storefront in 2011.
The exterior of the last remaining Blockbuster Video location in Bend, OR as seen in August 2018 Photo Credit: Coasterlover1994, CC BY-SA 4.0
Blockbuster Video also failed to invest in marketing intelligence. Their lack of understanding of where the industry was heading sent them plummeting from 10,000 stores worldwide to one single location in Bend, Oregon. In the early 2000s, Netflix founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph approached the video rental giant to see if they wanted to purchase their company for $50 million (a company that is now worth over $100 billion). Unfortunately, Blockbuster didn't have the foresight to see where the market was heading and completely missed the boat on streaming media.
While Polaroid pictures are now back in vogue, the company itself didn't have a full panorama of the photography landscape. Stuck on film, the company didn't anticipate how digital cameras would change the scene. But that issue alone wasn't the only reason they had to shutter their business in 2001.
Along with their competitor, Kodak, they failed to see how people were using their photos. As technology progressed, people shifted from filling photo albums with pictures to uploading them to their social media feeds, posting them on personal blogs, and saving them digitally on their computers and in the cloud. On the flip side, companies such as Canon, Nikon, and Sony had a clear picture of the shifting digital landscape and prioritized digitization early on.
Where is Your Brand Going?
To ensure long-term success, it's critical that you have the right information for intelligent, efficient decision-making. Whether you're ramping up new lines of products, transitioning to eCommerce, or trying to get more visitors to your brick-and-mortar location, you can leverage the power of marketing intelligence to make it happen. If you're interested in learning about gaining these essential business insights, reach out to Ethos Copywriting by visiting our contact page.