Data control the world at the moment. Keeping track of your industry and your market can help your business grow and be more profitable. It can help you get a better understanding of your market and use all that information to provide better products or services to your customers. Moreover, you can notice your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and try to find ways to use all that to your advantage.
A common mistake is that people think that market intelligence and business intelligence are the same. This is not the case. Unlike market intelligence, which provides you data for the whole market, business intelligence provides you data and information specifically for your company. Market intelligence assists companies in analyzing the overall environment in which they operate and trade. With this analysis, they can detect potential dangers they may face or opportunities that they could exploit, to get bigger and stronger. But how can you collect market intelligence? Below you will find ways to gather all the data you need for market intelligence.
Your existing clients
Your customers are your most powerful source of information and, also, one of the cheapest ways to collect market intelligence. Most of the time, your customers, since you have gained their trust with your products or services, will be willing to provide you feedback. Your sales team can take over the task of being in touch with your customers and record their opinion and feedback. The use of a CRM system can be really helpful in this kind of situations because you can store there all the data and people from different departments can have access and learn what they can improve in the product or service in their field of expertise.
Web analytics
Your analytics can also help with market intelligence. Through web analytics, you can see every interaction that the user is having with your website. Things like where the users come from, what do they do once they arrive on the website, how many of them add something in their basket and then leave the website etc. are data that can provide valuable insights about your customers’ behavior. You can exploit this information to start a marketing strategy campaign that will fit better to your users’ needs.
Assign the job to an expert
If you can afford to hire a market intelligence expert, do it. They are people who know exactly what to do and will provide you with the most insightful data, once the process is done. You will have a better understanding of your market and will learn about new opportunities of which you can take advantage of and will give you the chance to further expand your company.
Surveys
As mentioned above, you can take advantage of your existing customers to gather market intelligence. This can be done by sending them a survey or a questionnaire, to get the feedback you need. Moreover, this survey can be sent to the clients as an automated message once they have received their order and not many days later because it is likely possible to ignore it. When their interest is still focused on you and your product, this is the right time to approach them.
Do not ignore market intelligence. It may give you the opportunity, if you handle it correctly, to even get a competitive advantage in your market and see your profits rise faster than ever.
