What Is Market Intelligence? Types, Best Practices, And Use Cases

If you’re responsible for the success of a business and find yourself asking “Now what?” pretty often, chances are you lack data.

It’s crazy to think that companies still aren’t making the most out of data – even with so much of it already available at our fingertips – to propel their business forward. Markets today are evolving faster than ever. Even the slightest shift in customer perception or trends can make the market swing one way or the other.

Market trends don’t announce themselves in advance, nor do they wait for anyone to catch up. By the time you finish covering most of the groundwork, the industry will likely have already seen some changes, so you’re back to square one. That's why sales and marketing professionals use marketing intelligence software to understand consumer behavior and strategize operations. 

The goal of market intelligence is to provide you with benchmarks, trends, or forecasts that help you better understand the business environment changes and act accordingly. Market research, on the other hand, is completely different and aims to address a specific business question.

Market intelligence vs. market research

The key difference is that: market intelligence analyzes changing trends to help you come up with better business strategies, whereas market research answers specific business questions.

Market research refers to the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data for answering strategic business questions. For example, companies conduct market research studies to gain insights into product positioning, market gap, emerging needs and go-to market strategy. Market research insights help companies to address customer pain points and increase adoption as well as loyalty.

Market intelligence involves data collection, analysis, and reporting for monitoring consumer preferences, finding potential threats, and taking proactive measures. A market intelligence program complements market research to help businesses find changing trends and react accordingly. 

Why is market intelligence important?

We’re all guilty of scouring our competitors’ websites to get a pulse on what they’re up to, what new logos they’ve added to their list of growing customers, and what’s new in their product line-up. The problem is by the time all this information is up on their website, it’s already implemented and you’re only finding out about it along with the rest of the world.

To stay ahead of the competition, you can’t afford to be late to the party. Market intelligence is sort of the VIP pass to all the key customer feedback and marketing strategies you were probably missing out on.

Unlike business intelligence, where businesses are usually hyper-focused on ideation within their internal environment, to understand what the rest of the market is doing, external data is absolutely necessary to make any strategic move, big or small. This is the problem statement market intelligence aims to tackle.

While businesses already do their share of data gathering and draw their conclusions from the same, it certainly isn’t the whole picture. They’re just looking at data that is probably relevant to only their existing audience. It doesn’t tell you about the market segments that your business isn’t engaging with, emerging trends or crises that other teams would be unaware about for months, or how you fare against your direct or indirect competitors.

Market intelligence is real-time, actionable data about your audience, potential customers, and the competition. Like a weather forecast, it helps you anticipate what lies ahead. It guides your business’s decision-making by cutting through the noise out there in the market.

Gathering market intelligence helps businesses like yours get insights on the competitive landscape, the target market, customer trends, and specific buyer personas.

Types of market intelligence

Market intelligence isn’t just limited to one form of data – it covers information ranging across a broad spectrum of actionable industry insights. The burning question here is: what datasets should your business be looking at?

Here are the four main types of marketing intelligence:

1. Competitor intelligence

Competitor intelligence is like placing a finger on the pulse – getting a feel for what makes the industry beat faster.

Understanding your competitors’ strengths and their shortcomings allows you to evaluate how your product should position itself in the market as well as attract consumers’ attention. Constant monitoring what the competition is doing puts you at a competitive advantage and enables you to grab market opportunities before someone else recognizes them.

On the other side of the spectrum, closely following your competitors also helps you gain insight into what didn’t work for them, thus avoiding repeating something that wouldn’t be the best move for your business.

2. Product intelligence

Now that you’ve scoped out the competition, it’s time to take a look at how your product fares. There’s no point trying to make and sell lemonade when your lemons aren’t even ripe.

With product intelligence, you can get a better understanding about the way your product performs or how efficient your services are. Zeroing in on problems that your target audience is looking to solve allows your business to enhance your product line to include those crucial features. Think of it as using data to constantly build better products for your customers.

It’s a great way to validate your product and to see if your product roadmap is heading in the right direction. It's also a great opportunity to see if you need to undergo a new product exercise. Getting insight on which features are the most popular among your customer base, how the latest feature release has performed, and how your customers actually use the product can help make your product go from good to great.

Product intelligence can also help your business glean insights on what your competitors with similar products are doing and how your product compares. Analyzing what your competitors are missing with their product allows your brand to take advantage of the gaps in the industry before anyone else figures them out.

3. Customer intelligence

Customer understanding and product intelligence go hand-in-hand. A better product implies a better customer experience. Understanding the customer becomes key to understanding what kind of user experience they are looking for from your product.

The goal for any business is to retain their customers. While closing deals with new customers is always welcome, customer retention should be a business priority.

The perception a customer may have with your product can vary considerably from time-to-time. This stresses upon the need for comprehensive artificial intelligence that not only retrieves specific customer data, but to display it in a way that’s easy to understand and gives you quick insights on what your customers need, what they’re looking for, and what they’re not getting from your business.

It’s also a great way to monitor how your competitors’ customers feel. Any time your competitor has missed the mark with its customer service, your marketing team can immediately move in to make a quick steal with the help of targeted campaigns.

4. Market understanding

There’s nothing worse than realizing that significant features in your product have become obsolete after months of research and development (R&D) just because the rules of the game changed.

In an ideal world, your business is the only one solving a specific problem. In reality, there are probably a dozen or so solutions in the market that are catering to the same niche as you. This is where market understanding comes into the picture.

Understanding consumer demands and their needs can help a business significantly increase their market share and revenue, as well as see any new areas of growth potential within the existing market. It could also hint at new geographies that haven’t been tapped yet and are worth exploring.

How to turn market intelligence data into action

Now that you’ve gathered all the data from all the possible sources of information, what do you do with it? How do you turn this data into something executable?

Data can be a big window into what everyone is doing. Naturally, picking up what works great and quickly dropping activities that don’t see much impact is the way to go. Observing what tools and techniques your well-performing competitors are adopting is a great cheat sheet of sorts to cut through most of the fluff.

Again, different data can point to different goals and targets. Deriving utility out of market intelligence depends on what area you want to tackle first.

This could be:

• Using keywords that haven’t been on your radar in your copywriting or content
• Targeting audiences in a region that you haven’t set foot in yet
• Turbocharging your marketing campaigns for maximum reach using the right channels at the right times
• Exploring hashtags and themes that help put your content at the top of everyone’s social media feeds
• Tweaking sales decks that communicate your product offerings better
• Understanding why your leads failed to convert
• Finding influencers that you should reach out to
• Discovering affiliates you should be partnering with

This is just a small set of use cases in a broad range of possibilities that market intelligence can open up with its data. While fresh data can give rise to new changes periodically, it certainly helps create strategies and assets ahead of time in anticipation of these changes.

How to evaluate and set market intelligence goals

Data is only as good as the questions you ask. As much as we like instant gratification, market intelligence cannot promise ready-made solutions unless your business starts asking specific questions.

Before you start gathering market intelligence data, establishing specific objectives in advance can serve to strengthen your marketing intelligence efforts and its reach. Furthermore, it is easier to map the correct data across various marketing channels by specifically defining the function that needs information. Measuring the effectiveness of market intelligence is only possible when you take the time to determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business – both qualitative and quantitative.

While goals vary from organization to organization, most businesses, at their core, look at achieving a few fundamental targets:

1. If your sales team is looking at a higher quantity and quality of leads, your market intelligence goals should answer questions like:
    
   • “What is the target audience we should be engaging with?”
   • “What new markets have we not explored yet?”
   • “What are our competitors doing to engage with potential customers?”
2. If your marketing team is looking at creating targeted marketing campaigns that are effective, you should gather market intelligence data that answers questions like:
    
   • “What are the kind of campaigns that our competitors are launching?”
   • “How is our competitor’s SEO strategy? What kind of keywords are they targeting?”
   • “What kind of campaigns resonate well with our target demographic?”
3. If your product team is looking at improving user experience and increasing the product life cycle, you should set your market intelligence goals to answer questions such as:
    
   • “Who are our product champions? What do they like most about our product?”
   • “Did our product upgrade cause the desired change in behavior amongst our users?”
   • “What features do our users like the least?”

What to consider while gathering market intelligence

The number one rule of adopting market intelligence into your business is “to tweak your approach on the fly."

Data is dynamic. From customer sentiments to current affairs, change is the only constant you can be sure of. It makes sense then that any market strategy needs to be consistently monitored.

Simply adopting market intelligence does not give you the license to become lazy. Even though it would be easier to just make a few major changes at certain touchpoints and call it a day, market intelligence is all about depth.

To be the best, you have to assume every other business out there is putting their best foot forward. Your business runs the risk of losing market share and missing out on a lot of invaluable market insights if you don’t monitor what everyone’s doing and accordingly tweak your strategy to see consistent impact.

Market intelligence checklist

Goals not only vary from organization to organization – they even vary within an organization.

While everyone may be on the same page about where the business should go, different levels will focus on different things to get there. If your business is looking to invest in market intelligence tools, it helps to have a checklist specific to each level.

At a team level

It’s no surprise that sales and marketing teams would be the primary users for market intelligence tools. With both teams requiring copious amounts of data to execute their respective strategies, it becomes crucial to find a system that can provide real-time insights at the click of a button.

Identifying high-quality leads and determining the most effective channels to engage with them can cut down the time required to research leads and focus more on pushing prospects down the funnel.

At an organization level

Key stakeholders in the organization may be more concerned with what their direct and indirect competitors are up to, what they’re saying to potential customers, how their product is reviewed in the market, and how they’re acquiring the right talent for crucial roles. Market intelligence tools provide a window to all that and more so that any organization can determine what positioning and messaging seems relevant in the industry today.

At an industry level

Perhaps the most dynamic use of market intelligence can be seen across an industry level. Sometimes there is a goldmine of opportunities that haven’t been explored but could be staring you right in your face. Market intelligence helps answer some of the broader questions, like what the industry as a whole can offer, what it needs right now, and how you can leverage gaps within it.

Market intelligence tools

Market intelligence software gathers client-focused market information and publicly available data to help businesses gain insights from industry trends. Sales and marketing teams often use marketing intelligence systems in tandem with competitive intelligence software to learn more about the market and competitors. 

To be included in this category, the software product must:

• Gather and provide market-focused data from different sources
• Analyze market segment or customer monitoring data collected
• Offer actionable market insights to users
• Ensure data accuracy and quality

1. Similarweb

Similarweb is a digital marketing and research intelligence platform helping organizations with audience analysis, keyword research, market research, and ad intelligence. It also features shopper intelligence capabilities to help companies gauge consumer demand and shopper behavior.

What users like best:

"I've been using SimilarWeb for a few months now, and it's a game-changer for anyone serious about understanding website analytics and consumer behavior. The interface? Clean and intuitive. The data? Ridiculously accurate and actionable.

What really sets SimilarWeb apart is its ability to give you an in-depth look at your competitors' web traffic and strategies. It's like having a spyglass into what the other players in your space are doing, which is gold for strategizing your own moves.

Also, their customer support is on point. Had a few queries when I started, and they guided me through like pros. If you're sitting on the fence about this, my advice: jump in. You'll wonder how you ever made decisions without it."

- Similarweb Review, Ian James O.

What users dislike:

"One minor drawback I encountered is that it can be a bit challenging to initially navigate and extract data from the platform. Nevertheless, with time and familiarization, everything becomes more straightforward."

- Similarweb Review, Marco O.

2. ZoomInfo SalesOS

ZoomInfo SalesOS is a sales intelligence platform that offers B2B companies with accurate insights, intelligence, and purchase intent data that reveal ready-to-buy companies. It also features conversation intelligence capabilities to help you capture and analyze customer meetings, emails, and interactions.

What users like best:

"ZoomInfo SalesOS has been the haulmark of businesses to bring out the best holistic approach across various departments like sales, customer support, and TA. It can be used frequently for gathering right business personas. The seamless integration of the tool makes things easier to implement. Customer support has been great as well if and when things goes wrong."

- ZoomInfo SalesOS Review, Cholarajan J.

What users dislike:

"One notable drawback of ZoomInfo SalesOS is its price. For small businesses and startups, it can be even higher. If you have a small budget, it can be difficult to justify the investment. Although the platform is powerful, the learning curve may be steep for some users. If you are a first-time user, it may take some time to fully understand the features.

Though it has excellent data quality, some users have expressed concerns about the amount of data available in certain fields and industries. Not all markets are comprehensively covered. The customer support has been widely praised, but there have been instances where users have had issues with responsiveness and problem resolution."

- ZoomInfo SalesOS Review, Ravi R.

3. Semrush

Semrush is search engine optimization tool helping organizations conduct competitor marketing research for online marketing results. Businesses use this platform to dive deep into competitors' strategies and create theirs accordingly.

What users like best:

"Semrush saves hours of my effort because it allows to do intense competitive research, their traffic analytics, their content strategy, source of organic traffic, and most importantly-- the keyword gap. I almost everyday use its keyword magic tool and it gives fine results always. Although very rarely, but I also use on-page features of semrush such as for site auditing, seo content template, and the on-page seo checker. I only want to say one thing that semrush is a package full of advanced seo and content management tool. None of my work can be accomplished with Semrush and its simple to use. There's no complicated feature that needs users to have expertise in SEO."

- Semrush Review, Rehnuma K. 

What users dislike:

"When using the Semrush site audit tool, there are a number of different items to account for. Between "warnings" and "errors" and "issues". It's clear errors should be dealt with as first priority (or at least it is to me) but after that it just seems that fixing an "issue" can result in more "warnings" and it's hard to know how to prioritize those items. Almost seems intentionally confusing."

- Semrush Review, Dan S.

4. AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a leading market intelligence and search platform that tech companies use to gain critical market insights and act faster. The platform lets you monitor insights across industries, topics, and trends from 10,000+ data sources.

What users like best:

"I were able to maximized the research outcome but spending very little hours after implementing AlphaSense. Features like custom dashboard monitoring alerts help me to receive the latest news on the topic that I set. Easy integration between financial analysis and Excel reduce manual works."

- AlphaSense Review, Aaliyah P.

What users dislike:

"Too many data on the dashboard can be a distraction on which I need to focus first. Lack of integration with Google Mail is also one of the issues. Still, it is one of the finest tools I have use."

- AlphaSense Review, Robert M.

5. Crunchbase

Crunchbase is an all-in-one prospecting software that helps companies find target prospects, access verified contact data, and connect with decision-makers. The platform also provides company data, so you can stay on top of industry trends, revenue data, and firmographics.

What users like best:

"We have so many other prospecting tools in the market that provide insights on companies and target personas. But Crunchbase is so updated that it easily gathers all live time data and helps me with personalized information on my target audience. Integration with HubSpot as well is so seamless that I can easily bulk export accounts from Crunchbase."

- Crunchbase Review, Saheed A. 

What users dislike:

"The limit on the number of companies/ funding round one can download at one go is 1000. This should be increases as one has to download data again and again in multiple batches due to this."

- Crunchbase Review, Srishty M.

Good data gives you insights; great data gives you impact

Market intelligence doesn’t promise to be an automatic solution for all of your business problems. It does, however, promise to make your work easier, more efficient, and more accurate than it could ever be without a data-driven strategy.

Using market intelligence for product positioning or entering new market? Learn the basics of go-to-market strategy to set yourself up for success. 

This article was originally published in 2020. It has been updated with new information.