What Is Market Intelligence And Why Do CMOs Need It?

Knowledge is power in any business environment. The more you know about your industry, your competitors and your target audience, the better positioned you’ll be to earn conversions and drive growth.

For Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), market intelligence represents one of the most powerful tools available for increasing ROI. With market intelligence, you can gain a behind-the-scenes understanding of what it really takes to develop powerful relationships with your audience, which lead to repeat, lucrative sales.

The same insights will also help you to set yourself apart from the competition, discover new opportunities for product development and growth, and unlock new avenues for sales.

Let’s explore the benefits of market intelligence, and why it’s a must have for CMOs.

What Is Market Intelligence?

Market intelligence is the name used to refer to a collection of data from multiple sources, curated to provide insights into your company’s status within its market. Your market intelligence assesses a number of different factors responsible for determining the success of your company.

For instance, it looks at customer data, competitor information, problems, and challenges in your industry, and even changing trends related to your products. Using a market intelligence tool, a CMO can combine various data points, from customer data, to surveys, social media metrics, and purchasing information, to determine the next stage in a marketing campaign or strategy.

Crucially, market intelligence is not the same as business intelligence. While market intelligence focuses on external information like customer demographics, geographic information and competitor performance, business intelligence looks at internal company performance, like the total number of sales made by individual employees, or the number of products shipped.

To understand how market intelligence works better, you should familiarize yourself with the basic methods to obtain it. These include:

• Surveys: They usually involve a set of questions organized in a precise manner to collect information from your target market, which you then analyze to develop market intelligence. To get more reliable results from surveys, having a larger group of people as your participants is crucial. Surveys can also be performed through a variety of channels. These include online surveys, in-person surveys, and mail surveys. 
• Personal Interviews: They’re open-ended, unstructured questionnaires that can be used to explore a certain topic, product, or service in an in-depth manner. 
• Field Trials: They’re like doing real-time experiments, such as putting a product in certain stores to see how customers respond to them. 
• Observation: In some cases, the information gathered using other types may not be sufficient to provide you with insights into customers’ buying attitudes or behaviors. This is where observation comes into play. Direct monitoring can collect more valuable data about customer habits, preferences, and buying patterns while also catching nuances that mechanical methods can’t measure. 

These methods can help you obtain the data you need for market intelligence. But as a CMO, you may sometimes find them insufficient for developing a more effective marketing strategy. If that’s the case for you, checking out reliable resource websites may be an excellent idea. For example, Product 360 and other similar platforms provide a collection of resources that help you identify crucial areas that need to be addressed to succeed in the market. 

The Benefits of Market Intelligence for CMOs

To be successful in today’s competitive landscape, organizations need to develop comprehensive marketing strategies which create positive customer relationships, drive leads, and establish loyalty among their target audience group.

The main challenge with this is figuring out how to devise strategies which resonate effectively with your customer. Market intelligence solves this problem, by providing an in-depth understanding of your customer base, and giving you a crucial overview of important information. Primarily, CMOs need market intelligence for the following reasons.

1. To Understand Market Position

To create a plan for successful business growth, CMOs first need to understand the position of the business in the existing market. No company exists in a vacuum. Market intelligence can see you how you compare to your competitors in terms of pricing and structure, and what sort of audience you’re more likely to appeal to based on your business strategy.

With market intelligence, you can get a 360-degree view of your position in a current landscape, which can help you to determine next-step opportunities to branch into different markets and connect with new potential customers. More importantly, the right information will give you a closer view of things like changes in market demand, and trends which might be influencing your customers.

Analyzing the information you collect about your market position will help you to determine how you’re going to approach your new marketing campaigns. For instance, if you know you have a strong presence in the luxury market, you can target your campaigns specifically towards people with a higher income, who may be searching for luxury products.

2. To Evaluate Product Potential

Marketing experts like CMOs need to highlight the key USPs of their product in the most engaging way possible to attract potential customers.

Market intelligence allows business leaders to step into the shoes of their customers and find out what kind of benefits are most appealing to them.

With your market intelligence surveys, you can find out things like why your customers are purchasing your products in the first place, and what they appreciate most about your brand. This information can help you to create marketing campaigns which resonate with customer pain points, expectations, and desires.

3. To Find Your Target Audience

Market intelligence, when used correctly, can help you to understand your audience on a deeper level. It can give you an insight into what kind of customers are already buying your products and services, and what kind of clients you might be able to target in the future.

Using market intelligence, companies can develop in-depth customer personas to help them make more relevant marketing campaigns, catered to the interest of their target audience.

As a CMO, there are few things more beneficial than a deeper understanding of your audience.

4. To Know Your Competitors

Successfully using market intelligence to your advantage also means gaining a deeper understanding of your competition, and how you’re placed in the industry compared to other brands.

Gathering information about your competitors will make it easier for you to determine how you can differentiate yourself from other brands and target the market segments that they’re under-serving.

A successful insight into your competitors with market intelligence can also help to inspire your upcoming marketing campaigns, giving you new ideas on methodologies and marketing channels you might be able to use to reach your audience.

Leveraging Market Intelligence

Market intelligence is an extremely powerful tool for business leaders in general and CMOs specifically, simply because it helps you to understand your position in the current industry, and how to leverage new opportunities.

Your market intelligence could help you to determine new potential audiences for your company if you’re planning on expanding your operations, while it also enables you to pinpoint areas where you can differentiate yourself from the competition.