Market intelligence is critical to a successful business. This article will walk you through what exactly market intelligence means and how you can start increasing market intelligence to your business’s advantage.
What Are the Components of Market Intelligence?
You should be aware of the overarching trends in your industry. When it comes to market intelligence, there are four components that you need to monitor.
Keep an eye on these four aspects of the market to help you stay ahead in your industry.
1. Your own position in the market
How are you doing compared to the competition? Where do your own strengths and weaknesses lie?
2. Your key competitors
Who regularly competes with you for customers? Whose products are similar to your own? Which companies might be creating content that is drawing attention away from your business?
3. Products in your industry
What products do you offer compared to the competition? How does your selection of features or options compare to theirs? How do your competitors market or display their products?
4. Customer sentiment
How do customers feel about your competition? Are your competitors regularly receiving different customer reactions than you are?
Market research helps you figure out how your industry works. You’ll need to identify the hottest trends and the major threats that might be headed your way.
Paying attention to these market features will help make sure you don’t get lost in the shuffle. It’s easy to get so caught up in managing your business that you forget to keep track of how you’re doing compared to those around you. Don’t let that happen to you. The professionals at Archintel can make sure you stay up to date on the market intelligence you need to be at the forefront of your industry.
4 Key Steps to Start Increasing Market Intelligence
When it comes to market intelligence, there are some simple steps you can take to start increasing your awareness of your industry. It can be difficult to gather valuable market intelligence on your own, though, which is why the professionals at Archintel are ready to research your industry and help you get your competitive edge back.
Figure out where you stand in your industry
That’s where a SWOT analysis can help.
A SWOT analysis forces you to look at your strengths and weaknesses to get a better picture of your position in the market. Then you’ll need to evaluate potential opportunities and threats in your industry.
Sitting down with your team to identify your own strengths and weaknesses is incredibly valuable. That insight gives you a sense of where you need to improve and where you’re already excelling. Then you can start figuring out what might present threats to your business so that you can start preparing for them.
This insight will allow you to target specific areas of weakness or threat in the rest of your market analysis, which means you can research more efficiently.
Investigate your major competitors
After you’ve evaluated where you stand in your industry, it’s time to focus on your key competitors. Knowing what the competition is up to is a huge part of market intelligence.
Conducting a competitor analysis will help you narrow your focus and identify your industry’s key competitors. Once you’ve identified them, you can start researching them. How do they advertise? What’s their social media presence like? Are they offering new promotions or deals? How does their product selection differ from yours—more features or options? Have they made any innovative changes?
Free online competitor analysis templates will give you the space to answer these questions as you gather more insight about your competitors. Keeping track of your competitive landscape is critical to staying ahead of it.
Find out how your customers feel
You care what your customers think. Customer opinion has always governed much of business because if your customers aren’t satisfied, something’s wrong. Quality market intelligence should answer how customers are responding to your competitors.
Check out product review sites or look for reviews on your competition’s product pages. Online forums like Reddit and Quora can also be goldmines for evaluating customer sentiment. Look for indications of what customers would like to see or what makes them happiest about your competitors’ products. Does your competition offer a better product variety? Can they fulfill orders faster? Have they managed to lower their price?
You can even go a step further and ask your own customers how they decided to choose your business. Send out customer feedback surveys that ask customers what factors were important to them in their product search.
Getting a better idea of customer sentiment surrounding your competition can help you better compete with them.
Conduct a competitive product analysis
Now you need to home in on your competition’s products. What separates your products from the competition? What different features does the competition offer? How quickly can they produce and distribute their products? In what ways do your competitors advertise and market their products? These are the kinds of questions a competitive product analysis will answer.
Strong market intelligence depends on a comprehensive investigation of the products in your industry. Pay close attention to how your competitors display their products because knowing their marketing strategy is almost as important as knowing their products themselves. Keep an eye on patent databases to see what innovative developments or technologies your competitors have started using.
A thorough competitive product analysis can help you quickly identify the areas where your products might need some work. Use the intelligence to learn from your competitors and improve your own products.
Increasing Market Intelligence with Archintel
The professionals at Archintel are uniquely suited to help you track down critical information about your competition. They know how to monitor your market to make sure you’re aware of any major threats or weaknesses before they become a problem.
With Archintel, you can count on quality market insight delivered to you daily. You’ll be able to make smarter decisions with the confidence that you’re keeping your business competitive.
Let the experts at Archintel help you stay on top of the competition. Get in touch with Archintel today!