What Is Market Intelligence?
To build a successful SaaS B2B marketing strategy, you need to know your target market, ideal buyers, and key competitors. A market intelligence report allows you to summarize your knowledge regarding the market you want to penetrate. The more information you have regarding the game and its main players, the more informed decisions you’ll be able to make. But how do you collect this data? Let’s start by saying that you have internal and external data. The latter is gathered from easily accessible public information, including press releases, market analyst reports, and social listening. Companies typically conduct SEO competitor analysis to identify the tactics their competitors use to succeed. Internal data refers to information you gather that stays within your walls. It can be customer relationship management (CRM) data, website analytics, and company feedback. Basically, you analyze and optimize your company’s performance.
Competitive marketing intelligence shows you past and future trends and products and what the competitive landscape looks like. Therefore, you can strategize your next moves without worrying about shooting in the dark. As we proceed, you’ll find out more about the importance of competitive intelligence research and how to gather valuable data.
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Market Intelligence Vs. Market Research
These two may sound like brother and sister, but the truth is they are distantly related. A market intelligence report includes detailed information about your industry, competitors, products, customers, trends, and market conditions. It helps you get a comprehensive idea of your market and its needs, whether you want to create your market penetration strategy or grow in the same niche. It’s an ongoing process that never stops simply because the market is changing all the time, and you must be aware of every little modification.
On the other hand, market research is often part of online market intelligence, aiming to uncover problems your target audience faces regarding a specific product. A SaaS marketing strategy may use surveys, questionnaires, and interviews to identify their audience’s perception of a product or burning matter. Using this data, you can create content that offers answers and positions you as a thought leader in your field. Additionally, market research shows you which companies have the biggest market share, what the average pricing is, and how others foster customer loyalty.
Reasons You Need To Create A Market Intelligence Report
1. Expand Your Business
Entering a new market is challenging for a variety of reasons, including lack of trust, cost disadvantages, regulations, capital requirements, and retaliation. Jumping into a snake pit without preparation can cause you great anguish and failure. That’s why competitive intelligence research should be part of your SaaS sales strategy when you want to break into a new market or expand in your existing industry. Surveys and in-depth research help you understand the landscape of the new market, its peculiarities, and demand for your new product. Ask distributors and vendors to inform you about the best way to introduce new products to a new market. Also, industry experts can let you know about market trends you must be aware of.
Your competitive intelligence report will show you who your key competitors are, what they offer, and how they appeal to their customers. How do their B2B content marketing techniques help them stay at the top of the game? Knowing this helps you make informed decisions based on pure facts instead of assumptions.
2. Diminish Investment Risk
Entering a new market with a brand-new product or releasing a new service to your existing market is always risky. So, before investing time and money into developing a product, enforce competitive intelligence to identify whether your product niche is saturated and how your competitors attract customers. Do they advertise on social media and Google? Do they create press releases before launching a product? What types of content do they create to engage audiences? Market intelligence offers all this information, including market trends and purchasing behaviors. How? You can analyze large product transaction databases to pinpoint trends that push people to make a purchase.
User experience, for instance, is very important, as you may notice that your website’s checkout page is poorly designed and slow. These seemingly small details can have a significant impact on sales. One of the benefits of AI in marketing is offering automatic data regarding your product’s quality and how it would perform if released to the market.
3. Stay At The Top
How can a market intelligence report help you when you already hold the crown of your industry or specific product niche? Market intel keeps you updated regarding the newcomers, their unique products, and the market’s trending topics. Sure, you may be the best right now, but the goal is to get even more people to buy your product and ensure no one will reach your level any time soon. To achieve this, you must know your competitors well and what their future plans are. You may look for product differentiators, product benefits, technological improvements, pricing models, business funding, and marketing approaches. If your competitors leverage channels you don’t, maybe you should reconsider your social media strategy and include other platforms, too. To gather all this invaluable information, you can interview industry experts, former employees, and vendors and look at financial reports.
4. Develop Brand Positioning
One of the many things that instill trust in customers and set you apart from your competitors is brand positioning. Your identity must be carefully crafted so prospects know who you are and have a positive perception of your brand. Therefore, a market intelligence report allows you to check your competitors’ brand positioning and the things that distinguish you from them. How does your message differ from others in the field, and how uniquely do you tackle your target audience’s struggles and pain points? If you are new in the game and want to get more customers, you should identify the brand positioning of other businesses. Their target market demographics and needs, how they will meet customer requirements, and product differentiators should all be visible in a company’s positioning. Additionally, a competitor intelligence report should show you how others reassure consumers about their promises. Why should anyone take their word for it and trust that they will deliver on their assurances?
5. Target Customer Segments
Market segmentation refers to dividing your audience into ideal buyer personas based on their needs and preferences. Chances are you don’t appeal to only one type of buyer, as various people with different backgrounds, objectives, and characteristics may be interested in your product. You should segment these personas and create content that aligns with their requirements. Therefore, targeted advertising and content creation increase your chances of making a sale.
Let’s take an LMS company as an example. Various people from the same company may be looking into a specific LMS, including a financial manager, HR manager, and developer. The first one may be mostly interested in pricing as the budget might be tight. An HR manager, though, cares about features and development opportunities for employees. On the other hand, a developer wants to know how the LMS is integrated into the company’s system and how easy it is to navigate. For this reason, you must create content that offers answers to all three personas’ questions.
Ways To Gather Market Intelligence Data
1. Customer Feedback
Award-winning companies don’t make things happen overnight. They consult with market intelligence agencies to create reports regarding their market and how customers feel about their services. Building a solid feedback system is essential in ensuring clients love what you offer and trust you wholeheartedly. Surveys, polls, and questionnaires are wonderful for customer intelligence as they are easy to distribute to your clients via email. Interviews and focus groups are also valuable tools that offer you deep knowledge about market trends, behavioral patterns, and competitor tactics. You may interview industry experts, customers, employees, and even competitors. This way, you can make strategic decisions that will accelerate business growth and hopefully propel you ahead of the competition.
2. Competitor Analysis
Marketing business intelligence isn’t complete without competitor analysis. It’s the process of identifying their differentiators, strengths, and weaknesses and how all these stack up compared to your brand. You get the chance to analyze their sales and marketing tactics, SaaS growth strategy, and market position. But don’t get confused. Your goal isn’t to copy their techniques blindly or undercut their pricing. You simply identify their strong and weak points, so you identify opportunities you can leverage. For instance, you may take a look at their reviews and see which complaints are often replayed. Lean on that weakness to express how better you are at that specific area.
A market intelligence report including a competitor analysis allows SaaS startups to know their key differentiators. Don’t check only the top dogs in the game but also businesses the same size or even smaller than yours. This way, you may discover new competitors and a more accurate depiction of your target audience. Don’t forget to set benchmarks for your research intelligence, including KPIs and various metrics. Try to check these as frequently as possible.
3. SEO And Keywords
Search Engine Optimization is a process you can’t skip if you want to beat the competition. Why? Well, two-thirds of the total clicks on Google go to the first five organic results. To achieve this feat, you must find competitor keywords and create content based on them. Platforms like Ahrefs allow you to check how frequently a keyword is used and how hard it would be to rank for it. Once you know the terms people use to search online, you will be able to create relevant content that appeals to your target audience’s needs and preferences. Or, if your key competitors have written articles on high-demand topics, you should follow their lead and create curious reads. However, when you do keyword research, don’t focus on high-volume but high-intent phrases. The reason is that while you may get fewer clicks, they will most likely be more targeted.
How can you do a comprehensive SEO competitive analysis, though? Simple SEO skills may not be enough. In this case, you should think about collaborating with a content marketing agency, like eLearning Industry. Seasoned marketing experts can help you gather market intelligence data by performing an SEO audit and helping you build a link-building strategy. Consequently, a carefully curated editorial calendar can attract the right kind of customers and help you generate qualified leads.
4. Your Target Market
Another great way to fill your market intelligence report is by attending industry events, conferences, award shows, and other relevant instances. These happenings help you get closer to your target audience and talk to them directly about your product and its features. Also, you should ask them their opinion about your services and any problems they encountered while using them. Or maybe explain why they chose a competitor instead of you. Therefore, you know where you stand and what you must improve. Additionally, industry events help you stay updated regarding industry news and innovations.
Yet, how will anyone even know you will be present at a certain event? You should publish a press release to established online channels and websites that people in your niche often visit. Email marketing is another tool you should leverage. For example, instead of just sending a reminder to your audience, you can purchase a featured placement on another business’s weekly newsletter. As a result, you increase your reach and brand visibility.
5. Industry Developments
A market intelligence company would tell you that it’s very easy to collect your online data. And they would not be lying. There are many free and premium sources you can refer to to gather insights for your SaaS B2B marketing efforts. For instance, you can search for trade publications, industry reports, and statistics. Therefore, you will know the state of the market you operate in and the trends that appear. Also, you gather information about your key competitors and how they are performing under these circumstances. Maybe they took advantage of a trend that appeared not long ago and increased their sales significantly. Such an example proves that staying updated helps you remain competitive by making informed decisions.
What Is Competitive PPC Intelligence?
We already talked about SEO competitor analysis and identifying powerful keywords, but pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a category of their own. Market intelligence reports should include an analysis of the keywords your competitors bid on, the ad copy that increases their clicks, and their landing pages’ conversion rates. By leveraging PPC campaign management services, you can improve your techniques and boost your performance. Maybe you need to conduct landing page optimization if you have a high bounce rate and improve your ad copy if your PPC ads receive very few clicks. The best part is that this is not a said-and-done practice. You keep measuring your performance and analyzing that of your competitors to drive improvement along the way.
What about PPC directory listings? Have your competitors submitted their businesses to relevant directories? It is very easy to go online and jumpstart your market intelligence process by researching niche directories. If most of your competitors are on most of these lists, you should apply to be included too. You will notice that each list may have hundreds of brands. However, some of them are at the top, looking more polished. Why? Well, they probably paid for a PPC directory listing ad. As a result, they improve their click-through rates and possibly their conversion rates.
Effective Tools You Can Utilize
If you’re looking for the best market intelligence tool, we have a few suggestions you may find lifesaving. Starting with ZoomInfo, the platform is actively used by 35,000 companies worldwide, providing high-quality data and insights. Its B2B marketing intelligence database includes profiles of over 100 million companies and 340 million professionals around the globe. They have incorporated one of the top applications of Artificial Intelligence, offering fitting recommendations and personalized outreach. However, they are not alone in this sector, as Semrush is a top name on many people’s lists. Their active 87,000 customers can use its tools to optimize their search engine performance, improve their PPC campaigns, perform their content marketing duties, and conduct competitive research. Semrush’s database includes 800 million desktop and 30 million mobile domain profiles. Official data shows that 30% of Fortune 500 companies trust it.
Crayon is another powerful market intelligence platform that has won awards for its capabilities. What differentiates Crayon from other tools is that it offers fully automated and streamlined data. Professionals don’t have to manually research everything they need, as the tool provides in-depth summaries and real-time tracking of marketing messaging, pricing changes, hiring plans, and market strategies. It analyzes over 100 different types of data before offering a summary.
Market Intelligence Success Stories
In 2011, Airbnb wanted to expand to Europe by opening an office in London. They partnered up with marketing intelligence analysts and promotional experts to gather insights regarding tourist numbers, local accommodation, and visitor trends, including the 2012 Olympics in London. To say that their strategy was successful would be an understatement, as the company increased its revenue by 748%, and by 2012 they already had 10,000 listings in the city. The company’s director of marketing and communications said that informed decisions and insights helped them boost sales enablement.
Another company that bases its entire content marketing strategy and business existence on market intelligence reports is Starbucks. The reason they are the biggest coffeehouse chain on the planet is because they track cultural and seasonal trends, monitor social media, gather customer feedback, and test products in-store. Not only that, but they allow consumers to visit their website and submit their own product and marketing ideas, including new coffee flavors, discounts, and changes to existing products. As a result, they know what their customers want without having to guess.
McDonald’s is another large conglomerate that focuses deeply on market intelligence consulting to continuously improve their services and satisfy their customers. How do they do that? By checking which items sell well, which prices are most affordable, what people read and watch online, and which locations serve more customers daily. All this data allows the company to recognize when its business is growing or falling behind. Additionally, they take consumer feedback very seriously. For example, when people complained that there weren’t any organic or healthier menu options, McDonald’s added new items, including apple slices. They also launched a promotional campaign to inform and convince clients that their chicken nuggets and patties are made from real meat.
Key Takeaway
A market intelligence report is only necessary when you want to generate new leads and increase website visits. Sure, you may achieve these, but without improving your conversion rates. A competitor analysis gives you invaluable insights regarding who your key competitors are, what they do to stay successful, and what products they offer. So, when you try to break into a new market or expand into your existing niche, you decrease investment risk and put your brand in the most privileged position possible. Your goal isn’t to copy your competition but to develop a strong brand positioning that differs from everyone else’s. Once you do that, you can target specific customer segments that fit your buyer personas and curate relevant content.
Your vehicle to success includes an SEO strategy, including a link-building expert who will help you improve your organic results. Customer feedback is also crucial so you know what your clientele thinks of you and your products, allowing you to make timely modifications. Additionally, identifying competitive keywords and PPC directories allows you to build an efficient marketing strategy where you position yourself right next to the other players in the field. Maybe they have won certain awards that increase their credibility further. You should register for relevant awards, too, and share your accomplishments with your social media followers. With all that said, it should be evident by now that market intelligence data can make or break a company.
