Market intelligence, while different from market research, is similar in the way that it involves research and getting answers on competitors.
Today we’ll be talking specifically about competitive market intelligence even though there are ways to get market intelligence about customers too which we’ll cover briefly.
Here are all the things you’ll need to know if you’re serious about doing b2b market intelligence for competitors.
Similar to market research, the main goal of a b2b market intelligence project is to help your business goal with specific research goals and projects. It involves taking a deeper look at your competitors, customers, and any trends that might affect your brand.
Success rarely comes from one factor alone which is why it’s important to look at many factors involved. That’s where market intelligence/research comes into play. Utilizing it you can look at primary and secondary data related to the issue your brand is trying to solve or the questions you need answers to.
Market intelligence typically involves starting with a problem or goal and using data to answer or complete the understanding so that your brand can reach the goal. While there are many different ways of tackling that, it’s what the core of market intelligence is.
With primary market research data, it’s only available to you and can be customized to your goals.
For an example, it’s like if you wanted to survey your audience, your competitor’s audience, or a specific target audience that you wanted to get data from. You would then craft a survey that would aim to answer questions that would get your brand the answers you’re looking for and collect the data on it to do so.
That’s primary data, getting data that’s unique to your brand and no one else has access to (unless you share it).
In research terms, primary data is often 100x more valuable than other data since it can help you reach your goal faster and give you an edge in the market (by using data no one else can access).
The difficult part is that it can be time-consuming, take a ton of resources, and be difficult to obtain quality data. Especially if you’re working with your team or trying to do everything on your own, it sometimes can feel impossible.
The main things you need to worry about are keeping your data quality high (low data quality would result in bad decisions) and doing the project in a reasonable time frame (taking too long might make the results useless or delay a lot of other things). Even with those drawbacks, primary is still king compared to secondary data.
Secondary data typically involves using already existing data sets or publicly available reports to get the answers to your brand’s questions/problems. It can also be a project that is pending that brand’s chip in a small fraction of investment to complete instead of funding the entire project alone.
The downside to secondary data is that the data is not unique or private to your brand. Other brands that have bought the data, invested in it, or contributed can see the data all the same. Not to mention, it can seem daunting to try and draw unique insights from this data that can apply to your brand since the research is likely not going to be customized to your brand/audience.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing since it is significantly less expensive. It is important to know what the drawbacks are. You can still achieve your research goals with secondary research, it might just take a little more time and effort to do so.
This approach can be either primary or secondary but typically involves dividing your audience into different groups to find out where your audiences are. Instead of just relying on one audience, you may be trying to discover where your different targets line up regarding your brand.
It makes the most sense to use primary data for market segmentation. But it’s more than possible to use secondary data for it, as long as you filter your data sources appropriately.
In market intelligence, market segmentation can also reveal new audiences, help your brand switch targeting off of lower-interest audiences, and decide which audiences are best to double down on. It’s also possible to look at competitor’s audiences to find any crossover or differences in audience targeting.
When doing regular research or even for the first time, it’s possible to find trends that are relevant to your company/brand that you may be able to capitalize on.
Without research, these are difficult to find and even harder to connect specific audiences to. Brands that stay researching usually stay winning because of finds like these that can help put them ahead of trends or competition in general.
It doesn’t even have to be a viral or new trend, but a market shift may be a trend that your brand needs to recognize to change messaging, marketing, or strategy to stay connected with potential customers.
Like trends, audience needs, wants, and purchasing behavior can change. That’s why keeping up to date with your target audience and especially what they are looking for in your market can help your brand stay relevant and on track. Without collecting data it can be difficult to guess what prospects might do.
With data, your brand will know (depending on your research goals) what their purchase behavior looks like, what they need from products/solutions in your market, and what they want from a product that they are willing to buy.
All of this is critical not just for marketing but for business strategy overall.
We mentioned this but guessing can be dangerous in business and for your brand. Especially with major business decisions that affect your brand, you don’t want to be guessing. Market intelligence gives you the data to make confident decisions without having to second guess anything.
The higher the quality of the data you can get, the less risk you’re going to take when making decisions. It’s why so many big companies are constantly doing research for their decision-making. By collecting more and more data, you can reduce the amount of risk you take with any decision.
We’ve mentioned it a lot in this post, but you need to set goals for your research to be successful. Many decisions on how to approach or even complete your research can be answered easily after your goals are solidified.
A great research goal as an example can be “we want to know what % of the market prefers our brand to competitors”.
While this is a specific goal – it can be answered directly with research or data to provide answers. Goals can be specific, more specific, or even more vague depending on what your brand needs at the time. If you’re looking for more high-level answers it’s ok to have higher-level goals like “we want to know how customers decide to purchase [x]”.
Regardless of the solution you want to solve or questions you want to answer, remember that more specific is generally better. You can work with a market research pro or third-party market research company to help you come up with good goals if you aren’t sure what would bring your brand success.
In the case of market intelligence, you don’t want to limit the amount of data you collect for projects. The more (high-quality) data you can collect, the better. A lot of brands and companies make the mistake of collecting some data and deciding that’s enough for them. Realistically there isn’t a cap on the amount of data you should collect, mostly just the time it might take to collect it.
So if it’s possible to collect more data within a similar time frame, you should take that opportunity. You’ll never be upset having to decide with more data available. You’ll want to remember to keep the data quality clean and not take significantly longer to collect the data . But otherwise, it’s a no-brainer to collect more.
When collecting data, remember to collect some on competitors either as a benchmark or a comparison. A lot of brands also skip this part by only collecting data on their brand or audience to use. But competitor data is a goldmine. It can help you make comparisons, get deeper-level insights, or even find trends that may not have existed in a single data set.
It doesn’t even have to be a ton of data on competitors either, even some data points here and there will drastically improve the data you’re collecting for your brand.
Looking to get ahead of the competition? Drive Research specializes in B2B competitive intelligence to help you uncover key insights, benchmark performance, and make smarter decisions. Our market research services are tailored to your industry, goals, and timeline.
Contact us today to get started.
