Marketing intelligence 101: Exploring the what, why, and how

Marketing is a lot like chess.

At a first glance, it may appear as a simple endeavour, with defined rules and a straightforward part to succeed.

But in reality, it’s an intricate interplay of strategy, timing, and adaptation, where every move can define your success or defeat.

In the game of chess, understanding your opponent’s tactics, predicting their moves, and planning several steps ahead are paramount.

And doesn’t marketing, in essence, revolve around the same principles?

In marketing, understanding your target audience, anticipating their behaviours, and adapting your campaigns accordingly are the key to most successful marketing campaigns. And they’re usually the key to surpassing your competitors too.

Similarly, missteps in chess, and in marketing can result in a setback—a lost customer, a missed opportunity.

This makes strategic planning a critical, not an optional, element of the perfect marketing strategy.

And to do this, you need to gain the necessary insights to perfect your strategy to your target audience. After all, the more you know about who you’re speaking to, the more you can choose what to say.

So, how can you gain access to the information necessary to strategically “checkmate” your marketing approach?

By using marketing intelligence.

Marketing intelligence is the process of collecting, analysing, and interpreting any data relevant to your business and its clients.

It’s more or less like strategically positioning the queen on a chessboard — an invaluable piece revered for its power and adaptability, is the secret to achieving a triumphant marketing strategy.

In this blog, we’re giving marketing intelligence a 360-degree glance. We’ve included anything from its definition, to use cases, benefits, best practices and more.

You’ll also find some of our successful customer stories at the end of the post — through which you can see the effectiveness of implementing marketing intelligence accordingly.

What is marketing intelligence?

As we’ve mentioned a few lines above, marketing intelligence revolves around the methodical examination of data that directly relates to your business and its customers, resulting in valuable insights.

The insights and information can come from various sources — and can range from zero to first-,second-, and third-party data, generated within the organisation or obtained from external sources — such as market research, customer feedback, competitor analysis.

As long as it empowers stakeholders to make more informed strategic marketing decisions — then that data can more often than not be considered marketing intelligence.

Through this information businesses can make better informed data-backed decisions to enhance marketing strategies, understand the market and audience better, and achieve marketing objectives effectively.

What are the types of marketing intelligence?

Specific industries or businesses will need different types of marketing insights.

And while these specialised insights can be considered subtypes of marketing intelligence. However, the four primary types of marketing intelligence are the fundamental pillars for most organisations to gather and leverage market intelligence effectively are:

Competitive intelligence

Understanding your competitor is the cornerstone to surpass them.

And that is what competitive intelligence is all about — gathering data about your competitors, including their strengths, weaknesses, market position, and business strategies.

Competitive intelligence helps your business predict competitor actions and devise strategies to enhance your competitive advantage.

Product intelligence

Knowing what your competitors offer can be of little benefit if you don’t know exactly what you’re offering.

Product intelligence involves tracking the life cycles of your products or services, which includes monitoring product development, pricing strategies, and performance.

This allows you to further perfect your offering, including your pricing strategy, while creating innovative products to consistently match the evolving market tends and customer needs.

The end result? Brand relevance, optimised budget and efforts, effective resource allocation. And ultimately, competitive advantage.

Market understanding

Comprehending the market you operate in gives context to both product, and marketing intelligence.

Marketing understanding involves assessing overall market size, growth rates, trends, market segments, and larger industry trends that may influence your market.

This high-level perspective helps your business identify opportunities and threats and adjust strategies accordingly.

Customer understanding

Finally, what’s market intelligence, product intelligence, and competitor intelligence without gaining a deep understanding of your ultimate recipient — the customer?

Customer intelligence focuses on collecting data to deeply understand your customers’ attitudes, behaviours, needs, and satisfaction, to help you tailor products and offerings to meet customer needs, ultimately fostering long-term customer loyalty (leads, and sales).

What makes up marketing intelligence solutions?

Marketing intelligence is more like a process, a continuous cycle of data gathering, analysis, interpretation, and action.

This process begins with data collection, and ends with actionable insights. But what happens in between these crucial steps? What are the essential building blocks of marketing intelligence solutions?

Data collection and aggregation

Starting off the process is data collection and aggregation.

This critical component involves gathering a diverse range of data, including sentiment and popularity data to provide businesses with an accurate pulse on public perception and visitor trends.

An example of this data is our Sentiment Index, which provides businesses with valuable insights into public perception and attitudes helping them understand how customers feel about their brand and products.

Similarly, our Popularity Index acts as a robust proxy for footfall, offering businesses real-time insights into visitor trends, foot traffic, and the popularity of physical locations.

Data collection and aggregation are the foundational steps in the marketing intelligence process — meaning the data you collect, and its quality need to offer a sturdy basis for the steps that follow.

Not sure what makes data, quality data? Explore our data quality guide, where we delve into the essential steps required to ensure that the data you’re collecting meets the highest standards of quality and reliability.

Data analysis and interpretation

The next step in the journey is data analysis and interpretation.

This process involves examining, processing, and understanding the data at hand.

It’s a critical stage in data management where raw data is transformed into meaningful insights.

Analysts work to uncover patterns, trends, and valuable information hidden within the data.

By drawing out these insights, businesses can then use them to inform their strategies and decision-making processes.

And this phase is far from a solitary endeavour.

Engaging with stakeholders is central to this process, as these conversations are pivotal for extracting deeper insights from the data and ensuring alignment with overarching business objectives — particularly with subject matter experts, who can give further context to trends and patterns observed.

Reporting and visualisation

These aspects of data management focus on the presentation and communication of data findings. By using charts, graphs, dashboards, and reports, businesses can transform complex data into a format that is easily understandable and accessible to stakeholders.

This visual representation not only enhances data comprehension but also aids in decision-making. The power of reporting and visualisation lies in their ability to convey insights clearly, enabling businesses to make informed choices and set strategic directions effectively.

As a marketing professional, here you’ll need to bear in mind that not everyone may be as data-fluent as you are.

This is where visualisations and reports come in — as they further aid in presenting data comprehensively, facilitating these discussions and enriching the interpretation process.

Plus, most people find it easier to grasp and interpret information when it’s presented visually.

So, when you’re sharing insights and data-driven findings, utilising visualisation tools like maps, charts, graphs, and infographics can bridge the gap, making the information more accessible and understandable to a broader audience.

This approach not only enhances communication but also empowers everyone involved to make informed decisions based on the data at hand.

The following map is an example of our point of interest (POI) data in Brisbane. It showcases all POIs within a specific area and is provided through our partnership with Carto.

Intelligence in action: Marketing intelligence use cases

But how, exactly, can marketing intelligence solutions be applied to real-world scenarios?

In this section, we’ll explore some compelling use cases that highlight the practical applications of these solutions.

Brand perception and reputation management

One of the fundamental aspects of any business is how it’s perceived by its audience.

Marketing intelligence solutions, particularly those that incorporate sentiment analysis, offer businesses a window into the minds of their customers.

By monitoring customer sentiment, companies can gauge public perception and identify emerging issues or crises. This data allows for proactive reputation management, ensuring that your brand remains in good standing with your audience.

Competitive analysis

In the ever-competitive market, knowing how you stack up against your competitors is invaluable.

Marketing intelligence solutions enable businesses to compare customer sentiment and feedback between their brand and competitors.

This information helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses, giving you a strategic advantage in the marketplace.

Campaign effectiveness evaluation

For businesses running marketing campaigns, it’s crucial to understand how your target audience perceives these initiatives.

Marketing Intelligence Solutions allow for real-time monitoring of public reactions, enabling you to adjust your campaigns based on the sentiment of your audience.

This data-driven approach ensures your marketing efforts are fine-tuned to perfection.

Footfall analysis and location-based marketing

For businesses with physical locations, or businesses looking into OOH advertising, monitoring area popularity and visitor demographics is crucial.

Data Appeal’s popularity data, for example, can provide insights into the popularity of any business or point of interest in a given area, shedding light on how this popularity changes over time and across different hours of the day.

This data serve as a proxy for pedestrian traffic and can help understand which locations are favoured by customers and experience higher footfall during daytime or evening hours. This information is invaluable for making informed decisions about where and how to promote products or services in a particular region.

It’s essentially the distinction between merely having a physical presence and making a meaningful impact.

Product development

Understanding what your customers truly want is at the heart of product development.

Through marketing intelligence, you can decode consumer preferences, pain points, and evolving needs.

Armed with this knowledge, you can innovate and create offerings that align with your target audience’s desires.

Risk and crisis management

Preventing a crisis is often better than managing one.

Through sentiment and popularity marketing data can assist businesses in identifying potential risks and crises as they emerge.

Monitoring any trends observed through data allows for proactive issue resolution, minimising potential damage and protecting your brand’s reputation.

Market entry and expansion strategies

Thinking about entering a new market or expanding your current operations?

Marketing intelligence can provide you with critical insights into the new market landscape, consumer sentiment, and foot traffic trends.

This data empowers you to make strategic decisions with a firm understanding of the market dynamics.

Content and social media strategy

In the digital age, content and social media are key components of marketing.

Marketing Intelligence Solutions that leverage sentiment data help businesses understand which content resonates with their audience. This knowledge guides the development of more effective content and engagement strategies, leading to improved audience engagement.

Customer loyalty, and retention

Satisfied customers are usually loyal ones, too. And they’re the backbone of any successful business.

Gauge customer satisfaction and popularity is essential to shape an excellent customer experience, identify opportunities to strengthen customer relationships and foster long-term loyalty.

Customer experience enhancement

Your customers’ experiences play a pivotal role in your business’s success.

Marketing Intelligence Solutions offer insights into what aspects of the customer experience are working well and where improvements are needed.

By analysing sentiment data, businesses can pinpoint areas where customers are delighted or dissatisfied, allowing for precise adjustments to enhance the overall customer journey.

Benefits of using marketing intelligence solutions

Why choose marketing intelligence?

• Informed decision-making: Marketing intelligence empowers data-driven decision-making.
• Competitive advantage: Stay ahead of competitors by staying informed about market trends.
• Customer insights: Gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviour, preferences, and needs.
• Resource optimisation: Optimise budget and resource allocation for greater efficiency.
• Improved ROI: Informed strategies lead to a more significant return on investment.
• Personalised marketing: Create and implement more tailored marketing campaigns for higher engagement.
• Risk management: Early detection of market changes helps businesses manage risks proactively.
• Efficient marketing: Eliminate wasteful spending on ineffective marketing efforts.
• Product innovation: Insights from marketing intelligence aid in the development of products that meet market demands.
• Sustainability alignment: Align marketing strategies with sustainability goals for responsible business practices.
• Regulatory compliance: Ensure that your marketing efforts comply with industry regulations.

Best practices for implementing marketing intelligence

We’ve seen the what and why of marketing intelligence, but what about the how?

A lot of your data-driven success will depend both on the data you have, but also on your prowess in steering this data toward your goals.

The following are some of the best practices to keep in mind when working with marketing intelligence data, to make sure you make the most out of it:

1. Set clear objectives: Define specific objectives that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).
2. Work with quality data: Ensure that the data you collect is accurate, reliable, and relevant to your goals.
3. Secure the right tools: Select tools and platforms that align with your objectives, budget, and scalability needs.
4. Prioritise data security and compliance: Safeguard customer data by ensuring data security and compliance with regulations.
5. Integration: Seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, making data readily available.
6. Real-time monitoring: Stay agile with real-time monitoring of customer sentiment, market dynamics, and competitor activities.
7. Skill development: Invest in training your team to interpret data effectively.
8. Continuous improvement: Regularly assess and refine your strategies and tools.
9. Measure success: Use KPIs to evaluate the impact of marketing intelligence and adjust strategies accordingly.

Explore the real-world impact of marketing intelligence with these 4 inspiring success stories

Now, let’s look at these compelling success stories that showcase the transformative power of marketing intelligence in action:

Elevating OOH advertising with marketing intelligence

Discover how a global leader in market research harnessed marketing intelligence to enhance Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising strategies, resulting in more effective investments and strategic placements.

>> Read the full customer story

Market expansion empowered by marketing intelligence

Explore how a leading soft drink producer leveraged marketing intelligence to assess potential site locations and expand its presence in Eastern Europe’s growing market, using data-driven insights for growth and expansion.

>> Read the full customer story

Marketing intelligence for enhanced CRM and data enrichment

Poste Italiane’s journey to create a comprehensive profile for operators and potential customers, refining commercial prospects through marketing intelligence, reputation data analysis, and feedback from social networks.

>> Read the full customer story

Data-driven liquor distribution optimised by marketing intelligence and location intelligence

Uncover how an international major player in the spirits industry expanded its liquor product into new Mediterranean markets using precise marketing intelligence enriched with sentiment and popularity metrics, making informed distributor selection and expansion strategies.

>> Read the full customer story