What is market intelligence?

Market intelligence is a systematic process businesses use to gather, analyze, and manage comprehensive market data. Its goal is to provide insights for teams engaged in decision-making, innovation, and consulting, focusing on the external business environment, such as customers, competitors, products, and trends, unlike other business intelligence forms that analyze internal operations. Market intelligence differs from traditional market research by offering a broader scope of information, including ongoing market and technology trends, competitive dynamics, and product life cycle analysis. It is categorized into four segments: competitor, product, market, and customer intelligence, each providing crucial insights to anticipate market changes and enhance customer loyalty. 

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Who can benefit from market intelligence?

Market intelligence solutions empower various teams within an organization to make data-driven decisions. They can help corporate innovation teams to better understand new market opportunities and landscapes before launching new products or services, and corporate strategy teams to analyze market dynamics, track changes, and prevent disruptions to develop medium and long-term strategies. Consulting teams can advise clients more effectively thanks to comprehensive market and industry insights to advise, while corporate venture capital teams can use these insights to scout new opportunities, monitor investment portfolios, and stay updated on market changes to facilitate growth. Scouting teams can also use market intelligence to help identify emerging players in the industry ecosystem, finding startups to invest in, partner with, acquire, or monitor.

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How to choose a solution

Not all market intelligence solutions are created equal. A good one should offer access to relevant data, performance and agility, competitive intelligence features, data-driven insights, and comprehensive databases. 

Data and coverage

There’s a wealth of information available on every industry under the sun. But is all that data really valuable to your organization? Market intelligence solutions should be tailored to client’s specific needs, with tools that prioritize data from relevant sources. That means aligning these tools with an organization’s industry, geographical focus, products, services, customers, and competitors. The goal is not to inundate the user with information, but rather to collate it carefully and thoughtfully for maximum utility and insight. At the same time, however, a range of sources is necessary to give a comprehensive, holistic map of the situation that enables informed decision-making.

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Performance and agility

“All new news is old news happening to new people.” Journalist and satirist Malcolm Muggeridge may have been right on the money when he said this, but nevertheless, businesses need the newest possible news to navigate an increasingly globalized, competitive, and volatile marketplace. It’s clear that market intelligence tools have to be able to adapt to changes and emerging market trends – and quickly. In a world where customer preferences are increasingly changeable, speed truly is of the essence. Decisions need to be based on the latest possible data, so a responsive, agile solution is crucial. 

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Competitive intelligence features

A proactive business posture requires detailed information about competitors. It’s not enough to know what their latest product is; a well-informed organization is one that understands the competition’s broader activities, investments, advantages, shortcomings, and strategic imperatives. This is the information that enables you to anticipate their actions and develop counter-strategies that can see you leading, rather than following the market. Market intelligence solutions should encompass a range of approaches, including benchmarking, SWOT analyses, tracking pricing strategies, canvassing for customer feedback, and following their updates. 

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Comprehensive databases

Having ready access to comprehensive information on key market players is essential, so it goes without saying that a market intelligence tool should offer a database of relevant company profiles. This should be searchable by company type and subtype, along with name, industry, geography, and status, as well as relevant associations. Incorporating financial metrics, economic data, and market sizing is crucial, especially in emerging industries. These comprehensive databases enable users to pinpoint market opportunities and threats with precision. By analyzing financial performance, economic trends, and market potential, organizations can make informed decisions, anticipate shifts, and strategically position themselves for growth. 

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Data visualization

Dashboards, graphs, charts, and other visualization tools help decision-makers understand large volumes of complex data quickly. Market intelligence solutions should offer a range of options that cater to clients’ industries, needs, specific datasets, and various departments. A dashboard needs to be designed with a clearly defined objective and audience in mind, which will prioritize the main metrics and indicators to be tracked and represented. It should offer a clear, uncluttered overview of key information, with the option to dig deeper into different points easily. Ultimately, the goal of data visualization is to tell a story with your data, one that brings perspective to it and guides stakeholders logically through the analysis. 

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Data-driven insights

To be forewarned is to be forearmed. One of the primary goals of market intelligence is to identify and predict market trends, to help devise forward-thinking strategies and allocate resources effectively. That’s why market intelligence solutions should offer tools that not only collect, clean, order, and present data in a digestible format, but also analyze that data for trends. While human intervention is required to judge the merits of and act upon such insights, this capability is one of the great advantages of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, which excel in crunching unimaginable volumes of data and identifying patterns. Where AI succeeds in handling data at volume, human insight is a crucial element too. Experienced analysts can provide deeper analysis of market and industry trends, supported by trusted news sources, investigative research, and expert opinion. Having a team of professionals available brings intuition and creativity to the process, helping to glean hidden insights and saving decision-making teams a lot of time. 

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Conclusion

Market research intelligence services provide a finger on the pulse of any given industry, drawing together data from a diverse array of sources to create a comprehensive, holistic portrait of market trends, competitor, product use cases, and other data that strategy, innovation, and consulting teams need to make faster, better-informed decisions. Designed smartly and with attention to the nuances of individual organizations, they facilitate the sort of proactive business stance that is increasingly demanded by today’s competitive environment. Users should expect comprehensive data coverage, responsiveness, a granular view of competitor activity, in-depth databases, user-friendly data visualization tools, and AI-driven data analysis supported by human insight. 

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How Speeda Edge can help

Speeda Edge is a market intelligence platform designed to enable organizations to swiftly and confidently navigate emerging tech industries and their key players. Covering 200 emerging sectors, it supports corporate research teams in staying informed about the latest tech use cases and industry convergence. Check out our solutions to see how we can help your business make better decisions.