What is Market Intelligence?

Why is Market Intelligence Important for Businesses or Companies? 

The business environment is evolving rapidly. Executives need timely and relevant market intelligence for better decision-making to stay ahead in their business. Market Intelligence can help address the following questions:

• • What are the emerging technology trends that may disrupt business?
  • What are the growth signals in customers like business expansion, investment, etc.?
  • What are the latest product launches and customer acquisitions by competitors?
  • How to proactively identify emerging risk signals like supply chain disruptions?
  • What are the latest regulatory changes and Government policies that would impact the business?

What are the different stages in Market Intelligence?

• Identifying and Defining the Problem 

The first and foremost step in Market Intelligence is to define the problem statement. This includes: 

• • Who are the target audiences?
  • What are their Jobs To Be Done?
  • What signals would be of relevance to them?
  • How do they want to receive their intelligence? 
  • What is the refresh frequency?

The answers to these questions would be found from the discussions with the stakeholders.

• Source Identification

Once the problem statements are defined, the next stage in market intelligence is to identify the sources from which the signals can be found. The sources could include- internal, external, and third-party sources. Some of these sources could be structured and most of them especially external data sources are unstructured and scattered across multiple channels.

• Data Collection & Aggregation

The next stage in the market intelligence process is to collect and aggregate the data from various sources. For an ad hoc or one-time requirement, the manual collection may be easier. But if it is an ongoing requirement that involves collecting data from multiple sources, a scalable technical solution should be explored for automation.

• Data Curation 

This is the most important stage in the market intelligence process in which signals are discovered from a large volume of structured and unstructured digital data published in a variety of formats. With the explosion of digital data, this process should be automated with emerging technologies like Natural language processing and machine learning to achieve scale and efficiency.

• Data Analysis & Insights

This stage in market intelligence involves analyzing and visualizing the curated data to identify patterns and trends for business insights.

• Delivery Channels

The final stage involves delivering the market intelligence in a format and medium the target audience can consume easily. Some of the various ways market intelligence can be delivered channels are email alerts, web applications, integration with existing workflows like Slack, Team, Intranet, CRM, and other business process applications through API. 

What are the different types of Market Intelligence?

• Customer Intelligence or Client Intelligence or Account Intelligence – Monitor sales and risk signals in customer and client organizations. Examples could be customers investing in new business areas, customers getting acquired.
• Competitive Intelligence – Track competitive moves and identify emerging disruptions proactively. Examples could be new product launches by the competitor, competitors investing in an emerging startup.
• Sales Intelligence – Discover new sales opportunities. An example could be a prospect receiving new investment as they could spend money on new products or services.
• Risk Intelligence – Monitor for adverse events, negative news to identify potential risks proactively.
• Industry Intelligence –Track emerging industry trends, government policies, and regulatory trends that would impact the industry.

What are the data sources for Market Intelligence?

To build comprehensive market intelligence, the information has to be sourced from multiple places – internal and external sources that can be in structured or unstructured formats. Some of the common sources are:

• News 
• Press Releases
• Regulatory Filings
• Company Websites
• Blogs
• Social Feed
• Job Sites 
• Review Sites and many more

What are the challenges in Market Intelligence?

To build a good market intelligence practice, there are multiple challenges. 

• Information Overload – In today’s digital era, finding information is not a problem. The real challenge is too much information published in high velocity scattered across multiple sources. 
• Too many Sources – Monitoring multiple sources of information is not humanly scalable and is time-consuming.
• Curation of Unstructured Data – Filtering the right signals from noise is tedious and expensive.
• Delivering the Relevant Intelligence to Each User – The relevance of intelligence for each user varies based on his/her business function and role.

AI-Powered Market Intelligence Platform

Automating the whole market intelligence process using emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning is the way forward to address the challenges.  

Emerging startups like Intellizence is pioneering AI-powered market intelligence platform. Intellizence, an award-winning market intelligence platform, monitors unstructured data sources, curates signals from noise, delivers timely and relevant intelligence customized to each user. 

Product Page:

• Intellizence –  Market Intelligence