Staying ahead of the competition is crucial to the success of any brand. One effective way to do this is by collecting and analysing “Market Intelligence”
Market intelligence is the process of gathering and interpreting information about a market, consumers, and competitors. By understanding external factors such as consumer behaviour, pricing data, and customer feedback, you can align your goals, optimize budgets, and effectively advertise your products or services.
When analysing market intelligence, it is essential to break it down into different categories.
- Competitor trends: Identify your strengths and weaknesses, plus key product differentiators or similarities compared to your rivals to help position your product.
- Consumer behaviour trends: Find your ideal customers by looking at their interests, how they spend time and money, their browsing and shopping behaviours, etc.
- External market factors: Identifying the pros and cons of your current market, helping you make calculated risks, expanding to different markets, and similar.
By utilizing market intelligence, you can make data-driven decisions that will help improve your brand's position in the market. Hence, It is important to stay informed and aware of the current market trends and consumer behaviour, in order to make informed decisions and stay ahead of your competitors.
B2B marketers are taking their account-based marketing to the next level by integrating market intelligence with their content strategies.
Here’s how market intelligence can help you build a powerful ABM Plan that creates awareness, educates audiences, and builds credibility for your firm:
- Buyer-specific insights for personalized engagement - Marketers must ensure that their communication triggers an action from buyers. Shifting from generic to highly specific content is the key to higher engagement rates. This involves creating content that addresses a specific pain point of the customer. Gathering insights about your customer profile, the challenges they face in their job role, and the questions they seek to answer at various stages of the buying journey can support marketers in building content that adds value.
- Building researched-based content - Decision-makers value content that offers advice and insight on topics they care about. However, insights without reliable data have little credibility.
- Repackage your existing content - Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing and generates three times as many leads. They can do this by creating small pieces of content like short reports, pictures with information, and interesting posts on social media. These can be used during the process of buying something and help the customer understand better.
- Chalk out a cross-sell and upsell plan - ‘Land and expand’ is a well-known model of Account-Based Marketing. It simply means that after a new customer signs up, the sales team must take the relationship to the next level by helping the customer see value in the company’s entire set of offerings and map them to the latter’s needs accordingly. Since Account-Based Marketing delivers customized communication addressing individual pain points and needs, thus deepening the relationship, it helps marketers effectively broaden the funnel and multiply revenue streams.
Based on market intelligence insights, you'll be able to position your offering in the most effective and relevant manner. For instance, when speaking to a:
- CTO – Highlight the need to adapt your technology offering
- CFO – Tell them how your solutions are cost-effective and can up their ROI
- CEO – Emphasize how your offering can maximize operational efficiency
87% of marketers believe that ABM outperforms any other marketing channel. But getting it right requires that marketers work closely with sales and market intelligence teams. Doing so will help marketers gauge the true picture of the market and their buyer’s needs thereby increasing the productivity of sales teams.
Source: Content curated from Multiple sources
