Market Intelligence Vs Market Research – What’s the Difference?

Data is everything today, especially when it comes to any business or enterprise marketing efforts. Organizations collect data for analysis. Once analysed, the data is used to make informed business decisions concerning the organization’s consumer behaviour, products, competitors, etc. Marketing intelligence refers to utilizing this daily-collected data in a way that is relevant to the organization.  

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Marketers can’t afford to let market intelligence fall through the cracks. Here’s why. 

Guides an Organisation: Think of marketing intelligence as the guiding force behind your organisation’s decisions. Considering marketing intelligence involves the collection and analysis of data, it considers how consumers behave in terms of their purchasing power. This data is relevant as it helps companies influence and educate consumers, understand advantages over competitors, and evaluate trending insights and market dynamics.

Paves the way for Future Goal Setting: Organisations that have a vision and set goals in advance have a mover advantage over others to boost their marketing efforts and understand the consumer landscape. Marketing intelligence allows businesses to define information clearly, making it easier for an organisation to use the data as part of its future business projections.

Helps Determine Organisational KPIs: Since KPIs can be measured directly (on a quantitative or qualitative basis), marketers leverage market intelligence to understand their business strategies more cohesively.

How can you gather market intelligence?

Market intelligence can be gathered through several forms of information – from understanding competitors and conducting a SWOT analysis on their business, to analysing your own products and services to learn how well-performing they are. Businesses also use a mix of market and consumer understanding to figure out how well their business is performing – whether it can be expanded to other territories, or how can a business acquire more customers.

Conducting market intelligence can typically be done in many ways – through polls, surveys, focus groups, A/B testing, observations, interviews, using analytics to track competitor data etc. Businesses generally use CRM or CMS systems to easily access and analyse this information. 

What are the opportunities that market intelligence provides to organizations?

Since the primary goal of market intelligence is to navigate a business’ complexities and its marketing landscape, marketers can make the following strategic decisions using this resource –

1. Understand the Market: Businesses can easily navigate the business landscape by understanding the market. For example, in a region where online sales are low, enabling digital touchpoints for a consumer may be a futile exercise. By understanding the market, a business can better fit itself, and its products and services into the lay of the land.
2. Understand the Consumer: Prospects, new customers, customer acquisition, and customer retention are equally important to businesses. This is why it is essential to utilize marketing ROI effectively to understand a customer to drive conversions and improve retention.
3. Derive Competitive Advantage: Businesses collect data from their competitors and use these insights to develop stronger strategies. Competitor data helps a business understand why a consumer chooses the alternative over what’s available – this helps in aligning marketing strategies.
4. Derive Product Intelligence: Businesses engage with their consumers to understand how well their products or services are aligned to market needs and demands. Product intelligence helps businesses understand the challenges that consumers face, in a way that can help address them and drive conversions.

So, what is market research?

Market research refers to finding information and studying a market instead of market intelligence, where existing data available to a company is thoroughly studied and analysed to derive conclusions.

How is market research different from market intelligence?

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According to most marketers, the prime difference between market intelligence and market research is the goal. While market research is undertaken to learn more about customers and their preferences, market intelligence focuses on the business itself, with a view to develop marketing and business strategies.

Market Intelligence	Market Research
Focuses on gathering data across a variety of business processes and functions.	Focuses on the efforts undertaken by a specific organisation.
Helps optimize overall organizational efficiency.	Helps gain clarity about a business, without focusing on deriving insights associated with external factors.

How can a business make its market intelligence stronger?

To successfully derive data from across a business landscape, companies need to undertake strategies and steps to ensure that they are collecting the right information and data, arriving at optimum business decisions, and leveraging these insights to their highest potential. This can be done in the following ways –

1. Prep the Sales Team: Every company’s sales team is a main point of contact between the business and its consumers, for both B2C and B2B audiences. Since the sales team is constantly in touch with consumers, they need to be well-aware of the latest trends and insights of the industry.
2. Set up Direct Communication Channels: Since market intelligence is mainly gathered through information derived from customer behaviour, a business needs to engage with its customers directly. One way to do this is by setting up an advisory board where an organisation has direct access to consumers. This helps derive specific data vis-à-vis consumer interests, needs, and challenges.
3. Focus on Deriving Quality Data: While organizations have access to a mix of offline and online data, not all the data is useful.
4. Use Marketing Analytics: Marketing analytics help businesses understand their customers better – through what mediums of communication do these customers respond better? For example, social media or TV advertisements? Using these analytics helps a team to make more informed and targeted decisions.
5. Collecting Feedback: Businesses reach out to their existing customers through surveys, polls, and feedback forms to gather information based on customer experience and satisfaction, product-related information, authority of the brand, etc. This helps identify clearly which marketing strategies have been working thus far.

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Conclusion – What Works For Your Business?

Businesses spend time understanding the differences between both these concepts – while each has potential to impact the overall revenue, it comes down to the form of data collection and analysing, as required by the business, to be undertaken.