Have you ever been in that place where your marketing simply isn’t ringing, and yet you can’t quite put your finger on why? That’s where marketing intelligence comes in. It’s a constant activity of gathering, merging, and analyzing information from all sorts of sources—your website, social media, email campaigns, industry reports, you name it.
The entire concept is to see the overall picture of what individuals actually desire and how they engage with your brand, so as to react in a timely fashion and stay ahead of the competition.
Here’s a self-inflicted blunder: A couple of years ago, when I was doing marketing for a small e-commerce company, I configured Google Analytics goals incorrectly. We were seeing a ton of cart abandonments but had no idea where in the checkout process people were falling off. When I finally got the funnel tracking correct, we found shipping fees were the problem. Switching our shipping options overnight cut our conversions significantly.
Key Building Blocks of Marketing Intelligence
Without these key components, things can get tricky.
1. Collecting the Right Information
Prior to implementing a strategy, you need to gather your information from various sources:
Primary Data: These are the ones that you obtain firsthand, such as surveys, interviews, or actual user testing.
Secondary Data: These consist of market research, industry reports, and what your competitors are up to. I recall a report I read in the business that sustainable packaging was becoming a massive selling point. We’d never explicitly promoted that feature, so the realization of this new trend led us to revisit our entire package design. The redesign of our green packaging did wonders for our brand reputation.
If you’re looking to improve your subscribers count, understanding these trends is crucial.
2. Putting Your Data Together
Once you have all of that data, you want to bring it all together into a single view. That could involve syncing up your web analytics, your CRM, and your social media metrics. Prior to having a single dashboard, I was dealing with way too many spreadsheets for offline events, email metrics, and social media engagement. It was a mess.
When we got everything together in one spot, it was like a lightbulb moment—we were seeing patterns we’d never seen before, such as which social posts were generating email signups.
3. Acting on and Interpreting It
It’s not sufficient to collect data; you must interpret it. That could be statistical analysis, predictive modeling, or sentiment analysis. We used to take a sentiment analysis tool to our Twitter mentions and discovered that people were grumbling largely about our complicated return policy. So we simplified it, announced the change via social media, and overnight we noticed a spike in positive buzz.
If you’re keen to learn more from here, these interpretations can shape better business strategies.
Easy-to-Use Marketing Intelligence Tools
Who doesn’t want the set of tools that make things easy for us!
Social Media Monitoring
Use tools like Hootsuite or Brandwatch to track brand mentions and discussions in real time. I’ve missed an entire weekend of negative customer complaints once by using the incorrect alerts. By the time I caught on, we had a mini-crisis on our hands—lesson learned.
Web Measurement Tools
Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics will inform you where your website visitors are originating from, how they navigate through, and what causes them to bounce. I was certain initially that I’d established my Analytics objectives just so—incorrect. Discovering that mistake caused me to realize the shipping fee issue, an enormous issue.
Competitor Analysis
SEMrush or SimilarWeb will open up a competitor’s SEO strategy and paid campaigns. I’ve been there, replicating a competitor’s costly keywords, only to find they weren’t converting for them either, then having to explain the wasted budget to my manager.
For businesses looking to increase their growth, a good competitor analysis is essential.
Where Does All of This Data Come From?
Knowing where all these data come from can be helpful for you!
Internal Sources
Your support tickets, sales figures, and even your CRM can reveal recurring problems or trends to you. I recall noticing that repeat customers upgraded at a much higher percentage than new customers, so I put more effort into loyalty programs. That action doubled our retention.
External Sources
This may be social media chatter, public data sets, or more broad industry research. I was skeptical at first of “trends” on social media until I saw how much influence sustainability conversations were having. It pushed our company to be greener in several areas, and that was a big hit with customers.
Third-Party Providers
Powerhouses such as Nielsen or Statista provide in-depth market figures. I’ve had access to free Statista statistics more than once that entirely transformed my strategy (such as the discovery that micro-influencers, not celebrity endorsements, were the new hotness).
Keeping an Eye on the Competition
To be able to stay in the competition, you need to be able to stay in touch with you competitors.
- Identify Your Direct Competitors: Observe how they run their ads, the tone of their content, and how they interact with customers.
- Benchmark Your Progress: Discover where you are at with SEO, how your engagement compares, and whether your reviews are keeping up.
- Apply What You Learn: Adjust your pricing, push into new channels, or change up your campaign messaging based on what’s working for them (or what’s obviously not).
A dash of humility: I tried to top a competitor’s flashy ad campaign years ago without even checking if they were receiving good returns on it. We spent a lot and received little in return. If we had looked deeper, we would have realized that it wasn’t quite a gold mine for them, either.
Incorporating Marketing Intelligence into Your Overall Strategy
With these things, you can easily improve your overall strategy!
- Tie Insights to Your Goals: Ensure your data-driven insights truly link to definite business goals.
- Refresh the Products, Prices, and Promotions: If your information shows that your free trial is too short or your shipping policy is scaring people off, change it.
- Foster Team Collaboration: Nothing is more frustrating than a marketing campaign that isn’t in tune with what the product team is up to. When we finally began talking to the dev team on a daily basis, we discovered that product updates created more user activity than any slick advertisement we’d been running.
Mind the Ethics (and the Law)
I used to work on a team that included feedback from user comments in targeted ads without making it necessarily very obvious. The backlash was instantaneous. We had to make a public apology and change our privacy policy.
- Adhere to Privacy Regulations: Obey GDPR, CCPA, and other rules, and do not conceal the way you’re handling data.
- Be Honest with Users: Users have a right to know if you’re utilizing their comments to guide advertisements.
- No Manipulation: The intention is to augment, not deceive, the customer experience.
Best Practices to Keep in Mind
However, I suggest you to keep these practices in your mind.
- Know Your KPIs: Perhaps it is conversion rates, churn, or engagement. Determine in advance what success is.
- Cross-Functional Teams Rule: All must be involved from marketing, product, and sales.
- Test, Tweak, Repeat: I’ve been surprised many times by an A/B test that went contrary to my instinct. Believe me—test everything.
In one of my more recent projects, real-time dashboards saved our bacon. Email open rates began to slip in the morning, so we changed up the subject line by lunchtime. By evening, the trend had reversed—disaster averted.