Our third month of “Market Intelligence Mondays” is officially complete! Each Monday, CTRS Founder and resident MI expert Aaron Cruikshank, shares insights on the top questions related to what he knows best: market intelligence.
Did you miss the first two months of episodes? You can find the recaps here:
Missed Our Market Insights? Catch Up With These Key Takeaways
Missed Our Market Insights? Here’s The June Highlights
This month, we posted four new episodes on our LinkedIn page. If you missed an episode in all the hustle and bustle of July, not to worry because we’ve recapped each episode in this blog.
If you prefer audio/video over written text, you’ll find a link to each episode under the below sections. So grab a cold beverage and let’s uncover all the nuggets from the July episodes!
Key Components of a Market Intelligence Project
What goes into a market intelligence exercise?
Market Scan
One of the first things we look at is the market scan for industry trends. This goes beyond your niche within an industry and looks at the industry at the broadest level possible. For example, if you’re a company that makes ice cream, we would look at the food production industry overall. If you sell tax preparation services, we’d be looking at the larger professional services space.
There is a lot to be learned from adjacent segments in your market. They may have faced a challenge earlier than your segment and solved it. There may be an opportunity that they’re exploiting in their segment that you could also exploit in yours.
PESTLE
The second thing we do is we do a PESTLE analysis. This is looking at the macro level, Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental trends that are shaping your market. These are the drivers of consumer and market behavior. There can also be PESTLE shocks like the pandemic, which upend markets almost overnight. And there are slow creeping movements that can point to potential market changes 20 years from now, all of which you can plan for.
Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence is another component of a market intelligence project. This is understanding what your competitors are doing, what signals they’re sending that could be indicative of their strategy. Are they acquiring other companies? What kinds of companies are they acquiring? Where are they acquiring these companies?
We also look at your customers and who they consider to be the competition, not just who you consider competition. They might be different lists.
Primary Research
We also often use market research. Wherever possible, we like to bring in primary research that’s been gathered by our market research friends or by us. We tend to lean on our market research colleagues when the market in question is a B2C market and involves consumer goods. We tend to use our own expertise when the market is B2B because we have to use our market intelligence tricks to find the right people to talk to.
Market Sizing
And lastly, we do market sizing. Our clients want to know how much money they can make. This is an important question. We use total addressable market, that’s the whole market globally, serviceable addressable market, the part of the global market that you can reasonably reach, and serviceable obtainable market. That’s how much market share you can capture. We call that TAM SAM SOM. We can use this to forecast how much money you can make and with this, we can feed in the net present value calculation to see if your proposed strategy will yield positive returns.
That’s what goes into a market assessment or a market intelligence project at a high level.
Watch Video Clip Here: Episode 8
Adapting to Industry Changes
Let’s discuss the role of market intelligence in helping businesses adapt to evolving industry landscapes. You may or may not know the pace of change across every industry is increasing. This means it’s super important to stay on top of the evolving industry landscape.
I’m going to help you by telling you three ways that market intelligence will help you stay on top of the changes in the market so that you can not only survive but thrive.
#1:
With market intel, you’re able to identify one of a kind opportunities that exist today. This is done by monitoring what is happening in the market and what your competitors are doing. You’re looking for unfilled needs and new opportunities that arise because of the changes in the economy and the market.
#2:
Market intel supports strategic decision-making. Making the correct choice in whether to enter a new market or introduce a new product is crucial to the success of your business. Market intel gives you the data to develop an informed short or medium term strategy. Short term being in the next fiscal and a medium term being about two to four years out. Too much strategy done today is informed by guesswork, hunches, and personal preferences of your leadership team. That’s not good.
#3:
Market intel helps you see into the future. As market intel professionals, we are often playing the role of futurists. We take economic trend data, social system analysis, and layer in speculation by industry experts to help move beyond what is likely to happen in the next 12 to 36 months and look at the longer horizon.
If you know what the future holds, you can identify opportunities before they happen and prepare to enter those markets. And that’s how you’re gonna succeed and thrive in the future.
Watch Video Clip Here: Episode 9
Capitalizing On Seasonal Trends
How can market intelligence help businesses identify and capitalize on seasonal trends during the summer months?
First off, you want to pick your topics – they should be related to your business and your industry. Keywords will be the names of competitors or the name of your industry. For example, if you’re an interior designer, your keyword should have something to do with design. Next, you’re going to look for this data on Google Trends. Put those keywords and company names right into Google Trends and see what comes up. You can also filter general trends by industry and geography. They also have a newsletter you can sign up for, which is handy.
Once you see what trends are trending in your industry or your area, it’s time to think about, so what? What does this mean in the context of your business? For example, AI tools are trending in search volume this summer. They’re up 2 ,500 % in search volume in 2024 compared to this time last year. If you’re running a professional services business, this is important. So let’s assume that you’re already using some AI tools like Chat GPT. Is this a good thing or a bad thing to tell your clients that you’re using them? If it is, you can use this intel to inform a marketing campaign to educate your customers that you’re using the latest and greatest in AI tools to make what you deliver to them cheaper, better, or faster.
Key Takeaway: The information you get from the market is data. Your business is the context. What you decide to do with the intersection between your business context and the data is your strategy.
Watch Video Clip Here: Episode 10
3 Tips for Small Businesses
Small businesses should be able to leverage market intelligence too, so here are three top tips to get started.
Tip #1: Go to your local library. They have access to trade publications and syndicated studies like IBISworld. Make sure you’re keeping up on what industry experts and analysts are saying at a high level about your industry. After that, you can put your thinking cap on and decide what that means for your business.
Tip #2: Set up Google News Alerts for topics related to your business, your industry, or your customers. You’ll need a Google account to do this, but it’s well worth getting one set up so that you can get the intel that comes in. If you’re in a B2C (business to consumer) market, you could also consider setting up a media monitoring program like Hootsuite that would help you monitor and respond to the good and bad things being said about you, your competitors, and the industry. Stay on top of these sentiments.
Tip #3: Make sure that you’re doing annual strategic planning and that is informed by the market intelligence that you gather.
If you do those three things, you’ll be miles ahead of the competition!
Watch Video Clip Here: Episode 11
That’s a Wrap on July!
Ready for more insights? Keep a close eye on our LinkedIn page because more episodes are coming soon! We’re gearing up for a jam packed August with more topics and key takeaways.
If you’re interested in chatting more about how market intelligence could be leveraged for your business, reach out to us. We’ve seen first hand the positive impact market intelligence has when it comes to making informed decisions.
Let’s chat about the power of market intel for your business challenge.