Over the past two months, we’ve shared a mini series on our LinkedIn: Market Intelligence Mondays! The idea of this series was to tackle top questions related to understanding market intelligence (MI). Each Monday, CTRS Founder and resident MI expert Aaron Cruikshank, took to the virtual stage and unpacked his valuable knowledge.
Did you miss the May series? Here’s the link to our blog post with all the nuggets you need: Missed Our Market Insights? Catch Up With These Key Takeaways
For those who might have missed an episode in June, or for those who want a refresher, keep reading. In this blog post, we’ve included all the key takeaways from each weekly episode. Plus, if you prefer to rewatch or listen to your favourite clip, we’ve got you covered with links to all the episodes in June in this blog post. So let’s dive into this month’s topics:
- The Art of Gathering Market Data
- The ROI of Market Intelligence
- Key Advantages Companies Get from Using MI
The Art of Gathering Market Data
Let’s talk about efficient methods for collecting relevant data for market analysis. This is something I get asked a lot. How do you collect data? Where do you collect it from?
Well, there’s a lot of different ways to collect market data for analysis. If you’re going for efficiency and you have a budget – not just your time – I would look at the web scraping tools. The challenge with those tools is that sometimes you need to know a bit of programming language to make them work.So if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and teach yourself on those programming languages, they’re very powerful tools.
Now, if you’re looking for social media mentions as a data point, there are apps like Hootsuite that can track keywords, hashtags, and sentiments. It’s very useful for analysis. But there’s also what I call “advanced Googling”, which can be very efficient. You just have to know what you’re looking for and how to phrase your search prompts to get the best information. Sort of like how you get the most out of an AI tool if you have good prompts. Advanced Googling is the same.
There is also paid access to databases like IBIS World and Statista. They can save you a lot of time and heartache. Hot tip: you should check with your local library – they may actually be able to provide access to these resources for you at no cost. If you happen to be in university right now, you should have access to a lot of these tools and databases through your university library.
There are some more nuance tricks as well, but we’ll save those for a future video.
Watch LinkedIn Video Here: Episode 5
The ROI of Market Intelligence
How to achieve a return on investment for your market intelligence spend? There’s two ways you can do that. One is through expenses avoided and the other one’s through net new revenue.
The first one, expenses avoided, is harder to quantify than net new revenue. Many times good market intelligence will steer you away from a market that is not viable. So how much money would you have spent on a market before you realized that it was a dud? That’s hard to quantify. We do have examples of clients who have avoided spending millions and were able to redirect those funds into something profitable. That is a return on investment, but it’s not going to show up clearly on the books.
The clearer return on investment is net new revenue gained from a market that you were underperforming in, new markets, or bringing a new product or service into your existing market. There’s a more easy to attribute revenue line that comes from campaigns that you develop as a result of better market intelligence.
In any case, there’s a clear return on investment from doing market intelligence correctly. We have clients that have experienced 2000%+ ROI. Very clear to draw that from when we’re working with clients and they use the market intelligence as intended.
Watch LinkedIn Video Here: Episode 6
Key Advantages Companies Get From Using MI
First and foremost, you’re making informed decisions. Many of our clients are making decisions about large pieces of capital infrastructure that they want to invest in and they want to make sure there’s going to be a proper return on investment. Sometimes they’re looking at going into a new market with a new product. Or, sometimes they’re looking at going into a new market with an existing product. In every case, you need data points to help you make that decision in an informed way. That’s what we do at CTRS Market Intelligence.
The second thing that we do is give you competitive advantages. Market Intelligence tells you information about your competition that allows you to:
- be more competitive,
- be able to have good sales conversations with your clients and,
- be able to very clearly articulate the unique selling proposition that your company has vis -a -vis the other companies that they’re going to be comparing you to.
Sometimes you don’t know who they’re comparing you to. We can give you that information as well.
And the third and last thing that’s a huge advantage and an unfair advantage for some companies is seeing what’s next. How do you forecast what’s coming in the market? This allows you to do risk mitigation and it also allows you to answer when opportunity knocks. All of the data that you can look at with market intelligence will help you predict what’s going to happen next.
Watch LinkedIn Video Here: Episode 7
That’s A Wrap!
Well, there you have it folks! So what’s your biggest takeaway from June’s episodes?
If reading this or watching our videos has piqued your interest in using market intelligence for your business, reach out. Let’s chat about how you can leverage MI insights to make this quarter the best yet.
P.S. Be sure to keep a close eye on our LinkedIn page, because the series will continue in July!