What Does Marketing Intelligence Include?

Staying ahead of the competition is always on everybody’s minds. This is particularly true for the SaaS industry. According to a recent report published by Gartner, the SaaS market is expected to grow by 21.7% and reach $482 billion in 2022. Although this growth is mainly a good thing, it also means the already intense competition between SaaS companies is only going to get more fierce. This is where marketing intelligence comes into play. If you want to beat your competition, then it all comes down to data. Do you have the data you need to monitor and assess the state of the SaaS industry, navigate the ever-evolving business landscape, and stay ahead of your competition? If not, you’ve come to the right place.In this blog, we’ll go over the basics of how marketing intelligence works and explain why marketing intelligence can provide you with valuable insights into your customer base. 

After you’ve read through this blog and got a handle on the basics, check out our comprehensive overviews of SaaS marketing intelligence and creating a SaaS marketing strategy.

What is Marketing Intelligence?

Marketing intelligence is a broad term with an even broader explanation. Since we’re sticking to the basics in this article, here’s a straightforward marketing intelligence definition.  In the simplest terms, marketing intelligence is all of the data relating to a company’s current market or a market that they’re interested in entering.  

Marketing intelligence involves gathering data on industry and customer trends and monitoring your customers and competitors. Once you’ve done the hard work of collecting all of that market intelligence data, you can start to analyze it to gain insights to inform your decision-making when it comes to your digital marketing campaigns and strategies. The importance of marketing intelligence stems from its ability to provide you with the insights you need to inform your marketing decisions. Marketing intelligence offers you:

• Insights that give you a competitive advantage
• Better marketing and consumer understanding
• More accurate product intelligence

Don’t have the time or energy to collect and analyze all of this data? Don’t worry, you can have someone else do it. At Statwax, we bring a data-driven approach to help you predictably scale customer growth.

What is Market Intelligence Data?

Okay, we’ve explained that marketing intelligence is all about collecting data – but what kinds of data should you be collecting? Really, marketing intelligence data is any information that is relevant to the marketing efforts of your company. Let’s take a look at a few examples, shall we?

Marketing Intelligence Examples of Data Collected

• Active user data – Which and how many users are active over a certain period.
• Passive user data – Basic data that is collected based on user interactions without their knowledge (e.g., timestamps, browser name, the user’s default language, etc.)
• Market growth-rate data – How much and how fast your specific market is growing.
• Competitor growth-rate data – How many companies you are directly competing with.

What are Sources of Marketing Intelligence?

Okay, so we’ve identified what marketing intelligence is and what kinds of data are collected. But where does all of this information come from? Let’s take a look at some of the most common sources of marketing intelligence: 

Brief List of Marketing Intelligence Sources

1. Social Media – Social media can provide you with tons of data relating to customer and competitive intelligence. By analyzing the feedback posted by your customers on your social media channels, you can get better insights into how your brand compares to your competition and learn what needs to be improved in terms of your customer experience and content strategy. 
2. Polls  – Polls are a great way to gather information relating to a specific topic or question you have for your customers. Polls are nice because they can be answered quickly and easily, which means your customers are more likely to engage with them.
3. Surveys – Surveys allow you to gather more detailed insights into a wide range of questions from a large audience size. Surveys can help you determine both quantitative and qualitative insights about your customers.
4. Informational Forms – These forms are designed to gather specific information from your customers, like their demographics, and provide you with more insights into your objective data like where most of your customers are located and the average age of your customer base. 
5. Existing First Party Data – At Statwax, we gather marketing intelligence by looking at 1P data like website analytics, existing customer profiles, etc. This allows us to determine what our client’s site journey tells us about them as a company.

How Can Statwax’s Marketing Intelligence Insights Optimize Your SaaS Marketing Strategy?

At Statwax, we’re all about the data. Our Persona Based Targeting methods allow you to take your digital campaigns to the next level by identifying your ideal audience’s demographics and gaining direct insight into their intent, motivations, difficulties, and goals. At the same time, our data analytics and integration team delivers a predictive model based on your lead data that helps you accurately forecast your number of leads and how much each lead costs.
Sounds like a dream come true, right? If so, you can learn more about how Statwax can provide you with the data you need to stay ahead of the competition here.