Marketing Intelligence Software Explained

Just like Dr. Shaun Murphy, yes, you guessed it right - The Good Doctor - who has this knack of working on every single detail about the patient even before starting up their treatment. This knack of his makes him the go-to person for any critical suggestion needed. Also, to think of it, who wouldn't like to rely on data-driven information provided by Dr. Murphy or for that matter which Airbnb had? Marketing Intelligence Software is THE Dr. Murphy for businesses in today's world and we are here to learn a thing or two about it because, yes, we are the data-driven generation!

We are here to learn about Marketing Intelligence Software but how do you think marketing works? If you suddenly had a mental image of a group of very well-dressed people having a mid-day drink in their corner office, cracking one ad campaign every day, you need to stop watching Mad Men. Reality check: The job of a modern marketer is more complicated and includes a lot of things.

Marketers need to create marketing campaigns, ads, emails, webinars, collaterals, websites and more on an input level. The fruit of this labor (output) is derived from high-quality leads, sign-ups, demo requests, raising brand awareness, social media buzz and more (trust us, not as easy as Don Draper makes us believe). So, how do they manage it all? Their perfect tool needs to analyze data extracted from various sources - competitors to past trends - actionable information about customer trends, customer profiles, etc. In this article, we take a dive into the software that enables marketing intelligence, how it works, reasons to invest in it and how it can benefit your businesses. Enough build-up, let us raise the curtain on Marketing Intelligence Software. Read on!
 

What Is Marketing Intelligence Software?

Before talking about Marketing Intelligence Software (AKA Market Intelligence Software), let's dive into marketing intelligence. It is the process of gathering relevant data about your target audience from both internal and external sources. As a marketer, it helps in understanding the competitive landscape, evaluating your product/ service, knowing your target audience and conducting competitor analysis. This information makes the marketing team better equipped, eventually maximizing the effectiveness of their marketing performance efforts and improving revenue with ROI (Return-On-Investment). Marketing Intelligence Software as a tool utilizes both market intelligence tools where it collects data through surveys, publicly available information from a range of sources, data agencies or trade publications and other internal sources analyzes it and delivers key takeaways to the marketers in the form of comprehensive reports.

That's not all. This tool also can extract data from various traditional sources like contact information, locations, finances, news and press releases, helping marketers make better and fast decisions while being proactive to customer needs. It cuts through the noise and provides marketers with accurate, measurable and actionable insights to make strategic decisions. Phew! We are sure Airbnb's marketing analytics team would have left one or two of these... (just kidding!)

Typically, Marketing Intelligence Software provides information in four main areas:
 

• Competitor Intelligence:

  All the information about your competition's strengths and weaknesses and why customers prefer them over your product or service.

• Product Intelligence:

  This is about knowing the quality and performance of your own product and improving the user experience.

• Market Understanding:

  Know how your product performs in a particular market and its viability for market expansion.

• Customer Intelligence/Understanding:  

  Decrease sales cycle by knowing your customers - why do they buy your product, their pain-points, how does your product solve their challenges?

See, this is how precise Dr. Murphy is with his diagnostics… Now that we know what Marketing Intelligence Software is, let's look at how it works.
 

How Does Marketing Intelligence Software Work?

Twitter is a popular social media channel among marketers. One commonly asked question among marketers is - how many posts per day on Twitter will optimize my engagement? If you were expecting the answer to be a numeric value, you would be dead wrong.

However, the answer can be found using Marketing Intelligence Software. It can provide an easy-to-understand visual representation using data such as the number of engagements on Twitter posts, the number of daily posts, the time of day that generates maximum interaction, etc. Marketing Intelligence Software will continue to gather these insights from various other digital marketing sources, such as Facebook or email campaigns or, for that matter, in-app interactions provide real-time visual reports so marketers can get comprehensive insights into customers' responses to a particular campaign or product/service. It eventually assists in making informed, strategic decisions. It can work for your other communication and marketing channels as well to steer efforts in the right direction.

In addition to the above, Marketing Intelligence Software provides detailed analysis in Competitive Intelligence, Account Data Intelligence (identifying prospects and creating an insightful hierarchy of users) and Customer Understanding. Pretty great, right? Although, this definitely raises a question, why do businesses need this?
 

Why Is Marketing Intelligence Software Needed?

Your marketing efforts can best be described as taking a shot in the dark without analytics and insights. Although you might hit the target in the dark, in today's fast-paced, data-savvy and data-driven world, this is just as good as committing a crime that marketers cannot afford to commit. Marketing teams direly need Marketing Intelligence Software for:
 

• Generating On-Demand Reports:

  Marketers need information and it comes from various sources. These sliced and diced reports help them gain deeper insights. Eventually, finding out which campaigns worked and which ones did not, to maximize profitability.

• Viewing Customer Journey Insights:

  Customer journey insights are crucial. Marketers can see when customers subscribe via Google Ads, LinkedIn campaigns or any other source for that matter and decide on future budgets accordingly.

• Unified Visibility:

  View all campaigns and analytics in a centralized place instead of toggling between various channels. Aggregated data leads to a better understanding of marketing campaigns.

• Gaining Visibility At Scale:

  Understanding each marketing effort at a granular and aggregate level will enable marketers to control their marketing plans fully.

So, if you want to invest in Marketing Intelligence Software, you need to know about its must-have features. Let's dive right in!
 

Key Features Of Marketing Intelligence Software

Unlike patient diagnostics (as shown in The Good Doctor), guessing the features of Marketing Intelligence Software isn't really rocket science after all the reading you did. In fact, all they must do is aggregate different types of competitor intelligence and current market intelligence for organizations to analyze them. It sounds like something James Bond would do, doesn't it?  The different categories of information that Marketing Intelligence Software gathers include:
 

• Search engine data

• Social Media analysis

• Market trends

• Personal information

• Competitor intelligence

• Customer sentiment analysis

Any business intelligence platforms rely on one of the above fields, while others offer various intelligence types. SEMrush, for example, is a marketing intelligence tool to search marketing intelligence whereas, Crunchbase is a marketing intelligence tool to find details about public and private companies, including news and investment data.

With all this ease of functionality and essential aspects, let's see how exactly it benefits marketers.
 

Benefits Of Using Marketing Intelligence Software For Marketers

 

• Data-Driven Decision Making:

  Actionable Intelligence will allow marketers to make decisions that are fueled by marketing data and not by instinct or guesstimate.

• Track Industry Trends:

  Know where competition is headed, latest customer trends, technologies and market disruptors. This will immensely help marketers stay ahead of their competitors by being proactive.

• Better Allocation Of Time And Resources:

  With so many channels and activities running concurrently, marketing teams can easily spend over 30 hours a week just gathering and aggregating the analytics. Save the time and effort of your team and let the Marketing Intelligence Software do the hard work for you.

• Effective Marketing Campaigns:

  Marketers use various channels for campaigns and Marketing Intelligence Software helps measure its effectiveness across all channels and improve marketing efforts.

• Personalize Customer Engagement:

  Understand the customer's buying preferences to tailor collateral and messaging to suit the right segment and through the right channel.

• Improved Spending Efficiencies:

  Avoid going over budget with marketing campaigns by analyzing historical data to know which type of customers respond to which messages. Get details like cost per click and keyword bid to sharpen your campaigns.

• Expanding ROI Through Multiple Channels:

  Measure the ROI of your campaigns through various channels. Get an in-depth analysis of which channels are getting the desired results and maximize profit.

Every business tirelessly works for what the future beholds. Let's see how Marketing Intelligence Software will grow.
 

Marketing Intelligence Software And Artificial Intelligence Is The Future 

Like all other industries, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is slowly making inroads in marketing technologies. AI and ML (Machine Learning) can analyze humungous volumes of raw data and churn out meaningful insights. NLP (Natural Language Processing) is being leveraged to extract customer information by integrating voice assistant with Marketing Intelligence Software to ask natural voice-based questions and gather results. Another exciting AI feature is Predictive Analytics. AI analyzes historical data to detect common trends and patterns to predict future activities. All of these are poised to make Marketing Intelligence Software a crucial tool for marketing teams.
 

Summing It Up

If a young man tells his date that she's intelligent, looks lovely and is a great conversationalist, he's saying the right things to the right person and that's a marketing strategy. However, if he talks something about her dressing sense, sense of humor or food likings, he is furthering the conversation using real-time data insight that he may have just observed or heard from her. That is intelligent marketing and guarantees to materialize into a second date.

Marketing Intelligence Software is designed to give you the same kind of intelligent and actionable data points to ensure that you convey the right things at the right time through the proper channels to your customers and get the desired outcome.