How do we stack up against the competition? What deals are we missing? Which market segments are growing or shrinking? These are fundamental questions for B2B marketers. But much of the time, the answers lack substance. They rely on gutfeel and anecdote, rather than robust knowledge and insight.
Better intelligence about the markets you operate in enables marketing investment to be deployed more scientifically and strategically. Which means it’s more likely to deliver tangible commercial impact.
If your marketing has been flying blind, there are three key areas you can focus on to bring clarity and drive growth:
Awareness
It’s important to know how many target customers are aware of your company and what you do. This is the ceiling of what you can achieve, you can’t sell anything beyond it. Ideally you should be able to cite market awareness by segment and relative to competitors. This ensures marketing spend can be prioritised, with different approaches tested to determine which has the best value impact over time.
Understanding customer awareness is the cornerstone of insight-driven marketing. So, investing in research to reveal the percentage of customers that can name your brand – aided and unaided – is a good starting point. It also provides an objective benchmark against which to measure future performance.
Consideration
Once you know who’s aware of your business, you need to find out whether they’d actually consider working with you or buying from you. Measuring this over time gives a useful indication of what’s working and what’s not from a marketing communications perspective. Drilling down into how target customers rate your brand, its capabilities across segments, and versus competitors makes this factor even more meaningful. It gives a valuable indication of the areas where you can maximise opportunities, and those where you’re less likely to be on the radar of buyers and decision-makers. This enables better use of outbound marketing to boost your chances with opportunities that might otherwise have been missed. And in the medium- to long-term, you can test ways to increase consideration by segment, tracking the impact as you go.
Market share
Few B2B companies know their true market share. But in these days of digital disruption it’s a must-have nugget of insight. After all, your business may be growing, but new entrants could still be encroaching on your overall market share. If you’re unaware of this, it could leave your business vulnerable and exposed.
Plotting your wins and losses per month or per quarter alongside robust sector-based demand models can generate an accurate calculation of market share. It allows you to identify whether competitors are gaining on you in segments where you’ve traditionally had a stronghold, sooner rather than later. And it means you can properly track your own progress in new segments or those where your share was lower at the outset.
From lagging to leading
Today’s business world is characterised by volatility and fragmentation. Customer demands are changing and, in many sectors, new entrants are shifting the dynamic further. Market intelligence enables you to get a better handle on how your business is performing versus the competition in this complex, dynamic environment.
Market intelligence is not ‘just another tool’ in the stack. It’s less about technology and more about the data: scientific insights that empower marketers to communicate more effectively with customers in the moments that matter. It’s about applying and leveraging data to enhance the way the business operates, to maximise new business and minimise customer churn.
It’s time to make the transition from lagging indicators, such as public financial performance data, to leading indicators, such as which target customers are actively considering your brand right now. Without this insight, your business will always be on the back foot.
