subject: Gathering Market Intelligence With External Sources [print this page] Doing research to learn more about a market prior to making the final decision to have your company enter that market is gathering market intelligence with external sources. You need to know about quite a few aspects of a market (especially an overseas marketing) before developing your marketing strategy to penetrate the market and becoming a key provider of the product or service that you are interested in offering. You need to gather information on who your top competitors will be and find out how their marketing approaches could throw off yours. This is a great way to strengthen your weaknesses before jumping into the market to compete with them. You should also find out how much the customers in that market are going to be willing to pay for your product or service. If you go into a market and your price is too high, it may set you up for failure in the long run.
Market Intelligence and Social Media
The internet provides a plethora of external sources for you to use to gather external data for your market intelligence. This recovered data can help you analyze a new market that you are interested in entering and competing in. It is very important that you spend the time to research the desired market, especially if it is a foreign market, but with all of the resources that are made available to you on the internet, the research will be the easy part of your developing marketing approach. You can use social media web pages such as status updates and tweets. If you are entering a market and your goal is to target young adults or teens, testing the waters via social media sites is crucial since this is the age group that frequents these sites. Social media can help you gauge the mood of the audience you are trying to reach out to and you will be able to determine whether or not your devised marketing campaign will work or not.
Utilizing All Possible Market Intelligence Sources
There are many market intelligence resources available that can be used to gather the necessary data that you need to analyze. The data you will be analyzing can range from your website traffic numbers (gathered via some kind of analytics program), details on your future competitors within that market, how the customers of that market view those competitors, the overall mood of the market, its forecast, the buying habits of the customers, and so much more. It is a lot of data but it is necessary to look at all of it in order to form a larger picture of the market. This will help you make an intelligent decision when it comes down to whether or not you want your company to enter that market and attempt to secure a stronghold within it. When it comes to conducting your market research online, be sure to take advantage of every resource that is available. There are a lot of free resources out there which can be very beneficial.
