5 Essential Marketing Intelligence Tools

By: Josh Druck

Marketing Tools

1) SWOT Analysis – Recording and analyzing your businesses capabilities and resources can help you improve your industry position and performance.  You can develop this insight by looking at your internal company data. What causes your company to underperform, or lose market share (weaknesses)? Looking at your competition and looking ahead at environmental trends, provides you with the marketing intelligence to spot opportunities, justify new marketing strategies, and may help to identify trends which require changes to marketing strategy.

2) CSI – Consistently measuring Customer Satisfaction is essential to marketing strategy. Implementing and developing a marketing intelligence tool such as a Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) can provide you with ongoing scorecard on how your business is performing. Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is another form of this strategy/tool).

3) CPA – Customer Perceptions Audits are marketing tools which provide external evaluations of how your business if performing throughout the entire pre-purchase to post-purchase experience. A CPA is a step-by-step walk through of all “point of encounters” with the customer, from the customer’s perspective (i.e. – mystery shoppers).

4) GAP Analysis – A “GAP” analysis as a marketing tool seeks to identify management’s perspective of how things are running with respect to customer satisfaction and how the customer evaluates that performance. The difference is referred to as the “GAP”. For example on a 100 point index, management rates customer satisfaction at an 85 and the customer rates it at a 65, the “GAP” is 20. Reviews and customer surveys can be examples of this.

5) OPD – Not every business can afford to conduct extensive marketing research. One solution is to use the marketing intelligence tool called “OPD” or Other People’s Data. OPD is secondary research compiled by another party who is face to face or dealing with potential customers. Many people (agencies, competitors, the U.S government, etc.) are constantly conducting research and sharing the findings with the public. Be sure to take advantage of this free or very inexpensive marketing intelligence tool.