Information powers your organization’s strategy. The global business intelligence market is expected to grow from $23.1 billion to $33.3 billion by 2025, which means it’s more than likely your fiercest competitors will be seeking insights, just like you. Your competitive edge comes from being able to cut through the noise and find the “golden nuggets” of information that will inform your direction and decisions. This is why you need to have a strong market intelligence program and toolset.
Staying ahead of what could impact your business
Your robust market intelligence program goes beyond what you can gather directly from customer surveys and observation, though that’s an important component. While vital, if customer data is all you use to inform important decisions about the direction of your company, you do so with a dangerous myopia. Customer data is exponentially more valuable when viewed and analyzed within a broader body of intelligence, which is why industry leaders actively harvest and curate information about as much as they can, focusing on what will help them be more agile in a competitive environment. The broad strokes of what they look at—and what you should, too—include areas like these:
- Current and emerging trends in your industry and in adjacent industries
- Your competitors and what are they doing (products, pricing, promotions)
- Your prospects and customers, their challenges, values, and what they are saying about you and your competitors (product/brand perception, reputation)
- Organizations who offer complementary services in your space (potential partnerships and alliances)
- News and events that might impact your industry or your customers (market shifts, disruptive technologies, regulations)
- Existing and potential opportunities and threats
If that sounds daunting, take heart. For your market intelligence efforts to yield big results, you don’t need to know everything…you need to know the most important things. This is where having the right toolset makes things much easier, and Cronycle has the solution.
Using a market intelligence program to improve your long game
When we see one of the Fortune 500 companies offer a new product, or go through a rebrand, or target a new industry, it’s easy to nod our heads and think, “Well, that just makes sense.” But no one pulls the trigger on a big move overnight. The truth is that market leaders are leaders because they truly have their fingers on the pulse of the market—customers, competition, trends, news—and they’ve been monitoring it closely for a while.
Take Netflix, for example. As of the first quarter of 2021, Netflix serves more than 207 million subscribers worldwide, but that’s not just because the events of 2020 had more people enjoying their home theaters. Their story starts way before that, of course, and is filled with plot twists that demonstrate their consistent and excellent use of market intelligence. In 2013, six years after launching digital streaming and four years after launching Netflix Originals, the company made a bold move: CEO Reed Hastings announced they would embrace a new mission to produce original content that could win Emmys and Oscars. The company made the shift, and saw massive growth—from 2013 to 2019, revenue tripled, profits grew by 32X, and its stock CAGR increased 57% annually. Netflix continues to be recognized as one of the most transformational companies in the world, setting a standard for using insights.
We’ve also watched the big software brands get bigger by using market intelligence to move from selling individual products to becoming providers of broader, cloud-based solutions (think Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit). But the lesson of market intelligence isn’t just for the big guys, and it isn’t just for when economies are booming.
The recent pandemic has resulted in massive disruption—and opportunities—in every business sector imaginable. According to Accenture Strategy, the result is that “value chains are being reshaped—redistributing more than $3 trillion to businesses that best anticipate the impacts.“
When the recent pandemic posed a major threat to Spotify’s revenue, they employed a strategy similar to the one used by Netflix. Advertisers started cutting their budgets, and Spotify immediately found themselves experiencing a serious revenue loss, and facing big questions about the viability of their business model that relied primarily on advertiser revenue. They had no choice but to pivot. They started offering original content—specifically, podcasts. In one month, more than 150,000 podcasts were uploaded, and Spotify signed exclusive distribution deals with celebrities. This bold and decisive move could never have been made by a company focused solely (or even primarily) on customer behavior and feedback. Spotify’s strategic shift was possible because the company already had its eyes wide open to vistas beyond the narrow lane on which they were driving. Such is the value of market intelligence.
So it wasn’t just big technology players who grew during the pandemic. Growth came to organizations who were able to harvest and utilize insights from the massive amounts of new and dynamic data sources that resulted from an unprecedented situation—one that is still affecting value chains, consumer behavior, and myriad other market aspects.
Is your current toolset putting you at risk?
Take a moment to think about your current toolset. How confident you are that it’s doing all it needs to do?
- Are you the first to know of key developments or do you sometimes lag behind and have to play catch up?
- Do you fully trust your sources, filters, and algorithms or is it possible you have blindspots?
- Is surfacing, harvesting, and sharing insights efficient and easy or are you spending valuable time and resources to accomplish these tasks?
- Is your team ahead of the high demand to provide insights or do they struggle to respond and keep up?
Your success depends on being informed and ahead of the knowledge curve so you can make decisions quickly and confidently. You simply can’t afford to operate with the kinds of vulnerabilities presented by working with inadequate market intelligence tools. Whatever stage you are in with your market intelligence program, Cronycle will help you level up.
Filtering out the noise with Cronycle
There’s so much data coming at you that it can feel like drinking from a firehose—or ten firehoses! Cronycle helps you manage that massive information stream by filtering out the noise. Each day, Cronycle surfaces new developments and emerging trends from top experts across 80,000 topics and delivers to you the most trusted and most relevant 2% of content you need to know about.
Cronycle topics and our expertise network form the backbone of our search and relevance technology, and you decide what data to include in your content feeds, such as industry blogs, newsletters, Twitter, and RSS feeds. You’ll track what matters most, all in one place—everything from specific product and competitor news, to broad industry trends and market insights.
Collaborating on content is simple with Cronycle boards where team members post and share articles, videos, social media posts and more…and can then summarize, tag, annotate, and discuss what’s there. Our clients tell us that the flexibility of Cronycle feeds and boards helps them build a collective braintrust, avoid redundant research and cuts their time to insights in half.
And with Cronycle, you can easily share and publish insights to social media and in RSS feeds, on your WordPress website, over Slack or Microsoft Teams, and via newsletters using Cronycle’s built-in newsletter tool.
