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Where do you gather your marketing intelligence?
When it comes to marketing intelligence, where do you go for resources? Do you use a specific software, or do you follow certain blogs? Are you a part of any professional organizations?? I do marketing and sales and I’m wondering how others go about their marketing intelligence?
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5 Answers
Hi Lindsey
I did some field research recently to interview sales people to find out where they get their market intelligence from. The target group were field sales reps selling primarily technology products.
It's probably not a surprise but in general there is no clear winner here, most sales reps are using a variety of free and commercial tools to research companies and people, typically before the first conversation in order to find out something about the company or person.
The most typical comercial tools I saw were Jigsaw and Hoovers where people were going to get accurate contact information and basic firmographics. The free tools are geared around google, yahoo and an increasing number turning to LinkedIn.
Google Alerts are used by many but needs some care and attention to get good results. I'm seeing tools start to emerge now that do a pretty reasonable job of finding relevant content such as www.yourversion.com, www.gist.com among others.
Personally as a Product Marketing person I use a variety of sources from Analyst reports to customer meetings and inputs from the field. The important thing is always to segment, filter and validate, most information out there is created with a purpose in mind which often is to do more than just spread the information.
Lindsey:
I think one of the best places to gather your marketing intelligence is from your campaign metrics. I think one of the biggest oversights organizations make is not getting the intelligence from their metrics for historical purposes and for charting the future.
This is not to say speaking with your customers, prospects and reading market reports, etc. should be discarded, but adding your marketing, sales and customer support metrics will open up a whole new view and increase the value of your metrics.
Lindsey, would like to assist but could you define what you mean by "marketing intelligence"? Thanks.
Hi Lindsey,
I agree with Carlos, Marketing metrics of your past campaigns are very important, especially if you can also compare them with the competitors'.
Business reports are very helpful too, if you do not want to spend on subscriptions check local libraries, sometimes they have a good selection of reports. Sometimes business schools also grant admission to the library for the small fee.
For the reports I really like Mintel, because it provides not only competitor analysis and market analysis but also gives consumers perspectives and does quantitative and qualitative research.
It also helps to attend conferences, since get a good feel of the market sitation and techniques others are using.
But if you can specify more what you mean by marketing intelligence it would help.
What do you need the data for?
Hi Lindsey, Marketing Intelligence is a pretty broad topic but depending on what you want here are some places you can try.
If you are looking for demographics:
www.melissadata.com - Click on "free lookups" everything from income tax returns, housing sales, numbers of people who move in our out of a zip code, crime, climate, non profits, political contributions, this one has it all.
www.census.gov - you can get the basic demographics of a specific area
www.bestplaces.net - Another snapshot of cities and towns
If you are looking for company info:
http://www.referenceusa.com/ - this is an expensive program but many libraries have it. I log in at home with my library card. Check your local library or university library.
If you are just looking for everything in one place:
www.refdesk.com
Hope this helps.
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