If you’re responsible for making strategic decisions and often find yourself asking, “What should we do next?”, the issue is most probably a lack of timely, market-level insight.
Markets today change faster than most teams can react. Customer expectations evolve, competitors adjust positioning, and new trends emerge long before they show up in quarterly reports. By the time many businesses recognize these shifts, competitors have already acted on them.
That's why sales and marketing professionals use marketing intelligence software to understand consumer behavior and strategize operations.
Market intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing data about competitors, customers, and market conditions to support strategic decision-making. It includes insights on trends, pricing, product development, and consumer behavior, enabling businesses to identify opportunities and mitigate risks.
Rather than reacting after the fact, market intelligence enables businesses to stay proactive, informed, and competitive in fast-moving markets.
In this article, we’ll explore what market intelligence is, how it compares to market research, and why it plays a critical role in business strategy.
The key difference is that market intelligence analyzes changing trends to help you develop better business strategies, whereas market research answers specific business questions.
Market research is typically used to validate assumptions or solve a specific problem, such as testing a new product concept or understanding why conversions dropped. Market intelligence, on the other hand, provides continuous visibility into the market, allowing businesses to identify trends early and adjust their strategies proactively.
| Aspect | Market intelligence | Market research |
| Purpose | Monitor ongoing market changes and competitive dynamics | Answer specific business questions |
| Scope | Broad and continuous | Narrow and project-based |
| Focus | Trends, competitors, customer behavior, market shifts | Product validation, pricing, positioning, and customer needs |
| Timing | Ongoing and real-time | Conducted at defined points in time |
| Output | Benchmarks, alerts, insights, forecasts | Reports, surveys, studies, and analyses |
| Use cases | Strategic planning, competitive positioning, and market expansion | Go-to-market decisions, product development, customer feedback |
Rather than replacing market research, market intelligence complements it, ensuring teams have the broader context needed to act on research findings with confidence.
Every business decision is made in the context of a moving market, whether that movement is visible or not. Without market intelligence, teams are forced to rely on assumptions, partial information, or insights that arrive too late to influence outcomes.
Market intelligence gives organizations a clearer understanding of how the market is behaving right now, not just how it behaved in the past. Here’s how market intelligence creates meaningful impact:
Rather than serving as a one-time input, market intelligence acts as a continuous feedback loop, helping organizations stay grounded in what the market needs today while preparing for what’s coming next.
Market intelligence isn’t just limited to one form of data – it covers information ranging across a broad spectrum of actionable industry insights. The burning question here is: what datasets should your business be looking at?
Here are the four main types of marketing intelligence:
Competitor intelligence is like placing a finger on the pulse – getting a feel for what makes the industry beat faster.
Understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses helps you to evaluate how your product should position itself in the market and attract consumers’ attention. Constantly monitoring what the competition is doing puts you at a competitive advantage and enables you to grab market opportunities before someone else recognizes them.
On the other side of the spectrum, closely following your competitors also helps you gain insight into what didn’t work for them, thus avoiding repeating something that wouldn’t be the best move for your business.
Now that you’ve scoped out the competition, it’s time to take a look at how your product fares. There’s no point trying to make and sell lemonade when your lemons aren’t even ripe.
With product intelligence, you can get a better understanding about the way your product performs or how efficient your services are. Zeroing in on the problems your target audience is looking to solve allows your business to enhance its product line to include those crucial features. Think of it as using data to constantly build better products for your customers.
It’s a great way to validate your product and to see if your product roadmap is heading in the right direction. It's also a great opportunity to see if you need to undergo a new product exercise. Getting insight into which features are the most popular among your customer base, how the latest feature release has performed, and how your customers actually use the product can help make your product go from good to great.
Product intelligence can also help your business glean insights on what your competitors with similar products are doing and how your product compares. Analyzing what your competitors are missing with their product allows your brand to take advantage of the gaps in the industry before anyone else figures them out.
Customer understanding and product intelligence go hand in hand. A better product implies a better customer experience. Understanding the customer becomes key to understanding what kind of user experience they are looking for from your product.
The goal for any business is to retain its customers. While closing deals with new customers is always welcome, customer retention should be a business priority.
The perception a customer may have of your product can vary considerably from time to time. This stresses the need for comprehensive artificial intelligence that not only retrieves specific customer data but to displays it in a way that’s easy to understand and gives you quick insights on what your customers need, what they’re looking for, and what they’re not getting from your business.
It’s also a great way to monitor how your competitors’ customers feel. Any time your competitor has missed the mark with its customer service, your marketing team can immediately move in to make a quick steal with the help of targeted campaigns.
There’s nothing worse than realizing that significant features in your product have become obsolete after months of research and development (R&D) just because the rules of the game have changed.
In an ideal world, your business is the only one solving a specific problem. In reality, there are probably a dozen or so solutions in the market that are catering to the same niche as you. This is where market understanding comes into the picture.
Understanding consumer demands and needs can help a business significantly increase its market share and revenue, as well as identify new areas of growth within the existing market. It could also hint at new geographies that haven’t been tapped yet and are worth exploring.
Now that you’ve gathered all the data from all the possible sources of information, what do you do with it? How do you turn this data into something executable?
Data can be a big window into what everyone is doing. Naturally, picking up what works great and quickly dropping activities that don’t see much impact is the way to go. Observing what tools and techniques your well-performing competitors are adopting is a great cheat sheet of sorts to cut through most of the fluff.
Again, different data can point to different goals and targets. Deriving utility out of market intelligence depends on what area you want to tackle first.
This could be:
This is just a small set of use cases in a broad range of possibilities that market intelligence can open up with its data. While fresh data can give rise to new changes periodically, it certainly helps create strategies and assets ahead of time in anticipation of these changes.
Data is only as good as the questions you ask. As much as we like instant gratification, market intelligence cannot promise ready-made solutions unless your business starts asking specific questions.
Before you start gathering market intelligence data, establishing specific objectives in advance can serve to strengthen your marketing intelligence efforts and its reach. Furthermore, it is easier to map the correct data across various marketing channels by specifically defining the function that needs information. Measuring the effectiveness of market intelligence is only possible when you take the time to determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business – both qualitative and quantitative.
While goals vary from organization to organization, most businesses, at their core, look at achieving a few fundamental targets:
The number one rule of adopting market intelligence into your business is “to tweak your approach on the fly."
Data is dynamic. From customer sentiments to current affairs, change is the only constant you can be sure of. It makes sense then that any market strategy needs to be consistently monitored.
Simply adopting market intelligence does not give you the license to become lazy. Even though it would be easier to just make a few major changes at certain touchpoints and call it a day, market intelligence is all about depth.
To be the best, you have to assume every other business out there is putting their best foot forward. Your business runs the risk of losing market share and missing out on a lot of invaluable market insights if you don’t monitor what everyone’s doing and accordingly tweak your strategy to see consistent impact.
Goals not only vary from organization to organization – they even vary within an organization.
While everyone may be on the same page about where the business should go, different levels will focus on different things to get there. If your business is looking to invest in market intelligence tools, it helps to have a checklist specific to each level.
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It’s no surprise that sales and marketing teams would be the primary users for market intelligence tools. With both teams requiring copious amounts of data to execute their respective strategies, it becomes crucial to find a system that can provide real-time insights at the click of a button.
Identifying high-quality leads and determining the most effective channels to engage with them can cut down the time required to research leads and focus more on pushing prospects down the funnel.
Key stakeholders in the organization may be more concerned with what their direct and indirect competitors are up to, what they’re saying to potential customers, how their product is reviewed in the market, and how they’re acquiring the right talent for crucial roles. Market intelligence tools provide a window to all that and more so that any organization can determine what positioning and messaging seems relevant in the industry today.
Perhaps the most dynamic use of market intelligence can be seen across an industry level. Sometimes there is a goldmine of opportunities that haven’t been explored but could be staring you right in your face. Market intelligence helps answer some of the broader questions, like what the industry as a whole can offer, what it needs right now, and how you can leverage gaps within it.
Market intelligence software gathers client-focused market information and publicly available data to help businesses gain insights from industry trends. G2 helps businesses find the best market intelligence software to track market trends, analyze competitors, and make data-driven strategic decisions.
To be included in this category, the software product must:
*Below are the top 5 leading market intelligence software solutions from G2’s Winter 2026 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
ZoomInfo Sales is a sales intelligence platform that provides B2B companies with accurate insights, purchase intent data, and intelligence to identify ready-to-buy companies. It also features conversation intelligence capabilities to help you capture and analyze customer meetings, emails, and interactions.
"Zoominfo has been the hallmark of businesses to bring out the best holistic approach across various departments like Sales, Customer Support, and TA. Zoominfo can be easily accessed by Junior to senior members. It can be used frequently for gathering the right business personas. The seamless integration of the tool makes things easier to implement. Customer support has been extremely terrific as well if and when things go wrong."
- ZoomInfo Sales review, Cholarajan J.
"One major functional drawback is the lack of fuzzy matching during bulk searches. If the company name you provide doesn't perfectly match ZoomInfo’s specific formatting, the system simply returns no results. It’s frustrating that a premium platform doesn't offer 'did you mean' suggestions or partial name matching for bulk uploads, forcing us to spend hours manually cleaning data just to get a match."
- ZoomInfo Sales review, Abhishek R.
Semrush is a search engine optimization tool that helps organizations conduct competitor marketing research for online marketing results. Businesses use this platform to dive deep into competitors' strategies and create their own accordingly.
"Semrush saves hours of my effort because it allows me to do intense competitive research, their traffic analytics, their content strategy, source of organic traffic, and most importantly, the keyword gap. I use the keyword magic tool almost every day, and it always gives fine results. Although very rarely, I also use Semrush's on-page features, such as site auditing, SEO content template, and the on-page SEO checker. I only want to say one thing: Semrush is a package full of advanced SEO and content management tools. None of my work can be accomplished with Semrush, and it's simple to use. There's no complicated feature that needs users to have expertise in SEO."
- Semrush review, Rehnuma K.
"When using the Semrush site audit tool, there are a number of different items to account for. Between "warnings," "errors," and "issues," it's clear errors should be dealt with as first priority (or at least it is to me), but after that, it just seems that fixing an "issue" can result in more "warnings," and it's hard to know how to prioritize those items. Almost seems intentionally confusing."
- Semrush review, Dan S.
Similarweb is a digital marketing and research intelligence platform helping organizations with audience analysis, keyword research, market research, and ad intelligence. It also features shopper intelligence capabilities to help companies gauge consumer demand and shopper behavior.
"I've been using Similarweb for a few months now, and it's a game-changer for anyone serious about understanding website analytics and consumer behavior. The interface? Clean and intuitive. The data? Ridiculously accurate and actionable.
What really sets Similarweb apart is its ability to give you an in-depth look at your competitors' web traffic and strategies. It's like having a spyglass into what the other players in your space are doing, which is gold for strategizing your own moves.
Also, their customer support is on point. Had a few queries when I started, and they guided me through like pros. If you're sitting on the fence about this, my advice: jump in. You'll wonder how you ever made decisions without it."
- Similarweb review, Ian James O.
"One minor drawback I encountered is that it can be a bit challenging to initially navigate and extract data from the platform. Nevertheless, with time and familiarity, everything becomes more straightforward."
- Similarweb review, Marco O.
AlphaSense is a leading market intelligence and search platform that tech companies use to gain critical market insights and act faster. The platform lets you monitor insights across industries, topics, and trends from 10,000+ data sources.
"I was able to maximize the research outcome by spending very few hours after implementing AlphaSense. Features like custom dashboard monitoring alerts help me to receive the latest news on the topic that I set. Easy integration between financial analysis and Excel reduces manual work."
- AlphaSense review, Aaliyah P.
"Too much data on the dashboard can be a distraction, and I need to focus on what I need to first. Lack of integration with Google Mail is also an issue. Still, it is one of the finest tools I have use."
- AlphaSense review, Robert M.
Demandbase One is a B2B go-to-market platform designed to help revenue teams identify buying signals, prioritize accounts, and coordinate engagement across sales and marketing. By unifying account data and intent signals in one system, it enables teams to focus on the right opportunities, streamline execution, and drive more consistent pipeline outcomes.
"Its features greatly simplify audience segmentation, and it’s also very easy to implement and integrate. I like that you can complete each task in different ways depending on your preferences, and that it lets you create and launch multiple campaigns. I especially appreciate how quickly and efficiently I can launch channel campaigns, while still having control over many of the details."
- Demandbase One review, Paul D.
"The downside of the platform is that it can be too expensive and often requires a significant budget for you to use it. Also, when it comes to customer support, you may find technical support very slow or insufficient, especially when it comes to complex issues or integrations."
- Demandbase One review, Romeo P.
Got more questions? We have the answers.
Market intelligence should be reviewed continuously, with updates happening as frequently as market conditions change. High-velocity areas like competitor activity or customer sentiment may require weekly or real-time monitoring, while broader market trends can be assessed quarterly.
Market intelligence focuses on external factors such as competitors, customers, and market trends, while business intelligence analyzes internal data like sales performance, operational metrics, and financial results. Both are complementary but serve different decision-making needs.
While sales and marketing teams are the most frequent users, product managers, strategy teams, and executive leadership also rely on market intelligence to guide roadmap planning, positioning, and long-term growth decisions.
Common challenges include data overload, unclear goals, inconsistent data sources, and misalignment across teams. Successful market intelligence programs prioritize relevance, quality, and clear ownership.
Success is measured by how effectively insights influence decisions and outcomes. This may include improved win rates, stronger positioning, faster go-to-market execution, higher retention, or reduced strategic risk.
Market intelligence is valuable for both. B2B companies often use it to track competitive positioning and account-level insights, while B2C companies rely on it to understand consumer behavior, demand shifts, and brand perception at scale.
Yes. Smaller teams often benefit from market intelligence by focusing on a narrower set of goals and data sources, allowing them to identify opportunities and competitive threats without the complexity of enterprise-scale programs.
Market intelligence doesn’t promise to be an automatic solution for all of your business problems. It does, however, promise to make your work easier, more efficient, and more accurate than it could ever be without a data-driven strategy.
Using market intelligence for product positioning or entering a new market? Learn the basics of a go-to-market strategy to set yourself up for success.
This article was originally published in 2020. It has been updated with new information.
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