A Guide to Procurement Market Intelligence

Procurement market intelligence takes all the organisation’s historical data, wraps it up in a neat and accessible bow, and hands it over to Marketing teams along with insights that inform decision-making and spend.

An in-depth understanding of the market, costs, suppliers, products, materials, and agency costs is critical to successful procurement. Which means procurement teams need insights and data that’s up-to-date and relevant. 

However, this can be challenging. Procurement teams are faced with intense time constraints, changing external variables, tough economic and geopolitical conditions, and internal budget shifts and cuts. 

This is where procurement intelligence steps in. Providing brands with the ability to understand how every last dollar of their marketing budget is spent using data-driven intelligence that helps them shape their procurement strategies and marketing campaigns.

Advantages of Procurement Data Analysis

Procurement market intelligence offers procurement teams a number of benefits that include:

• Clear understanding of costs that allows for procurement teams to select the best suppliers and agencies based on realistic budgets and expectations.
• Visibility into agency fees that allows for the brand to select the best agency for the job without drifting into price wars and only choosing based the cheapest. Understanding an agency’s costs and performance clearly allows for brands to choose the best within budgets.
• Evidence-based decision-making which benefits both marketing and procurement and identifies areas where the brand can save money and add value.
• Contract negotiations are empowered by data so agency relationships are enhanced. You know market trends and industry benchmarks so you can negotiate better which leads to measurable savings.
• Benchmarking can be used to assess agency, spend, performance and costs across multiple markets and jurisdictions.
• You can identify alternative agencies or suppliers that fit your budgets more effectively.

Importance of Procurement Data Analysis

Data is the lifeblood of procurement market intelligence. Data is the intelligence – but only if it is managed correctly. Data has to be stored, analysed and presented in a way that makes sense for marketing procurement teams. Market research, competitor intelligence insights, and agency data form the foundation of procurement intelligence.

Data-driven insights can help you with benchmarking, budget planning, campaign performance tracking and reporting. To achieve this, you need analytics tools capable of sifting through the data to draw out relevant insights. 

Strategies for Procurement Efficiency

Using procurement marketing intelligence, your brand can improve procurement efficiencies. How?

• A data-driven approach allows you to clearly establish your costs versus your objectives. You gain insight into all the layers of your marketing costs and you can use this insight to make informed decisions around agency selection processes, budgets and planning.
• Understanding the cost structure of an agency allows for marketing procurement to make informed decisions based on cost efficiencies and performance. It’s not a race to the bottom, instead it is an informed process using relevant data.
• RightSpend provides benchmarking data across 75 global markets and assesses more than $10 billion in marketing spend annually. This visibility allows you to identify savings and build more accurate marketing budgets that are capable of flexing, changing and responding to an evolving market landscape. 
• RightSpend means you gain access to data classified by agency size, type and geographic location alongside metric-specific tracking and analysis with visualised reporting. These rich insights hand you the tools you need to create and build your marketing budgets more effectively and realistically. 
• When you have comprehensive visibility, you can use this to forge stronger and more collaborative relationships with marketing so campaigns have greater reach, value and success.

Procurement Analytics and Trends

When you have the right data and tools to analyse the data, you can uncover market trends and opportunities and use these to your advantage. This means you can drive efficiencies in your spend and campaigns as you have line of sight into potential areas of growth or improved success, and you can innovate within your campaigns based on solid insights and understanding.

You can also use data to predict market demand, making your procurement more proactive and allowing for smarter cost decisions, not rushed expensive ones.

Competitive Advantage Through Market Intelligence

Now you have your hands wrapped around the data, you can use it to enhance your decision-making across multiple strategic levels. You can analyse spend to identify patterns in spending behaviour and use this information to reduce inefficiencies and enhance budgets and planning. 

And, if you embrace a data-driven approach today, your ability to unpack data and leverage insights to better align marketing and procurement means you are ahead of companies which don’t have these tools. You can outperform, out-think and out-plan because you have access to deeper insights so you can make more accurate predictions.

RightSpend’s data-driven procurement marketing intelligence has proven to deliver measurable return on investment (ROI) to clients. A FMCG company was able to reinvest 16% into additional marketing, a technology company achieved 15% savings, a pharma company achieved 17% additional ROI, and a financial services company saved 25%. 

On average, our clients save 20%on their marketing spend which they can then reinvest into more marketing or deliver as savings to the bottom line.

How to Implement Procurement Market Intelligence

There are several methods you can use to gather and analyse your data to create insights relevant to your procurement and marketing teams. However, with RightSpend, you can access the insights and benchmarking on demand, when you need them, allowing you to focus on your roles and building stronger relationships with marketing teams. 

Book a call with the RightSpend team today to find out how Procurement Market Intelligence can help you deliver impressive results.