How Inquisio Compares to Traditional Marketing Research Tools
PE investors increasingly recognize that marketing can make or break a company’s growth trajectory, making it a crucial part of the due diligence process. And to evaluate a target company's marketing potential, they need tools to assess its marketing performance. As investors often don’t have the budget to use consultants at the Pre-LOI stage, they turn to traditional marketing tools for data on things like SEO, paid media and other metrics.
The only problem is: they're not getting what they need. Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs provide raw marketing data but nothing that investors can actually use. How is Inquiso any different? Let’s dive in.
Built for marketers vs. built for PE investors
Traditional marketing tools: These are powerful tools—but they're built for marketers, not investors. Investors often don’t have the expertise to understand what to look for in marketing data, or have the time to analyze tons of data sets. That’s where these tools fall short for investors.
Inquisio: Purpose-built for decision-makers by industry experts who have worked with leading PE firms and software companies to analyze prospective acquisitions, it draws from insights of top C-level marketing strategists and PE professionals. Inquisio generates investor-friendly reports with clear, actionable insights that empower investors with intelligence on the marketing potential of target companies so they can confidently make sound investment decisions—and make them easily and instantly.
Raw marketing data vs. actionable marketing insights
Traditional marketing tools: While great at providing raw data meant for tactical execution, these tools don’t translate this data into strategic insights investors can use. Because investors aren't marketers, sifting through marketing data points isn't helpful in evaluating a company’s growth potential. Deep marketing expertise, and significant time and research are required to transform, visualize and interpret meaningful insights from raw data that is actionable—resources that investors don’t have, especially within the tight pre-LOI due diligence window.
Inquisio: Inquisio delivers investor-ready insights in seconds—fully visualized, contextualized, and actionable. Its baked-in expertise transforms complex marketing data into broader strategy-level recommendations and critical insights tailored for PE firms, board members, and CEOs to make informed investment decisions about target companies or strategic marketing decisions. There's no need to invest time and funds on analysts to make sense of the data—just plug in company information and instantly get the marketing insights you need.
Limited marketing data sets vs. insights on all critical marketing value creation factors
Traditional marketing tools: These are limited to specific marketing functions and overlook critical value creation areas in marketing such as headcount or budget allocation. For that reason, even if you were to analyze the data, you wouldn’t get answers to key strategic questions such as how much should optimal headcount be, what sort of social advertising to run or how a company's marketing compares to competitors.
Inquisio: Our data goes far beyond the basics. While we use some data from other marketing tools, a significant majority of the data stack we present can't be found anywhere else. Inquisio answers questions on critical value creation decisions such as optimal spend, headcount, organization structure, competitor analysis, channel and program-level distribution and performance expectations. All these are tailored to the unique circumstances of the target company, such as ACV, TAM and revenue, ensuring accuracy and strategic relevance.
Inaccurate data vs. proprietary intelligence
Traditional marketing tools: There can be huge variance in the output from these tools as they produce inconsistent—and therefore unreliable—data. In fact, when compared to first-party data across 973 data points, third-party tools were found to overestimate search volume by 35% and underestimate cost per click by 74%. Not only do these inaccuracies require constant adjustments, but they also rely heavily on scraping, making the data even less dependable.
Inquisio: Built with a proprietary database and expert-designed algorithm, Inquisio delivers accurate, high-quality insights. By leveraging real anonymized company data, industry benchmarks, and AI/LLM components, it eliminates the guesswork and inaccuracy of third-party data—ensuring you get reliable insights without the need for manual adjustments.
Static historical data vs. customizable future growth insights
Traditional marketing tools: These tools will show you a target company’s historic or current marketing performance, rather than future growth potential. They also generate static outputs, meaning investors can’t adjust recommendations based on evolving business conditions. For example, they may track a company’s organic and paid media performance over time but fail to account for key factors—like the fact that paid media leads are often less valuable than organic ones.
Inquisio: Inquisio provides the future outlook, giving you a clear roadmap of what marketing could achieve and how to get there, and visualizing data so PE investors can instantly start using the outputs. Moreover, Inquiso provides dynamic outputs that investors can customize based on real business conditions—incuding adjusting for expected growth, changes in contract value or shifting market dynamics. The result? A data-driven custom outlook that PE firms can immediately act on.
Conclusion
Traditional marketing data tools were never designed for investors—they were built for marketers managing tactical execution. Inquisio fills the gap by transforming marketing data into strategic investment insights. With its proprietary database, customizable outputs and actionable recommendations, Inquisio is the only solution built to give PE firms a true competitive edge in marketing due diligence.
Ready to see how Inquisio can transform your investment process? Book a demo now.
