Data and insights are a powerful tool that helps businesses move through the market with stiff competition and ever-evolving technology and trends. It is not always clear, however, where to collect consumer insights to inform your sales, business growth, and marketing strategies. This post will take you through the key market research measures and strategies to ensure that you embrace critical opportunities that can carry your business to the next level and help you get an advantage over the competition.
What is Market Analysis?
Market analysis is a method for the evaluation and identification within a particular niche of various internal and external factors and conditions in a market. In essence, the key insights obtained from market research are linked to:
Market size assessments;
Pinpoint trends in growth;
Defining the target group and learning about them;
Having a detailed look at the competitive landscape; and
Identifying market priorities
Why Do Businesses Need to Conduct Market Analysis?
Carrying out market research helps businesses to remain informed about the latest market patterns, the purchasing preferences of their audience, emerging technology, and competitor behavior. To be more precise, it enables companies to uncover:
What goods and services are already common in your target market?
Which rivals use the most powerful marketing mixes to sell these goods and services
If your niche has any holes or opportunities that will allow you to fine-tune your goods and services and get a share of the attention of customers;
What other variables outside of competition and demand can affect the success or failure of your company.
In addition to these advantages, market research offers a data-driven approach to developing a high-impact and practical strategy for improved business
Market Analysis Techniques for Building a Solid Marketing Strategy
Business Goals
There are many ways to accomplish business objectives and your business probably has an idea of its business goals. We've chosen Critical Success Factors analysis as a "non-classical" strategy because we're talking about data-driven approaches to market analysis, which you may not have considered before.
Critical Success Factors (CSF) framework
In a nutshell, CSF analysis is a methodology that an organization may use to recognize areas that are important in achieving the mission and objectives of the company.
CSF can vary from company to company, of course, but it is possible to see some general trends. CSF sources usually fall into the following categories:
CSFs for industry: variables that arise from characteristics of the industry. A part of this CSF domain is things like technical innovations or cutting-edge business models. For example, aviation engineers had to rely on design engineers to develop the first supersonic aircraft, Concorde, who came up with brand-new designs for the wing. The aircraft would never have taken off without a double delta wing.
Competitive strategy and market role CSFs: Each business can identify its own success factors in relation to its competition and the industry as a whole, based on competitor behavior and internal organizational factors such as management structure, consumer demographics, company financials, and more. In the next steps, we will cover this part.
Environmental CSFs: the external environment to which your company belongs is concerned with environmental variables. To decide your CSFs here, a simple PEST (political, economic, social and technological) factors - analysis will be enough.
Temporary CSFs: these one-time causes are often the result of a sudden or temporary occurrence - a global pandemic or a new expansion of the market that needs businesses to hire new workers, go digital, etc.
Evaluating all of these variables will help your business plan its activities and track and evaluate progress towards achieving your strategic goals.