Market research has become a big word, which is able to change the destiny of many organizations. Though it is a simple process of digging out details regarding target audience, competition, industry trends, it can prove a milestone for any business. This is why more and more businesses are relying on it. The worldwide revenue of the market research industry is over 76.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, which is scaling more than twofold since 2008. This stat is sufficient to believe that this research can do miracles.
Best and Easy Steps to Conduct Market Analysis
This is a step-by-step procedure to conduct. Let’s understand it.
- Define Your Target Audience
You can start it by deciding what to achieve by targeting whom. The targeting via surveys or campaigns can help you to know demographics, psychographics, behavior, and preferences of prospects Once discovered, conducting market analysis for your business becomes easier. You can dig out targeted details by following these steps.
- Tell everything about your new launches likely to be offered so that the intended customers can know about them.
- Analyze customers who have launched similar products and their customers also to know how you can engage customers differently.
- You can run campaigns for market research via surveys, focus groups. Conducting interviews with potential customers can also help.
- Extract valuable details from the collected data and segment them under the titles age, gender, income, education, and location.
- Also, work on deriving the psychographics of your target market. Or, come across their interests, values, lifestyle, and behaviors.
- Finally, sit aside peacefully and invest a few hours on identifying patterns and trends in your target market. This can help you to create a refined marketing strategy and messaging.
2. Analyze Industry Trends
Industrial trends are crucial to integrate various vital elements. These can be associated with technology, consumer behavior, and regulatory environment analysis. For it, you should filter industry insights.
- Try to analyze and comprehend key players, market structure, and its size.
- To understand, you need data from market reports, articles, news, and statistics.
- Once gathered, do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of the industry you’re going to target and find its current and future growth potential. Likewise, follow the same procedure for competitors to analyze.
- Move to the collected datasets of the industry to do modeling for breeding business intelligence. Track emerging AI or other technologies to quickly understand customers’ expectations and startups.
- After market, move to customer analysis on the basis of their age, income, location, and behaviour so that you can align tailored marketing strategies and messages to specific customers.
- Finally, get deep into industry trends insights so that you can make realistically viable business decisions, define strategies, and plan.
3. Conduct a Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis refers to getting into competitors’ crucial corporate details and uncovering their strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. Through this knowledge, you can have the best ideas to decide competitive pricing, marketing campaigning, and product positioning. Here are the tips to conduct it.
- List down the names of your main competitors, including both direct and indirect competitors.
- Collect data online or offline. This can let you learn every step of your competitors who are leading in the market. It means that you should see their website, social media presence, annual reports, press releases, customer reviews, and industry reports with the lens of a researcher.
- Check out and do competitive analysis of their products, prices, marketing methods, supply chain, distribution, customer support, etc. to prepare your own plan.
- Don’t forget to study their pricing strategies, including their prices, discounts, promotions, and payment options. This knowledge can help you to come up with competitive pricing and advantages.
- Also, expand your research to the insights of your competitor’s marketing and advertising strategies. Brainstorm and identify how to beat their strategies & engage overwhelming traffic.
- Now comes your competitors’ distribution channels. Explore their online presence, physical stores, and partnerships. Sit with your marketing team to find how to better your own distribution channels.
- Never forget to discover your competitors’ customer service. Deeply examine how they respond, what their response time is, their accessibility, and quality. Use this knowledge to introduce a better customer service for making them happy & engaged.
4. Analyze the Market Potential
To find out your chance of survival and growth in the market, map its size. Come across potentials to expand and discover how far you can go to reach your targets in the market. A type of research called primary research can help you. Or, you can run online surveys, and secondary research to collect these details.
- Estimate the target market size.
- Find the possibilities of your products’ demand.
- Recall market trends, growth prospects, and competitive landscape
- Segregate customers as per demographics, behavior, and psychographics
- Analyze how easy or difficult it is to access distribution channels
- Once you understand every detail, predict scope in the market and what the future trends are going to be.
5. Identify Barriers to Enter the Market
To step into the market, you have to come across complementary compliance, regulations, capital requirements, and obtain copyrights of your intellectual property beforehand. For this, you should:
- Collect market data of your specific industry to understand how tough the competition is going to be.
- Research for existing companies, their market size, and other details.
- Study every pain point and expectation of your target customers.
- Invest your time on considering the costs of your launches.
- Estimate how much you’re likely to invest for storming into the market.
6. Evaluate Distribution Channels
Distribution channels are important, especially when you are into the sale and purchase business. You have to find a supply chain provider who is affordable and efficient. But, this practice also needs research, which you can discover more about here. So,
- First, find potential distribution channels and their reach.
- Ensure that you know your target customer well.
- Identify competitors, compare with their distribution costs, and then decide the costs of each of your distribution channels on the basis of their effectiveness.
- Preset the level of manipulation over each distribution channel.
7. Identify Market Gaps
Gaps are the holes that can make your commerce fall down. So, you have to find them out and fix issues. These can be incorporated unmet demands of customers, undiscovered market segments, and untapped geographies. Leverage these steps to discover.
- Research your performance-based datasets and compare them with the industry and market.
- Discover what your customers say in their feedback, reviews, and complaints.
- Categorize them as per their complaints.
- Analyze how your competitors deal with them via which offerings.
- Work hard to innovate and simplify your back office operations.
- Deeply research future trends by integrating business intelligence or AI tools for
auto-analysis.
8. Evaluate Your Value Proposition
Measure and find what your business’ USP can be and how it can prove a big competition for your competitors. That USP can be in your product features, customer service, pricing, and marketing. Here are the tips to find how to discover.
- Preset your unique selling proposition (USP) by thoroughly analyzing your offerings.
- Come across the expectations of your target audience and their pain points to heal.
- Identify the USP of your 2-3 competitors.
- Conduct an online survey on focus groups to gather feedback on your USPs to find.
- Thereafter, be continuous with tracking and adjusting your value proposition based on feedback and market trends.
9. Analyze Market Segmentation
Market segmentation refers to splitting the target market for easing the analysis of your target market. Categorize the audience into different segments, which should be around demographics, psychographics, behavior, and preferences. This is how you can customize the way to attract or promote your efforts and product offerings. For segmentation, you can follow these steps:
- Target market is vital, which should be defined on the basis of demographics, behavior, and
psychographics. - Conduct customer surveys, focus groups, and online analytics to gather data
- Analyze the data to identify patterns and segments
- Evaluate the potential demand and profitability of each segment
- Develop marketing strategies to target each segment
- Continuously monitor and adjust your segmentation strategy based on feedback and market trends.
- Determine the pricing strategy that is appropriate for your product or service. This includes
analyzing competitor pricing, market demand, and cost structure.
Once you follow these steps, the market study would be easier and simpler. You can go ahead with a better picture of who your target audience is, how the competition is, what industry trends, and market potential are, etc. On this basis, informed decisions can be made for integrating with your business strategy, marketing, and product development.