What advantages do conducting a marketing analysis offer?
How To Perform A Market Analysis For A Business
Marketing analysis:can help project income, detect new trends, and lower risk. A marketing analysis can be helpful at various phases of your company’s development, and it may even be wise to perform one annually to stay on top of any significant market changes.
Your business plan will typically include a thorough market analysis because it helps you better understand your target audience and competitors. This will assist you in creating a marketing plan that is more focused.
These are some other major benefits of conducting a market analysis:
- Risk reduction: Knowing your market can reduce risks in your business, since you’ll have an understanding of major market trends, the main players in your industry, and what it takes to be successful, all of which will inform your business decisions. To help you further protect your business, you can also conduct a SWOT analysis, which identifies the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for your business.
- Targeted products or services: You are in a much better position to serve your customers when you have a firm grasp on what they are looking for from you. When you know who your customers are, you can use that information to tailor your business’s offerings to your customers’ needs.
- Emerging trends: Staying ahead in business is often about being the first to spot a new opportunity or trend, and using a marketing analysis to stay on top of industry trends is a great way to position yourself to take advantage of this information.
- Revenue projections: A market forecast is a key component of most marketing analyses, as it projects the future numbers, characteristics and trends in your target market. This gives you an idea of the profits you can expect, allowing you to adjust your business plan and budget accordingly.
- Evaluation benchmarks: It can be difficult to gauge your business’s success outside of pure numbers. A market analysis provides benchmarks or key performance indicators (KPIs) against which you can judge your company and how well you are doing compared to others in your industry.
- Context for past mistakes: Marketing analytics can explain your business’s past mistakes or industry anomalies. For example, in-depth analytics can explain what impacted the sale of a specific product, or why a certain metric performed the way it did. This can help you avoid making those mistakes again or experiencing similar anomalies, because you’ll be able to analyze and describe what went wrong and why.
- Marketing optimization: This is where an annual marketing analysis comes in handy – regular analysis can inform your ongoing marketing efforts and show you which aspects of your marketing need work, and which are performing well in comparison to the other companies in your industry.
Conclusion: A market analysis can help your company in many ways, especially if you do regular studies to ensure that you have up-to-date data for your marketing initiatives.
What disadvantages come with conducting a marketing analysis?
The disadvantages of conducting a market analysis are listed below, however they are more about the resources needed than the approach itself.
- Market analysis can be expensive. If you’re not as familiar with marketing concepts such as market volume and customer segmentation, you might want to outsource your market analysis. Doing so can be great for your analysis’s quality, but it can also leave a big dent in your budget. Narrow your market analysis to a certain group – perhaps current customers – to lower your costs.
- Market analysis can be time-consuming. Market analysis can take precious time away from more directly business-related tasks. You can analyze one area at a time – say, buying patterns or competition – to free up your day-to-day schedule.
- Market analysis can require extra staff. Some larger companies retain in-house market analysis staff, and you can follow their lead. Doing so, though, comes with all the usual costs of hiring a new employee. The question then becomes: Do you conduct your market analysis yourself, outsource it, or hire in-house? The more expensive options can often yield more meaningful insights.
- Market analysis can be narrow. The most successful market analyses use actual customer feedback, which analysts often get through customer surveys. These surveys may reach only a portion of your entire customer base, leading to an inaccurate sample size. The result is that market analysis may not fully detail your customers and what you should know about them.
Comparing sentiment analysis, conjoint analysis, and market analysis
Conjoint analysis focuses on how clients value what you offer, as opposed to market analysis, which is extensive and general. Surveys are frequently the foundation of conjoint analysis since they allow customers to express what motivates their purchases. Conjoint analysis is frequently used in the testing of products. This strategy can give insights on pricing and product features and configurations.
Sentiment analysis goes beyond market and conjoint analysis that is based on numerical data to determine how customers qualitatively feel about your products. It might help you learn what aspects of your products or purchasing procedure people like and dislike. You can also explore more intense emotions like rage, urgency, and intention, or you might look for evocative responses. Contrary to conjoint analysis, which is essentially a part of market analysis, it is a fantastic tool to employ in conjunction with market analysis.
How to perform market research
Although performing a marketing study is not a difficult process, it does require extensive research, so be ready to invest a lot of time in the process.
The seven steps to doing a market analysis are as follows:
1. Decide on your goal.
You can be undertaking a market analysis for a variety of reasons, including to assess your competitors or comprehend a new industry. Whatever your motivation, it’s critical to establish it as soon as possible to maintain focus throughout the process. Start by determining whether your goal is external, such as requesting a company loan, or internal, such as boosting your cash flow or business processes. Your research’s scope and depth will be determined by your goal.
Tip: Use our guide to choosing a business loan to make the right decision after conducting a market analysis. Visit our business loan reviews page to find options and learn all about easy-approval options.
2. Research the state of the industry.
Map a detailed outline of the current state of your industry. Include where the industry seems to be heading, using metrics such as size, trends and projected growth, with plenty of data to support your findings. You can also conduct a comparative market analysis to help you find your competitive advantage within your specific market.
3. Identify your target customer.
Not everyone in the world will be your customer, and it would be a waste of your time to try to get everyone interested in your product. Instead, use a target market analysis to decide who is most likely to want your product and focus your efforts there. You want to understand your market size, who your customers are, where they come from, and what might influence their buying decisions. To do so, look at demographic factors like these:
During your research, you might consider creating a customer profile or persona that reflects your ideal customer to serve as a model for your marketing efforts.
4. Understand your competition.
To be successful, you need a good understanding of your competitors, including their market saturation, what they do differently than you, and their strengths, weaknesses and advantages in the market. Start by listing all your main competitors, then go through that list and conduct a SWOT analysis of each competitor. What does that business have that you don’t? What would lead a customer to choose that business over yours? Put yourself in the customer’s shoes.
Then, rank your list of competitors from most to least threatening, and decide on a timeline to conduct regular SWOT analyses on your most threatening competitors.
5. Gather additional data.
When conducting marketing analyses, information is your friend – you can never have too much data. It is important that the data you use is credible and factual, so be cautious of where you get your numbers. These are some reputable business data resources:
6. Analyze your data.
After you collect all the information you can and verify that it is accurate, you need to analyze the data to make it useful to you. Organize your research into sections that make sense to you, but try to include ones for your purpose, target market and competition.
These are the main elements your research should include:
7. Put your analysis to work.
Once you’ve created a market analysis, it’s time to actually make it work for you. Internally, look for where you can use your research and findings to improve your business. Have you seen other businesses doing things that you’d like to implement in your own organization?
Are there ways to makey our marketing tactics more successful?
If you conducted your study for external objectives, compile your facts and research into a paper that is simple to read and understand in order to share it with lenders.
Keep all of your data and research for your upcoming analysis, and think about setting an annual calendar reminder to keep up with your industry.
Go ahead and use this tutorial if you have the time to carry out a market analysis yourself. If you don’t have the time, it’s usually cost-effective to hire an inside specialist or outsource your investigation. Your analysis will assist you in determining who and how to target them, which is a crucial component of business success.
