One of the keys to running a successful enterprise is being aware of the key factors in the market that can have an impact upon your business.
Today, that is even more relevant because the internet has created a global village. There is much more competition in most every sector, and suppliers can be anywhere in the world.
Knowing market conditions through a market analysis is necessary before beginning a new enterprise, and it is necessary to stay up on those conditions on a regular basis. Businesses that do not conduct an initial market analysis are doomed to be blindsided.
The following will examine the best ways that businesses can conduct an initial market analysis, and how they can keep up to date on the state of all relevant market conditions on a regular basis.
For Initial Market Analysis –
Entrepreneur Magazine suggests that businesses conduct a full market analysis every year because markets can change rapidly. They suggest dividing your target market into segments in order to better understand diverse needs. For example, people who shop in your store that are locals will have different needs than vacationers.
Your Target Customers –
You need to learn about your potential customers. You need to ascertain the age range of target customers, their gender, approximate income, occupation, level of education, location and family status.
Quite a bit of this information can come online from U.S. government sources such as the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics information as well as official websites for your state and county.
You can also use information from trade journal blogs, videos and articles. The goal is to understand how to target your marketing efforts to each segment of your target customers.
Learn About Your Competitors –
Wading online will help you examine your competitors. You will need to find out which types of customers your competitors target. You will also need to find out the differences between your offering and theirs as well as their strengths and weaknesses. How can you differentiate your offering from that of your competitors?
Entrepreneur also stated that a market analysis needs to look at current trends in the target market. Maybe many are beginning to tighten their belts right now since they believe a recession is coming.
You will also want to find out the size of your industry, its growth rate and the current outlook. You need to find out what customers consider they will be willing to pay for your goods or services. Much of this information will be found online in trade groups and publications as well as in government statistics.
You will also need to know the current buying trends of customers. This is where insights from professionals like Fisher Investments come into play. Informative videos like these are available for free online via various sources and can be an important tool for researching your customers and their buying behavior.
The goal is to hone your marketing efforts to your specific target customer groups so that you are on point meeting their needs and providing value.
Staying Current on Market Trends –
Once you have an initial market analysis, you will need to stay abreast of news, government, regulatory, legal and market issues that can impact your business.
News, Government, Regulatory and Legal Issues –
Just as a few examples, here are a few of the types of issues that can deeply alter a business and its success in a short period of time.
Farmers in the Midwest are reeling from the flooding last spring as well as problems with U.S/China trade wars.
Uber, Lyft and other gig economy companies are bracing themselves as the fifth largest economy in the world, the state of California, has decided to force such companies to label their workers as employees and provide them a minimum wage as well as other benefits that are a part of state labor law regulations.
Many people are beginning to find other social media platforms to share information with friends and family, as Mark Zuckerberg has been caught on more than one occasion being very cavalier about the privacy needs of users of Facebook.
In every one of these examples, those who keep on top of the news will be able to navigate around dangers more readily than those who don’t keep up with news, government, legal and regulatory issues that might impact their enterprises in the coming years.
News Sources –
In order to keep up with properly informative news sources, one will need a variety of local, state, national and world news media. As stated by Entrepreneur Magazine, one must solely seek unbiased sources that consistently convey the truth.
The best way to find news sources that are unbiased is to seek all types and keep track of what they are saying before tuning out the ones that can’t seem to be honest. Today, you will find most news media on YouTube and on their own websites. Some even have apps.
Business and Market Information Sources –
The Fisher Investments app has all of the Fisher Investments videos, including the aforementioned market analysis videos and podcasts as well as all of their social media postings. This can be a useful source of market analysis and trend information.
The Yahoo Finance app is also free and will allow you to get personalized financial and business alerts and information.
You can aggregate all of your trusted news and market information sources, including blogs and videos, into an RSS reader, so you can get thumbnails and titles for each source and decide which articles to click on.
You can also set Google Alerts for topics relevant to your industry, such as alerts when a competitor or supplier ends up in the news. You can also set up Google Alerts for any information that pops up on the web in your field.
Most all of the market analysis information you will need in order to conduct a thorough customer and competitor analysis will be found on the internet.
In terms of ongoing news and market trend information, you can amass much of it in apps and your RSS reader feed in order to stay abreast of market trends in your industry without spending too much time each day doing so.
