Business success today depends on understanding what market trends are most prominent, what your customers need and what types of competitive strategies are the most effective. After all, there's nothing worse than spending precious resources launching a new product or service that ultimately flops in the marketplace.
Fortunately, advancing technology makes it possible to conduct competitive market research more rapidly than in the past. Let's explore how to conduct a market analysis efficiently, as well as strategies that facilitate quick learning of key market trends.
Conducting a Customer Needs Analysis
The first step in mastering market trends is getting to know your customers. You should use any information and feedback collected to divide your customers into segments. Segments should share a common characteristic (such as age or location) and be large enough to warrant individual marketing attention.
Within each segment, it's helpful to develop buyer profiles. Picturing your customer as a human being, you'll describe:
- their demographics and background,
- motivations and challenges,
- what they spend their lives doing,
- how they communicate with the businesses they patronize and
- the messages that are most likely to appeal to them.
Your last customer needs analysis step will be connecting each target buyer's needs to a product or service. Call out your benefits, why the target buyer would or would not choose you over a competitor. If there are holes, consider refining your offerings to better address critical customer pain points.
For the rest of the article head over to the AMEX Business site.
Comments