Learning to assess new opportunities within your market is crucial to growth, and growth is an important constituent of the strategy to ensure the long-term success of any business.
Promoting potential opportunities for growth becomes all the more crucial in the current business environment. Technological advancements have shortened the lifecycle of products and services. This, in turn, has altered the business and competition dynamics dramatically.
Hence, to thrive in such a highly competitive landscape, retaining your existing customer base is just not enough. Every business needs to leverage the possibility of seeking new business opportunities. You may be a company that wants to launch a product or service within an existing market or someone looking for ways to expand into a particular market; identifying market opportunities is imperative for your success.
Accurately assessing and pursuing the right opportunities can generate benefits to transform your business forever.
Although, if miscalculations are made at the stage of market assessment, it might result in irreparable damage.
Assess New Opportunities: Follow a Defined Framework
Before starting to search for opportunities you need to have a clear understanding of your company goals and areas of expertise. This step is necessary to evaluate your growth direction and to understand the scope of your resources, strength, and capabilities.
Once you have a detailed understanding of these aspects, you can proceed to the next step of analysing the market, assessing customer needs, and exploring new opportunities.
Let’s take a look at the ways to analyse these factors:
- Customer Segmentation
To understand demand, it is important to segregate consumers on the basis of certain common characteristics. These characteristics can be “hard” variables — age, gender, education level, occupation, location, salary — or “soft” variable — lifestyle, purchasing motivations, attitude.
A detailed analysis of these variables helps you define the availability of the market and allows you to focus your marketing efforts in the right direction.
- Research the Competition
A thorough market analysis also involves having a deeper understanding of the competition and benchmarking your performance against it.
Learn as much as you can from your competitors to equip yourself with the ability to assess every opportunity for success. Let’s look at some of the points you need to consider for competitor analysis:
- Research their products, business practices, and service history.
- Compare their pricing strategy to yours. This gives you some helpful clues about customer spending and how much they are willing to pay to your competitors.
- Research your competitors’ market share and how they position themselves in the market.
Go through customer reviews to know what customers are saying about their products or services. Examining reviews is an excellent way to identify potential areas of opportunity. A prevailing sense of dissatisfaction in the reviews is a clear indicator that your competitors are not deep in the market.
However, it is important to mention here that competition is not always direct and opportunities may at times lurk somewhere in the substitute industries. Analysing indirect competitors is an excellent approach to explore additional opportunities for growth and establishing a competitive advantage.
- Understand Your Market
Assessing your customers and competitors is important, but these aren’t the only steps necessary. Everyone in the marketing team needs to have a detailed understanding of the market as a whole and the scope for growth in that market.
When you assess new opportunities in a particular market, you basically look for ways to create value in that market.
Let’s take the current COVID-19 pandemic into account. The COVID-19 pandemic brought severe consequences and uncertainty to the world. But, many companies changed their business and marketing models to seize opportunities even in the time of this crisis. For instance, digital technology was an important change brought around by this pandemic. Companies that adapted themselves to withstand this change were the ones to witness a significant increase in their growth figures.
Market opportunity analysis evaluates various factors with an aim to provide actionable insights around:
- Market value, size, and volume
- Cross-selling or up-selling opportunities
- Consumer demand
- Marketing strategies
- Industry value chain
- Barriers to the entry
- Intensity of competition
These actionable insights are highly valuable, especially for strategic decision-making. By utilising these insights, businesses avert the risks associated with misjudged targeting, improper focus and positioning, or pushing products to disinterested people.
Thus, research around your market doesn’t just look into the demand for a product or service but points out what’s needed to translate that demand into a success. This simply means:
- Effectively linking customers’ needs and expectations to demand and supply.
- Evaluating the degree of personalisation or customisation a product needs.
- Assessing relevant channels to market or supply the products.
The market analysis step enables a deep and thorough understanding of even those issues which were not anticipated and thus, helps you focus on true opportunities.
- Concept Testing
Every business needs affirmation that the concept they envisioned matches the needs of their target audience before breaking into the market.
The use of custom surveys and tests takes cues and answers from real people to help brands seize opportunities in the market.
Concept testing is an evaluation of consumers’ perspectives, needs, expectations associated with a new product, campaign, or service. Through this method, companies get the validation they need about the potential their product or service holds.
The market wants data-driven concepts. Integrating actionable insights into every process of a solid concept goes a long way to unleash unmet or unidentified needs to help your brand develop that strategic advantage.
With the help of a market research platform like Bolt, you can create well-defined questionnaires that ask the right audience what they think to get fast and quantitative results about your concept. Custom research is loaded with rational and emotional insights to give you the assurance that your ideas resonate with the likes of your target audience. This way, concept testing examines the usefulness, differentiation, appeal, and relevance of your concept to give you a fair idea about which concept to invest in and which to abandon.
Assess New Opportunities with Bolt Insight
The bottom line is clear. When you are looking for new opportunities within your market, you need to understand your market and carry on the necessary research through a specialised agency like Bolt Insight.
Our team of experts provide the actionable insights and details you need to help you achieve your marketing goals. With the information and insights at your hand, you can easily examine what your chances are of achieving the growth you are looking for.
