A lot of business is conducted online these days. Businesses promote their products and services online, reach a wide audience, and make profits thanks to digital marketing. To achieve all this, they perform thorough research and analysis of the information they collect.
The more successful analysis and marketing are for a company, the better results it can achieve in terms of sales and recognition.
Marketing can go a long way for a business and help it grow tremendously. Still, the success of marketing depends on the analysis conducted in its planning and execution.
In other words, these two make the recipe for your business’ success online. Let’s see how they work.
Market analysis: the what, the why and the how
Analyzing your market and things like your buyer persona, their behaviors, the competition, and the current trends is vital to your marketing success. This involves the collection of data that will help you create a product or service, offer it to customers, and form your marketing strategies.
Since there’s a lot you can learn about the market, there are all sorts of analyses to be conducted. You need to monitor the market trends, figure out if your product idea can work in the market, and learn how people will respond to it. It also tells you what people need and what they’d like to hear.
That is what market analysis is.
The analysis is what helps you get ahead of your competition and gives your brand some value. People are far more likely to buy from you if you offer them what they want and need. You can’t really guess it – you need to research it to make sure that your strategies work.
This is why you need to do a market analysis. We’ll get more into it later.
The how is the trickiest part. When you do the research, you need to consider many things. You need to follow the social media marketing trends, learn how to present your product in an engaging way, figure out where to put the content for people to see it, etc.
Truth is, behind every successful company on any market nowadays, there’s a history of a lot of market research – both on customers and competitors. You’d have to be the luckiest person in the world to be able to make the best marketing for your brand on a regular basis – and have all your ideas pay off.
This is why we test ideas before we offer them, analyze the success of what we’ve made, and edit our strategies to attract more customers.
Businesses use a variety of tools and tricks at different stages of their research and marketing process. They don’t just perform research, form a strategy, and forget all about it. They work on this constantly to improve and succeed on the market.
Still, you have to get started first. So, let’s discuss the how.
How to conduct a market analysis
No matter how many guides and tricks you hear about, there’s no pre-written rule for analysis and research that will guarantee your business success. Your strategies will have to be adapted to your target audience, where you want to market your products, what types of products you have, etc.
Generally speaking, a market analysis must include the following:
- Analyzing your buyer personas and target groups
- Evaluating the quality of your product
- Determining if you have the right price for your offering
- Analyzing your advertising options and strategies
- Analyzing the sales you are making
- Analyzing customer experience and satisfaction levels
Whatever option you choose to get to this data, the results will determine your next moves and strategies.
In all those types of testing and analysis you can make today, one is applicable in every business and for every product, and can be irreplaceable in terms of research strategies. That is concept testing.
Concept testing and how to do it
Concept testing is what you use to validate your products or services, the design, and the marketing ideas you have early on. This is a perfect way to ensure that you minimize future expenses and errors, and plan for your future marketing strategies.
If you take a look at this concept testing guide by Maze, you’ll learn how to run a concept test, craft a survey, and get a pretty good idea of the information you’ll gather in the process.
There’s one thing that’s even better about this – you can actually use Maze to do all the testing with minimal effort and a bit of customization. The tool is popular for many different tests and analyses, but concept testing is surely something to strongly consider to begin with.
Why you should analyze the market
The time came to go back to the thing that is essential to your success – understanding how important analysis and research are for you. If done properly i.e. if you use the right methods and collect accurate information, you can make your business grow tremendously.
This is a great way to achieve your goals – perhaps even the only way to do it. Here are a few reasons why you should analyze and collect data:
Better understanding of your customers
Market analysis will stop you from guessing what your customers need, where they hang out, whether or not they’ll respond to your marketing – and how. It’s a technique through which you can build the profile of your buyer persona (check HootSuite’s guide on how to do this).
It can help you determine the size of the market i.e. how many people you can reach. Lastly, market analysis will tell you about the specifics of your target audience i.e. their income (a great way to make a decision about your prices), their social media usage (learn where to promote your products), etc.
Analyze the competition
Your competition can help you a lot in shaping your marketing strategies and building your brand. You shouldn’t steal their ideas or their content, but you can definitely get inspired by the things that work with your target audience.
Successful brands in your niche are doing something well, which can be useful when you’re attempting to reach the same people.
Moreover, analyzing the competition can show you how people will react when you introduce something new to the market. It will also tell you what their weaknesses are and help you avoid them before you make the same mistakes.
Lastly, you can use it to determine the gaps in the market i.e. find the opportunity to offer something that is not there already.
Test your products before launching them
Product development, marketing, selling – everything costs a lot. If you have to fix it afterward, tweak your strategies, invest in repairing the opinions of your customers – that costs even more.
Market analysis can help you avoid all this and give you a higher chance of succeeding. If you know what people expect and want, how they would respond to your product or service when it’s introduced, you can fix and tweak it and make it the best it can be.
Data-based marketing: how it helps your business
When you have all the information on hand and know what people want, where you can find them, and more, it’s time to invest in your marketing.
In today’s digital world, not investing in digital marketing is a grave mistake. The online world gives businesses access to a wider audience than any other form of marketing can. It is also where many people shop, research, and make decisions nowadays.
If you do it right, you can expect amazing things thanks to marketing. That being said, here are the kinds of marketing you should be paying attention to these days.
Search Engine Optimization
Otherwise known as SEO, this is the key to marketing these days. Without SEO, you won’t be easily found online. In a busy market where everyone is trying to reach the audience, not showing up in search results is disastrous for your brand.
This is the starting point of your marketing strategy and the best way to bring success to your business.
Imagine that – you have a great marketing strategy thanks to all that research and rank higher in search engines. On the first page of search engine results, the top 5 results account for 67.60% of all the clicks!
Great SEO marketing strategies can spread the word about your business faster than anything else. You can get hundreds to thousands to millions of customers with the help of it, but only if you do it right.
If you know little of SEO and want to get started, Moz’s beginner SEO guide is a great starting point.
Marketing on different channels
You’ll be doing tons of marketing across different platforms, by using different tools, and at different stages of your journey as a business. Right now, the most prospective ways for growing your business via marketing include:
- Social media marketing and advertising
- Pay per click advertising
- Email marketing
- Blogging
Wrapping it up
Every good strategy starts with analysis and is followed by marketing. Analysis and marketing go together and cannot work any other way. You use marketing to put the analysis results into action and you use analysis to get the idea of how to do your marketing. Together, they can bring enormous success to your business.
