To stand out from the competition, your company needs to develop skills to identify market opportunities that will help your business to grow.
While there are numerous opportunities out there, not all are worth investing in.
To avoid overwhelming your team with the wrong type of marketing venture, it’s essential to take some time to assess your strategy and establish a framework for evaluating marketing opportunities.
Before developing this framework, you must first understand your company’s vision and determine your team’s capability to take on new ventures and expand its operations.
Once you’re aware of your organization’s strengths and limitations, you’re ready to search for the best marketing opportunities for you.
The aim is to identify those opportunities that show promise and will positively impact your business’s growth, but how do you go about this? Let’s break it down into six simple steps.
Conduct Thorough Market Research
While not a groundbreaking idea, conducting market research is the simplest and most effective way to learn about your market and give direction to your advertising strategy.
The process of market research is similar to that of any research project and involves five principal steps:
- Defining the opportunity(s)
- Developing a possible marketing research plan
- Data collection (qualitative and quantitative data)
- Analysis of accrued data and reporting
- Piloting the opportunity with the intent to scaling up
Check Out International Markets
Business growth may also mean that you explore international markets. From business maturity to home-market saturation, there are a myriad of reasons why your company may be considering expanding into foreign markets. The advantages of going global include:
- New investment opportunities
- More revenue
- New talent acquisition
- Product diversification
Before deciding which countries you’d like to branch out into, you need to research their economy and your legal responsibilities.
When you take your business overseas, you may need to hire more staff. Getting the right kind of talent is a concern for any entrepreneur, but there are resources out there that can help.
The countries you expand to, such as Singapore, will most likely have an employer of record, such as NH Global Partners, to assist you in managing your liabilities and other employment duties.
You may also need to contract a professional translation service provider to ensure smooth communications between your new business partners and customer base.
Study Your Consumers
You should study your current customers to find out what other services or products they may benefit from. This knowledge may inform which products or services you offer in the future.
You may wish to expand to other services that your customers currently need or those that they will need in the future so that you can keep your customers, even as their lives change.
For instance, if your company manufactures and distributes baby food, you ought to find out what other products you can introduce that parents and carers of these infants will be interested in as their kids get older, such as snacks for children’s lunchboxes.
You should strive to collect information such as client characteristics ranging from age, education status, and income to attitude and lifestyle.
These variables influence customers’ purchasing decisions, preferences, and power.
Check Out Your Competitors
Being up to speed on what your competitors are doing is just as essential as understanding your customers.
You can learn a great deal from evaluating the successes and failures of other businesses on the market.
This is particularly useful if your company plans to diversity or launch a new product or service.
Are there other company’s out there offering a similar service? What is successful about it, and what could be improved?
Take this knowledge and use it to ensure your business has a leg up.
Leverage Social Evolutions
Although your customers may be very loyal to your brand, they won’t think twice about moving to one of your competitors as their needs change.
It’s vital, therefore, to stay on top of how the consumers shift their purchasing patterns. This information will provide you with the strategies to evolve to meet your customer’s needs.
You should be informed about general changes in society, new trends, and how they could impact your customers’ needs.
A great example of this is our new awareness of and concern about the environment.
These days consumers want to know what businesses are doing to reduce their carbon footprint and are more likely to give their money to companies that take measures such as using recycled packaging.
Keep up with these changes, and your business will grow.
Use Social Media
We cannot overstate the value of social media for business marketing.
Not only should you be using various social media platforms to advertise your products and services and target your ideal customer, but you can also mine it for invaluable information about said customer.
By following social media trends and discussions, you can see what the public really thinks about your services, as well as those of your competitors.
You can also engage directly with your customers by running fun surveys and polls about new or existing products, and get unedited opinions straight from the horse’s mouth.
This kind of input can help you refine your ideas. In a nutshell, this strategy is one of the best ways to identify market opportunities for your business growth.
Conclusion
As our six top tips have shown, garnering information is a crucial first step to embracing opportunities for business growth. However, the real work is what you do with that knowledge.
You now need to take everything you’ve learned and apply it to your business decisions. Do that, and you’re sure to find success.
Once your company is ready to branch into international markets, BeTranslated can help with all your translation needs, from translating marketing material aimed at your new customers or translating the relevant legal documentation.
Our experienced translators and project managers will provide you with top-quality service every time.
For more information or a free, no-obligation quote, get in touch today.
