Nothing is static. That’s certainly the case for digital marketing and for the market in general. A market analysis is not a one-time event but something you have to repeat as trends change, new opportunities arise, and your business grows.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing practice aimed at improving a website’s visibility in search engine results using both paid ads and unpaid techniques. A market analysis is a detailed assessment that helps a business understand its place in a competitive landscape. A search engine market analysis examines market share, competitive landscape, user behaviour, technological advancements, and trends in the search engine industry. It helps businesses optimise digital marketing strategies, improve SEO/SEM campaigns, and understand competitive dynamics to make informed decisions and stay competitive.
While market research helps you find clients for your business, competitive analysis makes your offerings unique. It involves gathering data on your competitor’s products, pricing strategies, target audience and marketing approach.
Anchor Digital has helped many purpose-driven brands grow and seen what makes businesses succeed and what keeps them stuck in the mud. Here’s our guide to why market and competitor analysis needs to be continuous and some tips for your own market analysis.
Why Is Market Analysis Important?
Market analysis is like doing your homework. But instead of studying for an exam, you’re preparing to launch and grow your business. If you’re a business-to-business company, a B2B market analysis is just as important as it is for customer-facing businesses. Maybe even more so, as B2B products tend to be even more complicated and customised than products for the public.
The right market analysis has many benefits. For example:
It identifies demand and product-market-fit
A market analysis can help you determine whether there’s enough demand for your products and services before you begin and how you can provide a better solution to your customers' problems.
It helps you find your unique value proposition (USP)
Once you’ve identified what differentiates your offer from the offers of your competitors, you can use your strengths to define your unique value proposition (USP). At its simplest level, a USP is the answer to the question, ‘why should a customer choose you?’
It creates a stronger marketing strategy
A market analysis is an important step in a powerful marketing strategy. It reveals the most appropriate channels, tools, and techniques to reach your ideal audience and how to maximise your resources and budget.
Why Does Market Analysis Need To Be Continuous?
If a market analysis is about finding where you fit into the marketplace, why do you need more than one? In digital marketing, new trends and developments continually arise to break with tradition. The reasons to make search engine market analysis a continuous process to refine include:
The market is always changing
A market analysis helps you stay on top of changes in technology, consumer trends and Google algorithm updates, among other factors that may influence your business.
Your business goes through growth stages
As you scale your business growth and move into new phases, your goals will shift and so will the public’s expectations. A market analysis can help you deliver what the market expects at every turn of the growth cycle.
Consistent client flow
A market analysis at each transition helps ensure a steady influx of new clients during every stage of growth.
New opportunities
When you remain focused on new developments in your market, it’s a lot easier to also spot new opportunities when they arise. When you want to take your business in a new direction, make the most of your marketing efforts and learn from your successes and failures, a B2C or B2B market analysis is a strategy that will help you succeed.
Tips for Constructing a Market & Competitor Analysis
Though the number of steps involved may differ, the best way to conduct a market and competitor analysis is always with a strategic approach. Here are some essential stages in the process: Identify your competitors, both those providing direct competition (the same product) and indirect competition (similar products that could fulfil the same demand). Learn about your competitors, and use both their strengths and weaknesses to inform your own strategy.
Define measurable goals
Decide the outcomes you want to achieve and make sure they’re specific and measurable. For example, you might want to understand different customer’s needs and how they drive their behaviour. Doing this can help you focus on the most important areas of your market and focus your strategies to those ends.
Identify your target audience
Your target audience is the specific demographic of people you want to reach with your product or service. You can find this demographic using social media analytics, website analytics, surveys and social listening, among other strategies.
Research the competition
Learn about the competitors in your field: not so you can copy their strategies, but so you can analyse their weaknesses and strengths. Good strategic research helps you understand your position in the market compared to your peers, and your relative strengths and weaknesses.
Research the trends
Tracking and analysing the trends in your industry will help you identify potential opportunities early(including the ones your competitors may have missed).
Do a SWOT analysis
SWOT stands for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats” and a SWOT analysis is a framework that examines these four factors in detail. A SWOT analysis helps you maximise your strengths and opportunities and address your weaknesses and potential threats before they hurt your brand.
Undertaking a SWOT analysis involves setting a goal for your business then brainstorming and listing all four of the factors: what you do well, what you could do better, what emerging trends you can work to your advantage and what’s on the horizon that may cause you damage.
Make data-driven decisions
A data-driven process can help you approach any strategy more successfully. 36% of marketers say data helps them to more effectively reach their target audience. Data-driven approaches involve using analytics tools to gather essential information, identifying insights and using the conclusions you reach to guide the decision-making process.
Continuous Market & Competitor Analysis with Anchor Digital
Making time for yet another search engine market analysis is a lot of responsibility when you already have your own business to run. Luckily Anchor can take it out of your hands. Building strategy from scratch, Anchor can assist you with a range of services including workshop facilitation, brand positioning, brand strategy, acquisition and retention planning and customer and market research.
Our performance work covers all aspects of digital marketing: not just speed and responsiveness, but other factors that influence rankings. These include search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising (PPC) including Google, Bing and Facebook Ads.
A creative digital agency based in Brisbane, Anchor is made up of people with backgrounds in everything from business and sales to marketing and more. The wide range of skill sets we bring to the table allow us to nurture your project from start-to-finish. And our data-driven approach ensures your next campaign is always supported by a stable foundation.
If you’re ready to take your market and competitor analysis to the next level, contact the Anchor team.
