Market share analysis : understanding competitive landscape.
Identifying your competition is important for determining your market plan. Recognize direct and indirect competitors, know what their customers can buy from them, and see whether that serves their customer effectively.
Market share trends are more important for the companies in older or established industries than for the companies in the fast-growing ones, but web data can be a useful source of competitive analysis.
Market sizing
Market sizing plays a key role in the competitive landscape analysis. It includes projecting customer base and measuring your competitors’ market share; demographic variables such as age and income of target groups should be considered too. Now that you have this information at your disposal, you can plan for a winning approach to make it more successful.
As sizing is an estimate and can not be a perfect reflection of your market, extensive research is essential to making sure you come up with the right figure. To do so properly.
Market sizing can be complex but there are several ways you can get started. For example, data from sales for similar products could be used to estimate demand; the rate of growth, population, customer surveys and so on may be used for finer-grained optimization; top-down or bottom-up should also be employed, depending on research objective, geographical scope and data set.
Market segmentation.
Market segmentation means splitting a larger market into small segments on the basis of demographics, buying patterns, personality traits, and behavioural characteristics. Companies use the market segmentation insights to optimize sales, marketing and product development cycles, and to stay ahead of their competition by detecting deficiencies in competitors’ offerings.
Data can be gathered in a variety of ways from customer feedback to market studies to databases. The changes in the competitive landscape should be closely observed to tweak your segmentation plan accordingly.
Competitive analysis is a must to know what your competitor is doing and where it has potential. The process can be performed through SWOT analysis, Porter’s Five Forces analysis, PESTEL, BCG Matrix and depending on your business may include strategies like geographic segmentation, value segmentation and firmographic segmentation – each has advantages and disadvantages, the best one will depend on your resources, budget and long term objectives.
Market share analysis
Market share is the missing piece in the increasingly dynamic business world, as it tells us about the competitive landscape. Rather than numbers on balance sheets, its impact extends well beyond the accounting tables; its value is far beyond the accounting tables – providing market information, opportunities and optimized strategic decisions.
In order to get market share, take the amount of sales your business generated in a certain period and divide it by the industry sales; divide this number by 100 to get your market share percentage and compare yourself with the competition.
But, it’s difficult to get real-time sales data from competitors who don’t make their personal information easily available. Therefore, market research agencies that specialize in this discipline are the perfect choice as they can accurately calculate and provide valuable interpretation of findings; also, they can include industry statistics and benchmarks so that you can make better decisions on budget allocation, sales force deployment, and marketing efforts.
Market research
The market research is one of the most crucial tools that can propel a business. It tells you a lot about how big of a market you could be in, and even offers you the kinds of surprises you might not find otherwise. It can allow information gathered to steer more ethically made decisions while building business strategies.
Perform market research through the surveys, focus groups, interviews and online polling. These tools can reveal important competitor data like their specific position in the market, and what customers care about them most. You can analyze the competitors’ branding, geographic reach and pricing. You can also get their financial information like revenue and profit which will enable you to understand how strong the competitors are and where to go from there; you can access this from your competitors’ websites or reports.
About Author
