What's a Competitive Analysis & How Do You Conduct One? When was the last time you ran a competitive analysis for your brand? And most importantly, do you know how to do one efficiently? If you're not sure, or if the last "analysis" you ran was a quick perusal of a competitor's website and social media presence, you're likely missing out on important intelligence that could help your brand grow. A competitive analysis can help you learn the ins and outs of how your competition works, and identify potential opportunities where you can out-perform them. It also enables you to stay atop of industry trends and ensure your product is consistently meeting — and exceeding — industry standards. Let's dive into a few more benefits of conducting competitive analyses: Helps you identify your product's unique value proposition and what makes your product different from competitors', which can inform future marketing efforts. Enables you to identify what your competitor is doing right. This information is critical for staying relevant and ensuring both your product and your marketing campaigns are outperforming industry standards. Tells you where your competitors are falling short — which helps you identify areas of opportunities in the marketplace, and test out new, unique marketing strategies they haven't taken advantage of. Learn through customer reviews what's missing in a competitor's product, and consider how you might add features to your own product to meet those needs. Provides you with a benchmark against which you can...

Total Addressable Market (TAM): What It Is & How You Can Calculate It In college, I interned at a MarTech company that sold email marketing optimization software. With their software, brands could finally gain visibility into their email program’s deliverability rate or inbox placement, which most email service providers, like Constant Contact or MailChimp, can’t do. The business’ largest revenue stream was a channel partner program that enabled email service providers to sell my old company’s software to their own customers. And one day, at an all-hands meeting, our CEO showed us a slide that listed every single email service provider we partnered with and the amount of customers they all had. He told us this was our total addressable market. Then, he showed us a slide of how much of the market we had captured — it was a single digit percentage. Even though we generated $100 million in revenue per year, we were shocked at how little of the market we had secured. But it also helped us realize that we still had plenty of room to grow, which motivated us to win as much of the market as possible. Whether you want to start a new company and gauge its industry’s profit potential or forecast a realistic revenue growth goal for your business, measuring your total addressable market is a crucial first step you must take. To help you do this, we’ve put together a guide that’ll teach you exactly what total addressable market is...

What Is a Focus Group in 100 Words or Less In an ideal world, you'd know just how your product or business idea would be perceived before it's released. This knowledge could help you make alterations to what you're offering for the best possible reception, and better inform your sales projections and marketing strategy. Sadly, you'll never know exactly how what you're selling will be received by your target audience, which is why companies conduct market research. But, while mass data collection through surveys provides you with necessary quantitative information, it doesn't offer as much qualitative insight into your target market's view or opinion of what you're selling. This is where a focus group comes in. So, what is a focus group, and how can it help you navigate your market research? Let's explore those two questions, next. What is a focus group? In the context of market research for businesses, a focus group is a cohort of individuals participating in a guided discussion about a business, brand, product, and/or service. Typically, a focus group is facilitated by representatives from the business and is composed of individuals in the business's target market who share their thoughts and opinions on the topic or offering in question. A focus group is usually moderated by a representative or representatives of the company, who ask 5-10 questions to the participants over the course of 30-60 minutes, with another facilitator keeping notes on the focus group questionnaire. Follow Along With a Free...

How to Do Market Research: A Guide and Template Today, consumers have a lot of power — they can research your product or service and make purchase decisions entirely on their own. And rather than talking to one of your sales reps, they're more likely to ask for referrals from members of their networks or read online reviews.  With this in mind, have you adapted your marketing strategy to complement the way today's consumers research, shop, and buy? In order to do just that — and to meet your potential buyers were they are — you must have a deep understanding of who your buyers are, your specific market, and what influences the purchase decisions and behavior of your target audience members.  Enter: Market Research.  Whether you're new to market research, this guide will provide you with a blueprint for conducting a thorough study of your market, target audience, competition, and more. What is market research? Market research is the process of gathering information about your business's buyers personas, target audience, and customers to determine how viable and successful your product or service would be, and/or is, among these people. What does market research tell you?  Market research provides insight into a wide variety of things that impact your bottom line including (but not limited to): Where your target audience and current customers conduct their product/ service research Which of your competitors your target audience looks to for information, more options, or to make a purchase...

How to Run a SWOT Analysis for Your Business A SWOT analysis is a useful technique to evaluate a new project or objective your business faces, or your business as a whole. Essentially, a SWOT analysis is a roadmap for how you should move forward with your business, which opportunities you’re missing out on, and which challenges you should tackle. It’s an effective method to maximize opportunities while minimizing negative factors associated with a given project or objective. Plus, it lets you unbiasedly evaluate your business’s strengths and weaknesses, which is key to avoiding unnecessary errors down the road from lack of insight. Here, we’ll provide a SWOT analysis template, and conduct SWOT analyses on major brands Apple and Starbucks. When you’re done reading, you’ll have all the inspiration and tactical advice you need to tackle a SWOT analysis for yourself. You know a SWOT analysis is important, but, how do you conduct one? There are four steps you’ll want to take when evaluating your business as a whole, or your product in particular. Before you start, you’ll need to figure out what you’re evaluating with your SWOT analysis. Creating a social media program, launching a new product, or considering a brand re-design are all good reasons to conduct a SWOT analysis. Use this SWOT Analysis Template. To visualize your SWOT analysis, it's helpful to make a table. Here, I’ve created a sample using a simple Google Doc table -- feel free to use the model yourself,...

How Market Intelligence Will Make Your Marketing Team More Agile When I was younger, my dream was to open a cheese store with my family. My mom, brother, sister, and I — we're all obsessed with cheese. So anytime I see a cheese store, I'll go in and sample everything … for research, obviously. Although I'd never thought about it this way before, I was already thinking in terms of market intelligence and market research (two different concepts … more on that below). I was thinking about the product and the competitors. As a marketer, market intelligence is important because it can help you understand your position in the market, evaluate your product, know your target audience, and conduct a competitor analysis. With this information, your marketing team will be better equipped to position your company in the marketplace. Below, let's review what market intelligence is, how it's different from market research, and marketing intelligence systems that can facilitate the process. So, what's the purpose of gathering market intelligence? To learn more about the customer and the competition so you can better market your own product or service. For instance, companies can gather general demographics and spending habits of their consumers to write better, more targeted social media ads. Additionally, market intelligence can help a company make decisions on product development and establish a stronger brand. So, what type of information should you collect? Generally, market intelligence can be divided into four main categories of information: Competitor intelligence....