Using BuzzSumo to find the most popular posts in their industry, they found the most popular topics and the type of content that worked the best. Namely, in the design space, they found that there is more demand for free templates, icons, and color-combinations than for information on how to create them. The more you know about how your content performs, the better you can perfect your content marketing strategy. Run A/B tests to refine your landing pages and home page or to test different CTAs on your blog posts. As your brand evolves, establish new tests. You can incorporate that data into future content creation decisions.
Understanding your customers is the key to success for any startup. If you don't have a deep understanding of who your customers are, you'll have trouble developing products that truly fit their needs, and you'll struggle to develop a successful marketing strategy.
- So for each blog post you write, choose one key phrase that you believe readers would use to find that post. Next, incorporate that phrase into the title of the post, the headline on the page, within the content on the page at least two times, in a featured image on the page and also as part of the page link.
- Spice up your blog posts with high-quality stock photos and images: Paul Jarvis (free), Unsplash (free), Library of Congress (free), iStock (fee-based), Shutterstock (fee-based). Determine whether or not you want comments on your blog; they are often a useful way to receive feedback and directly engage with your readers.
This is where a market analysis comes in. It may sound like a daunting and complex process, but fortunately, it's not.
What is a market analysis?
A market analysis is a thorough assessment of the current market.
Once completed you'll have a better understanding of the volume and value of the market, potential customer segments, and their buying patterns, the competition, barriers to entry, and industry regulations.
Why you should conduct a market analysis
Whether you are writing a Lean Plan or putting together a detailed business plan for a bank or other investor, a solid market analysis is expected. But, don't just do a market analysis because you're developing a plan. Do it because it will help you build a smarter strategy for growing your business.
Once you have in-depth knowledge of your market, you'll be better positioned to develop products and services that your customers are going to love. And while diving into market research may seem like a daunting task it can be broken up into four simple elements:
- Industry overview: You'll describe the current state of your industry and where it is headed.
- Target market: Who are your actual customers? You'll detail how many of them are there, what their needs are, and describe their demographics.
- Competition: Describe your competitors' positioning, strengths, and weaknesses.
- Pricing and forecast: Your pricing will help determine how you position your company in the market, and your forecast will show what portion of the market you hope to get.
How to conduct a market analysis
Now, let's go into each step in more detail so you know exactly what you need for your market analysis.
1. Industry overview
In this step, you'll describe your industry and discuss the direction that it's headed. You'll want to include key industry metrics such as size, trends, and projected growth.
Industry research and analysis is different than market research. When you're researching your industry, you're looking at all of the businesses like yours. This is different than market research, where you are learning about your customers.
Your industry overview shows investors that you understand the larger landscape that you are competing in. More importantly, it helps you understand if there's going to be more demand for your products in the future and how competitive the industry is likely to be.
For example, if you are selling mobile phones, you'll want to know if the demand for mobile phones is growing or shrinking. If you're opening a restaurant, you'll want to understand the larger trends of dining out. Are people eating at restaurants more and more over time? Or is the market potentially shrinking as consumers take advantage of grocery delivery services?
If you're in the United States, the U.S. Census has excellent industry data available. I've also found Statista to be useful. You should also look up your industry association—they often have a wealth of information on the trends in your industry.
2. Define your target market
Your target market is the most important section of your industry analysis. This is where you explain who your ideal customer is.
You may find that through the course of your analysis, that you identify different types of customers. When you have more than one type of customer, you do what's called market segmentation. This is where you group similar types of customers into segments and describe the attributes of each segment.
You'll need to start broadly and refine your research by defining the following elements.
Market size
Unlike industry size, which is usually measured in dollars, your market size is how many potential customers there are for your product or service. South park fractured but whole mac free download version. We've got a great method for figuring out your market size that you can read about here.
Demographics
Describe your customer's typical age, gender, education, income, and more. If you could paint a picture of your perfect customer, this is where you'll describe what they look like.
Location
Where are your customers located? A specific country, region, state, city, county, you'll want to describe that here. You may even find that your customer base is segmented based on location which can help you determine where you'll be doing business.
Psychographics
It's here that you need to get inside the mindset of your customers, know their needs, and how they'll react. What are your customers' likes and dislikes? How do they live? What's their personality?
This piece can even help you better approach analyzing the competition.
Behaviors
This is essentially an extension of some of your psychographic information. Explain how your customers shop for and purchase products like yours.
Trends
Customer behavior is always changing. If there are trends that you've noticed with your target market, detail them here.
Competition
Your market analysis isn't complete without thinking about your competition. Beyond knowing what other businesses you are competing with, a good competitive analysis will point out competitors' weaknesses that you can take advantage of. With this knowledge, you can differentiate yourself by offering products and services that fill gaps that competitors have not addressed.
When you are analyzing the competition, you should take a look at the following areas.
Direct competition
These are companies that are offering very similar products and services. Your potential customers are probably currently buying from these companies.
Indirect competitors
Think of indirect competition as alternative solutions to the problem you are solving. This is particularly useful and important for companies that are inventing brand new products or services. For example, the first online task management software wasn't competing with other online task managers—it was competing with paper planners, sticky notes, and other analog to-do lists.
How you're different
You don't want to be the same as the competition. Make sure to discuss how your company, product, or service is different than what the competition is offering. For a common business type, such as hair salons, your differentiation might be location, hours, types of services, ambiance, or price.
Barriers to entry End of first weekteach to be happy.
Describe what protections you have in place to prevent new companies from competing with you. Maybe you have a great location, or perhaps you have patents that help protect your business.
The best way to research your competition is to talk to your prospective customers and ask them who they are currently buying from and what alternate solutions they are using to solve the problem you are solving. Of course, spending some time on Google to figure out what else is out there is a great idea as well.
Step 4: Pricing and forecast
The final step in a market analysis is to figure out your pricing and create a sales forecast to better understand what portion of the market you think you can get.
First, think about your pricing. Of course, you should ensure that your price is more than what it costs you to make and deliver your product or service. But, beyond that, think about the message that your price sends to consumers.
Customers usually link high prices to quality. But, if you are pricing on the higher end of the spectrum, you need to make sure the rest of your marketing is also signaling that you are delivering a high-quality product or service. From what your business looks like to its logo and customer service experience, high-prices should come with a high-quality experience during the entire sales process.
On the other end of the spectrum, maybe you're competing as a low-priced alternative to other products or businesses. If that's the case, make sure your marketing and other messaging are also delivering that same, unified message.
Once you have an idea of your pricing, think about how much you expect to sell. Your industry research will come into play here as you think about how much of the overall market you expect to capture. For example, if you're opening a new type of grocery store, you'll want to know how much people spend on groceries in your area. Your forecast should reflect a realistic portion of that total spend. It's probably not realistic to gain 50 percent of the market within your first year.
How To Find And Use Industry Research In Your Blog Posts For A
However, don't make the mistake of assuming that you can easily get 1 percent of a very large market. 1 percent of a 3 billion dollar market is still $30 million and even though 1 percent seems like a small, attainable number, you need to understand and explain how you will actually acquire that volume of customers.
When you build your forecast, use it as a goal for your business and track your actual sales compared to what you had hoped you would sell. Tools like LivePlan can help you automatically compare your forecast to your accounting data, so it's easy to do. But, even if you use a spreadsheet, tracking your progress will help you adjust your business strategy quickly so that you can do more of what's working and less of what isn't.
Prepare your business with a market analysis
Creating a good market analysis is a very worthwhile exercise. It will help you uncover your blind spots and prepare you to compete with other businesses. More importantly, it will help you understand your customers so you can deliver the best possible service to them.
Looking for some examples of market analysis? Take a look at our free sample business plans on Bplans. There are more than 500 of them across a wide range of industries, and each one of them has a market analysis section.
Using BuzzSumo to find the most popular posts in their industry, they found the most popular topics and the type of content that worked the best. Namely, in the design space, they found that there is more demand for free templates, icons, and color-combinations than for information on how to create them. The more you know about how your content performs, the better you can perfect your content marketing strategy. Run A/B tests to refine your landing pages and home page or to test different CTAs on your blog posts. As your brand evolves, establish new tests. You can incorporate that data into future content creation decisions.
Understanding your customers is the key to success for any startup. If you don't have a deep understanding of who your customers are, you'll have trouble developing products that truly fit their needs, and you'll struggle to develop a successful marketing strategy.
- So for each blog post you write, choose one key phrase that you believe readers would use to find that post. Next, incorporate that phrase into the title of the post, the headline on the page, within the content on the page at least two times, in a featured image on the page and also as part of the page link.
- Spice up your blog posts with high-quality stock photos and images: Paul Jarvis (free), Unsplash (free), Library of Congress (free), iStock (fee-based), Shutterstock (fee-based). Determine whether or not you want comments on your blog; they are often a useful way to receive feedback and directly engage with your readers.
This is where a market analysis comes in. It may sound like a daunting and complex process, but fortunately, it's not.
What is a market analysis?
A market analysis is a thorough assessment of the current market.
Once completed you'll have a better understanding of the volume and value of the market, potential customer segments, and their buying patterns, the competition, barriers to entry, and industry regulations.
Why you should conduct a market analysis
Whether you are writing a Lean Plan or putting together a detailed business plan for a bank or other investor, a solid market analysis is expected. But, don't just do a market analysis because you're developing a plan. Do it because it will help you build a smarter strategy for growing your business.
Once you have in-depth knowledge of your market, you'll be better positioned to develop products and services that your customers are going to love. And while diving into market research may seem like a daunting task it can be broken up into four simple elements:
- Industry overview: You'll describe the current state of your industry and where it is headed.
- Target market: Who are your actual customers? You'll detail how many of them are there, what their needs are, and describe their demographics.
- Competition: Describe your competitors' positioning, strengths, and weaknesses.
- Pricing and forecast: Your pricing will help determine how you position your company in the market, and your forecast will show what portion of the market you hope to get.
How to conduct a market analysis
Now, let's go into each step in more detail so you know exactly what you need for your market analysis.
1. Industry overview
In this step, you'll describe your industry and discuss the direction that it's headed. You'll want to include key industry metrics such as size, trends, and projected growth.
Industry research and analysis is different than market research. When you're researching your industry, you're looking at all of the businesses like yours. This is different than market research, where you are learning about your customers.
Your industry overview shows investors that you understand the larger landscape that you are competing in. More importantly, it helps you understand if there's going to be more demand for your products in the future and how competitive the industry is likely to be.
For example, if you are selling mobile phones, you'll want to know if the demand for mobile phones is growing or shrinking. If you're opening a restaurant, you'll want to understand the larger trends of dining out. Are people eating at restaurants more and more over time? Or is the market potentially shrinking as consumers take advantage of grocery delivery services?
If you're in the United States, the U.S. Census has excellent industry data available. I've also found Statista to be useful. You should also look up your industry association—they often have a wealth of information on the trends in your industry.
2. Define your target market
Your target market is the most important section of your industry analysis. This is where you explain who your ideal customer is.
You may find that through the course of your analysis, that you identify different types of customers. When you have more than one type of customer, you do what's called market segmentation. This is where you group similar types of customers into segments and describe the attributes of each segment.
You'll need to start broadly and refine your research by defining the following elements.
Market size
Unlike industry size, which is usually measured in dollars, your market size is how many potential customers there are for your product or service. South park fractured but whole mac free download version. We've got a great method for figuring out your market size that you can read about here.
Demographics
Describe your customer's typical age, gender, education, income, and more. If you could paint a picture of your perfect customer, this is where you'll describe what they look like.
Location
Where are your customers located? A specific country, region, state, city, county, you'll want to describe that here. You may even find that your customer base is segmented based on location which can help you determine where you'll be doing business.
Psychographics
It's here that you need to get inside the mindset of your customers, know their needs, and how they'll react. What are your customers' likes and dislikes? How do they live? What's their personality?
This piece can even help you better approach analyzing the competition.
Behaviors
This is essentially an extension of some of your psychographic information. Explain how your customers shop for and purchase products like yours.
Trends
Customer behavior is always changing. If there are trends that you've noticed with your target market, detail them here.
Competition
Your market analysis isn't complete without thinking about your competition. Beyond knowing what other businesses you are competing with, a good competitive analysis will point out competitors' weaknesses that you can take advantage of. With this knowledge, you can differentiate yourself by offering products and services that fill gaps that competitors have not addressed.
When you are analyzing the competition, you should take a look at the following areas.
Direct competition
These are companies that are offering very similar products and services. Your potential customers are probably currently buying from these companies.
Indirect competitors
Think of indirect competition as alternative solutions to the problem you are solving. This is particularly useful and important for companies that are inventing brand new products or services. For example, the first online task management software wasn't competing with other online task managers—it was competing with paper planners, sticky notes, and other analog to-do lists.
How you're different
You don't want to be the same as the competition. Make sure to discuss how your company, product, or service is different than what the competition is offering. For a common business type, such as hair salons, your differentiation might be location, hours, types of services, ambiance, or price.
Barriers to entry End of first weekteach to be happy.
Describe what protections you have in place to prevent new companies from competing with you. Maybe you have a great location, or perhaps you have patents that help protect your business.
The best way to research your competition is to talk to your prospective customers and ask them who they are currently buying from and what alternate solutions they are using to solve the problem you are solving. Of course, spending some time on Google to figure out what else is out there is a great idea as well.
Step 4: Pricing and forecast
The final step in a market analysis is to figure out your pricing and create a sales forecast to better understand what portion of the market you think you can get.
First, think about your pricing. Of course, you should ensure that your price is more than what it costs you to make and deliver your product or service. But, beyond that, think about the message that your price sends to consumers.
Customers usually link high prices to quality. But, if you are pricing on the higher end of the spectrum, you need to make sure the rest of your marketing is also signaling that you are delivering a high-quality product or service. From what your business looks like to its logo and customer service experience, high-prices should come with a high-quality experience during the entire sales process.
On the other end of the spectrum, maybe you're competing as a low-priced alternative to other products or businesses. If that's the case, make sure your marketing and other messaging are also delivering that same, unified message.
Once you have an idea of your pricing, think about how much you expect to sell. Your industry research will come into play here as you think about how much of the overall market you expect to capture. For example, if you're opening a new type of grocery store, you'll want to know how much people spend on groceries in your area. Your forecast should reflect a realistic portion of that total spend. It's probably not realistic to gain 50 percent of the market within your first year.
How To Find And Use Industry Research In Your Blog Posts For A
However, don't make the mistake of assuming that you can easily get 1 percent of a very large market. 1 percent of a 3 billion dollar market is still $30 million and even though 1 percent seems like a small, attainable number, you need to understand and explain how you will actually acquire that volume of customers.
When you build your forecast, use it as a goal for your business and track your actual sales compared to what you had hoped you would sell. Tools like LivePlan can help you automatically compare your forecast to your accounting data, so it's easy to do. But, even if you use a spreadsheet, tracking your progress will help you adjust your business strategy quickly so that you can do more of what's working and less of what isn't.
Prepare your business with a market analysis
Creating a good market analysis is a very worthwhile exercise. It will help you uncover your blind spots and prepare you to compete with other businesses. More importantly, it will help you understand your customers so you can deliver the best possible service to them.
Looking for some examples of market analysis? Take a look at our free sample business plans on Bplans. There are more than 500 of them across a wide range of industries, and each one of them has a market analysis section.
Noah Parsons
Noah is currently the COO at Palo Alto Software, makers of Outpost and the online business plan app LivePlan, and content curator and creator of the Emergent Newsletter. You can follow Noah on Twitter.Posted in Business Plan Writing, Management
One of the best ways to get visibility and traffic to your blog posts is to write on topics that are popular and being shared on social media platforms. One reason why trending topics get more traction is that they're relatively more valuable to the reader. Such content is more likely to get links and shares as well. Displaying domain expertise becomes a breeze when you follow and post about the latest stuff in your industry. It then gets you, followers and subscribers. Hacking industry trends is an essential part of any content marketing strategy.
Here are ten awesome ways in which you can find and write about trending topics:
1. Feedly
Feedly is a great tool to research for trending content. The tool allows you to follow some of the top blogs in your niche with just one click. You can simply search for the relevant publications by choosing a category. Just subscribe to their feed and get all the latest content in your Feedly dashboard. Feedly is a freemium app available on desktop and mobile.
2. Medium
Another cool place to find trending content in your industry is Medium. Medium is a free-to-use content publishing platform. It's a great community for finding some truly remarkable content pieces. You can use category search on the platform to search for some popular blog posts and pick those that you wish to write about. You can log in and create your free account and use Medium on your desktop or download its mobile app. You can follow individuals and categories on the platform. Once you do, you will see latest stories from them in your feed. Another section that's worth checking out is 'Popular on Medium'.
3. Quora
I think Quora is one of the best communities for finding trending content. Whenever I'm ideating a content piece, I would check out popular questions on Quora. The platform provides you the option to follow the relevant topics in your niche. Once you do so you'll keep seeing the ‘Top Stories' (questions) in your Quora newsfeed. You can also check out the ‘New Questions' option to see the latest questions. The community is full of interesting questions to find inspiration for your next blog post.
4. Google Trends
Google Trends is another free tool with a host of interesting features. It helps you to do a comparative keyword research to find out which ones are being talked about the most.
The tool provides you with an option to analyze trends for web, images, videos as well as Google shopping.
You can also look for trending stories for a particular category and location.
5. Buzzsumo
There are many content pieces that get widely shared on social media channels. There is something unique and valuable about these pieces that make them unique. You must catch hold of these content pieces to know more about what's doing well. Buzzsumo is one tool that will help you to find niche pieces which have the highest social shares. Type in a sample topic or keywords and you'll get the URLs of all those pieces along with their respective number of shares on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn etc.
6. Reddit
Some communities may not be as popular but definitely quite valuable. Reddit is one such community which can help you to find some fairly exciting content to help you ideate your next blog post. The community helps you view content based on its freshness and popularity. Look for the relevant subreddit for conversations related to your niche. You'll find tabs like hot, rising, and new to look for trending topics.
Reddit is not a conventional place to do your content research but it's certainly worth researching.
7. Linkedin Pulse
LinkedIn Pulse helps you to find some of the top stories and professional conversations on a daily basis. These stories are curated by editors of LinkedIn and include stuff that's published on the platform and off it.
How To Find And Use Industry Research In Your Blog Posts Instead
Check out the 'What People are Talking About Now' section to get your dose of trending content.
8. Pocket
Pocket is a must-have app for content marketers. Its core feature is to let you save your favourite articles and refer to them anytime, anywhere. The app recently came up with the 'Explore' tab where you can type in any keywords in your niche and find content that people using Pocket are saving. That's one great way to find popular content on Pocket. The other useful sections within the Pocket app include 'Recommended, 'Trending', and 'Must Reads'.
9. EpicBeat
How To Find And Use Industry Research In Your Blog Posts Using
This another cool freemium tool to find trending content in your business vertical. You can simply use the search bar in the tool to look for a topic URL or author. EpicBeat has a unique search assist feature that gives you suggestions of keywords, authors, and websites based on your interests. The tool also provides you with an advanced search feature to make your search more accurate.
It lets you analyze the top content pieces and shares while it also gives you the list of those who have shared the pieces in the past week.
10. Social Mention
How To Find And Use Industry Research In Your Blog Posts Post
This is another cool web app to find the latest content in your industry. Just type in your keywords and find real-time content in your niche. It gives you the option to look for content pieces of all formats (Blogs, Microblogs, and Videos etc.) or just one of them. The tool gives you the option to search for exact key phrases so you can find results that are more relevant. You can use the tool to look for content that's as recent as the last one day, 12 hours or an hour.
Besides the tools mentioned above, you can also look for trending blog topics in Google's News Search feature. It's a great place to find the very latest news and in your industry. Even Twitter for that matter is a great place to type in domain-specific hashtags and find the latest stories.
Make Your Content Stand Out
There are other things that you must keep in mind while posting on trending topics. Make sure you are trying to outdo some of the top trending content pieces. It will help you to get more shares and visibility for your blog post. Give an interesting twist to the topic by adding a point of view to your story. You can make it more valuable by adding examples and case studies that fit into the story.
Over To You
You must make use of the above tools white researching for blog topics. Trending stories will always fetch you more traffic for your blog and result in more leads and conversions. You must make use of trending topics to pitch for guest stories - the acceptance rate will be much higher and result in more backlinks and brand mentions.
I hope you found this piece helpful. Would love to learn from your experience. Please feel free to add your suggestions in the comments section below.
