7 Benefits of Market Analysis: marketing and beyond!

Market analysis for marketing and beyond: here are all the benefits why you should choose them for your business.

Amarket analysis is a quantitative and qualitative assessment of a specific market, which is essential to examine market size in both volume and value, competitors, various customer segments, and buying patterns.

It allows us to have awareness of the opportunities and possible risks in a target market so that we can guide companies in marketing decisions, successful business development, and many other aspects.

We at Central Marketing Intelligence conduct market analysis based on social listening, or listening to the network.

This means that our analyses aim to understand the needs of consumers in a specific market, to understand what attracts a specific target audience and how to “catch” them.

Do you want to know what is the purpose of a market analysis? Marketing, reputation, sales are 3 of the main elements why you should choose it for your company. But not the only ones!

Now we are going to find out what are the main reasons (as many as 7) why listening to the network is indispensable for all companies, from Large Enterprises to SMEs.

We’re going to take a nice journey to discover what risks you can avoid by listening to the Web and what opportunities you can succeed in seizing that your competition doesn’t even know are possible at the moment.

You will see that these reasons are not just about marketing, as most people think. Listening to the network is a strategic tool for your business on many levels.

1) Market analysis & marketing: listening to the network helps you invest better.

I imagine that your company has a digital presence and invests thousands-if not millions-each year in marketing activities on social networks, such as Facebook and Instagram, and on search engines such as Google.

Great! But do you know what is the first requirement for every penny spent on the web to turn into concrete results for your business?

Knowing perfectly the audience you are targeting, therefore conducting careful market analysis with the help of powerful social listening software.

Being able to find out who your potential customers are and what they want is what makes the difference today between a successful campaign and a disastrous one in which the only ones making money are the social networks.

The reason for this is not that social media are scammers (although they obviously do their own thing, that’s for sure).

The reason is that their goal is to interest users, so that they continue to waste-pardon spend-all their free time with their noses glued to the screen.

So it’s in their interest for the content to be quality and to be targeted to the right people, don’t you think? If you keep investing money but make ads that don’t interest users… Facebook, Instagram and Google penalize you by charging more per click on advertising.

But how does market analysis help you invest better and avoid this waste of money? Here is the answer:

• They help you get to know your target audience.
• With market research, you can send the right message to the right people.
• By monitoring results with network listening tools, you can correct unproductive strategies and improve winning ones.

Let us now look at the second benefit of market analysis.

Read also: Marketing and Market Research: without Data you waste 60% of your budget

2) Market analysis based on listening to the network helps you avoid reputation crises.

Listening to the network means sheltering yourself from reputational crises in your company and your industry. As you well know, whether you are wrong or right, at any moment any scandal can break out and suddenly target your company, besmirching its name.

If you can’t predict it, you can at least notice it in time through social listening!

Market analysis allows you to take immediate action to stem the damage and come out of the affair as clean as possible, preventing consumers from forever remembering your brand as “What he did…” or “What he said/ wrote…”

A market survey does not prevent a blizzard from breaking out (that would be impossible) but it helps you contain the crisis well before it becomes a scandal within everyone’s reach.

3) Sell more (and give super powers to your customer service) through web listening.

Web conversations and messages are not just a risk or a cue to improve your marketing. They are also an invaluable resource for interacting with your customers, building relationships, solving their problems, and ultimately selling more!

This is an aspect of network listening that is too often underestimated, yet it is critically important for companies.

Yet it can markedly improve your customer service and help you sell more.

Think of how many wasted opportunities you can fortunately begin to seize through web listening. Thanks to web listening you can:

• Put a “virtual salesperson” in your store, who stays on the alert and scours the Web, catching those who are interested in you or who have a problem. And, as he would in a physical store, ask him if he needs help.
• Helping your customer service representatives intercept those who ask a question mentioning your brand or a competitor’s brand, thanking those who post a positive comment about your brand, and rushing to help those who have a problem and are complaining (even if they don’t report it directly to your company).

These activities, referred to in the jargon as “social customer care,” are not only kind to the customer: they translate into sales, loyalty and growth in your revenue.

Customers, in fact, spend 20 to 40 percent more with companies with which they have had positive interactions online, and they are more likely to speak well of them to their friends and relatives, becoming true “ambassadors.”

Indeed, if traditional customer care, via phone and email, is taken for granted, being able to interact through social creates a very strong interaction, a feeling of being heard and important to the company, especially when the question or message was not addressed directly.

4) Never make a decision in the dark again.

Listening to the network is thought to be an activity reserved for the marketing team, which uses it to gather ideas for campaigns or to respond in real time to users who write online.

Nothing could be more wrong! Listening to the network is the key to gathering a tremendous amount of information that can be useful to you at different levels of your company to make business decisions, avoiding throwing millions away and helping you seize opportunities you couldn’t see before.

But what is the most impactful information for your business? Here they are listed right away:

• The sum total of everything that people think, desire, love and detest. This information that people provide to us for free is a gold mine for us to be able to understand what is going on in their heads, glimpse the dynamics at work, and answer our business questions that usually remained completely unanswered. This helps you reduce uncertainty when making a business decision.
• Know when consumers need a particular product or service. With market analysis based on listening to the network, you can launch the right product at the right time!
• Know your potential customers’ favorite products and those they, on the other hand, dislike (so you can choose which items to focus on and which to discard).
• Know who your competitors are in foreign countries, what kind of products they sell, who your target audience is, what their needs are, and what words and terms they use when referring to that particular problem. This helps you get a leg up on a new market.

As you can see, market analysis is useful not only to marketers but also to those who have to make decisions about the future of their companies while keeping a close eye on what is happening in the marketplace. And speaking of keeping your eyes open.

5) You are always one move ahead of the competition.

Market analysis helps you discover and automatically gather a great deal of information about your competitors, without anyone having to waste hours and hours combing through websites and reporting data.

Acompetitive analysis based on social listening first makes you understand who the companies and entities are that compete with your company, and then compares the results of each competitor, identifying the most important and fearsome ones.

Having done this, listening to the network allows us to understand the strengths and Achilles’ heels of the most dangerous competitors so that we can adopt the proper strategies to be able to grow in our target market!

Aside from the sadistic enjoyment of rejoicing in other people’s woes, having this information-along, of course, with information about what consumers like, and thus where your competitor is stronger than you-helps you make several decisions, including:

• What “angle of attack” to use to reiterate that you are better than your competitor.
• What to focus on to improve your products and services.
• Which messages and promotional campaigns do NOT work and therefore you should avoid. If your competitor made an epic fail, avoid doing something similar yourself!
• What to learn that is useful. On the other hand, if something the contestant did worked particularly well, mark it down for good–not to copy, but to take a cue when needed!

In a world where companies don’t even know what they are up against, I assure you that having this information allows you to be not a span, but miles ahead of the rest!

Read also: What tools to use for competitor market analysis?

6) With market analysis, you always know what’s going on in your industry.

New innovations and trends emerge every day, some very important that will be world-changing, others more impromptu that will remain mere curiosities.

Some of them will come out in all the newspapers and be on everyone’s lips, while others will remain more hidden, perhaps because they were born in a part of the world too far away from us.

Ask yourself sincerely: do you have a way to track this?

Aside from reading the occasional newspaper, can you say that you are always up-to-date on what innovations, startups, and currents of thought are influencing your industry?

If the answer is no or partially no, don’t worry: most other companies are in the same boat as you.

Only, as of today, you know how to discover and monitor trends in your industry, that is, with some kick-ass market analysis!

7) You can evaluate your results across the board with online market analysis.

Evaluation of results is a very important point. I put it last, but it might as well be at the beginning of the whole article.

Because you can do all the marketing campaigns you want, you can make very risky decisions based on very accurate information… But if you don’t evaluate the results, you’re back to square one.

You don’t know if it worked and how, you don’t see where you should improve, and you don’t understand a figment of how you’re doing compared to the past.

For example, with market research you can understand how much visibility you are gaining with your strategies, assess the risks of a campaign, understand whether the influencers you chose were effective, and much more.

Awareness: the watchword for growing in the market!

Market analysis brings many benefits to your business, but we can sum them all up in: growth given by conscious action.

Thanks to a few minutes of reading, you now know how to move forward and grow, outperforming your competitors, in the coming decades.

Do you still want to stand still, keep fumbling and waste more than half of your investment?

That would be really clueless!

Then contact us now to schedule a consultation . We will be happy to help you put together ad hoc market research and provide appropriate training for you and your employees.