Free Market Analysis

by

What’s market analysis all about? How does free market analysis home work? Here’s the way to take the right step. It is a good option and can help you save money and time. Check them out and read more below!

Market analysis is a large part of market research and an important component of a business plan. In this plan, business founders document their business idea in writing. During the course of the market analysis, a specific market is taken into account. With the help of the results displayed, companies can identify the opportunities and risks of that particular market. The target group forms the basis of the market analysis.

Different methods of market analysis

In order to carry out a market analysis you will require reliable information. Generally speaking, small companies tend to carry out the necessary research for their market analysis themselves. Larger companies, on the other hand, often commission market research institutes to do it for them. A market analysis can be carried out using various methods of data collection. A distinction is made between primary and secondary research.

With primary research, experts from a target market are interviewed in order to collect new data. The advantage of this is that it is still your own research purpose in focus. This way, you can collect the data you need for your market analysis. In contrast to this, secondary research uses existing data records from previous surveys. This can be collected both internally and externally. By opting for secondary research you can save both time and money because you don’t have to conduct costly interviews and evaluation. Sources for representative data are, for example, the Federal Statistical System, professional chambers, annual reports of other companies, or trade journals.

What are the benefits of running a marketing analysis?

A marketing analysis can reduce risk, identify emerging trends, and help project revenue. You can use a marketing analysis at several stages of your business, and it can even be beneficial to conduct one every year to keep up to date with any major changes in the market.

A detailed market analysis will usually be part of your business plan, since it gives you a greater understanding of your audience and competition, helping you build a more targeted marketing strategy.

These are some other major benefits of conducting a market analysis:

  • Risk reduction: Knowing your market can reduce risks in your business, since you’ll have an understanding of major market trends, the main players in your industry, and what it takes to be successful, all of which will inform your business decisions. To help you further protect your business, you can also conduct a SWOT analysis, which identifies the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for a business.
  • Targeted products or services: You are in a much better position to serve your customers when you have a firm grasp on what they are looking for from you. When you know who your customers are, you can use that information to tailor your business’s offerings to your customers’ needs.
  • Emerging trends: Staying ahead in business is often about being the first to spot a new opportunity or trend, and using a marketing analysis to stay on top of industry trends is a great way to position yourself to take advantage of this information.
  • Revenue projections: A market forecast is a key component of most marketing analyses, as it projects the future numbers, characteristics and trends in your target market. This gives you an idea of the profits you can expect, allowing you to adjust your business plan and budget accordingly.
  • Evaluation benchmarks: It can be difficult to gauge your business’s success outside of pure numbers. A market analysis provides benchmarks against which you can judge your company and how well you are doing compared to others in your industry.
  • Context for past mistakes: Marketing analytics can explain your business’s past mistakes or industry anomalies. For example, in-depth analytics can explain what impacted the sale of a specific product, or why a certain metric performed the way it did. This can help you avoid making those mistakes again or experiencing similar anomalies, because you’ll be able to analyze and describe what went wrong and why.
  • Marketing optimization: This is where an annual marketing analysis comes in handy – regular analysis can inform your ongoing marketing efforts and show you which aspects of your marketing need work, and which are performing well in comparison to the other companies in your industry.

Key takeaway: A market analysis can benefit your business in many ways, especially if you conduct regular analyses to make sure you have current information for your marketing efforts.

How to conduct a market analysis

While conducting a marketing analysis is not a complicated process, it does take a lot of dedicated research, so be prepared to devote significant time to the process.

These are the seven steps of conducting a market analysis:

1. Determine your purpose.

There are many reasons you may be conducting a market analysis, such as to gauge your competition or understand a new market. Whatever your reason, it’s important to determine it right away to keep you on track throughout the process. Start by deciding whether your purpose is internal – like improving your cash flow or business operations – or external, like seeking a business loan. Your purpose will dictate the type and amount of research you will do.

2. Research the state of the industry.

It’s vital to include a detailed outline of the current state of your industry. Include where the industry seems to be heading, using metrics such as size, trends and projected growth, with plenty of data to support your findings. You can also conduct a comparative market analysis to help you find your competitive advantage within your specific market.

3. Identify your target customer.

Not everyone in the world will be your customer, and it would be a waste of your time trying to get everyone interested in your product. Instead, decide who is most likely to want your product using a target market analysis and focus your efforts there. You want to understand your market size, who your customers are, where they come from, and what might influence their buying decisions, looking at factors like these:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Location
  • Occupation
  • Education
  • Needs
  • Interests

During your research, you might consider creating a customer profile or persona that reflects your ideal customer to serve as a model for your marketing efforts.

4. Understand your competition.

To be successful, you need a good understanding of your competitors, including their market saturation, what they do differently from you, and their strengths, weaknesses and advantages in the market. Start by listing all your main competitors, then go through that list and conduct a SWOT analysis of each competitor. What does that business have that you don’t? What would lead a customer to choose that business over yours? Put yourself in the customer’s shoes.

Then, rank your list of competitors from most to least threatening, and decide on a timeline to conduct regular SWOT analyses on your most threatening competitors.

5. Gather additional data.

With marketing analyses, information is your friend – you can never have too much data. It is important that the data you use is credible and factual, so be cautious of where you get your numbers. These are some reputable business data resources:

6. Analyze your data.

After you collect all the information you can and verify that it is accurate, you need to analyze the data to make it useful to you. Organize your research into sections that make sense to you, but try to include ones for your purpose, target market and competition.

These are the main elements your research should include:

  • An overview of your industry’s size and growth rate
  • Your business’s projected market share percentage
  • An industry outlook
  • Customer buying trends
  • Your forecasted growth
  • How much customers are willing to pay for your product or service

7. Put your analysis to work.

Once you’ve done the work to create a market analysis, it’s time to actually make it work for you. Internally, look for where you can use your research and findings to improve your business. Have you seen other businesses doing things that you’d like to implement in your own organization? Are there ways to make your marketing strategies more effective?

If you conducted your analysis for external purposes, organize your research and data into an easily readable and digestible document to make it easier to share with lenders.

Be sure to retain all of your information and research for your next analysis, and consider making a calendar reminder each year so that you stay on top of your market.

Market Analysis Tools

Google Analytics

Outstanding feature(s): Records real-time audience insights.

A handful of experts recommend Google Analytics for market research, particularly, for understanding where your visitors come from and how they interact with your business (your site visitors’ on-site behavior).

Truck Driver Institute’s Keyoka Kinzy applauds the Audience section feature. Kinzy explains, “It allows you to adjust the demographics, behaviors, and interests of your specific audience to ensure that you’re optimizing the content that appeals to your consumer base.”

“As such,” Paul Franklin of SideGains summarizes, “GA helps me understand the direction my content should take long-term and informs my short-terms strategy to serve people more of the content they find interesting.”

GanttPRO

GanttPRO is an online Gantt chart program for project management that allows intuitive creation of schedules. It is a paid software which also offers free trial version.  GanttPRO allows sub-division of major tasks into minor tasks and offers cost calculation per task. While using a Gantt chart, you can immediately see all the information you need on your chart, including your team’s tasks, their sequences, deadlines, and priorities. GanttPRO is hosted in the cloud, which makes is easily accessible for every team member using any web browser.

Google Trends

Outstanding feature(s): In-depth look at market trends.

“Google Trends has been most insightful for me,” Dollar Creed’s Lily Ugbaja highlights. “This is because it is a great tool for researching trends.”

In particular, Ugbaja writes that this tool:

  • “Gives a picture of what people are looking for on the web, by tracking the volume of searches on a particular product or services over time and by location.
  • Gives insight into similar search queries and topics, to identify patterns and figure out the terminology users commonly use.”

SoGoSurvey

SoGo Survey is an easy-to-use online survey application which offers a wide range of solutions for conducting surveys. Survey tools from SoGo Survey help you gauge marketing trends, brand awareness, net promoter score, customer loyalty, campaign management and advance analysis. SoGo Survey offers a wide range of products including Free Student Plan, Free Non-profit Plan, Discounted Academic Plan, and Paying by a Purchase Order. The basic package is free and offers 15 surveys, 30 questions, 125 responses, and 125 email invitations to name a few.

Typeform

Outstanding feature(s): Easy to use and great data visualization.

An important aspect of marketing research is getting to know your audience and their problem. To this end, talking to them helps, which brings us to the survey tool, Typeform.

Ashley Cummings from Searchlight Content notes it’s great for all businesses irrespective of their size. Talking about her work, Cummings elaborates, “My business is smaller, but I still conduct primary research regularly.

I recently used Typeform to send out a survey to freelance writers that helps other writers benchmark rates. Typeform was perfect for my needs. It was easy to create and distribute a survey.”

Best of all, Cummings shares, “my participants were familiar with the platform, so it wasn’t difficult for them to complete the survey.:

“Typeform also visualizes the data, making it easy to interpret,” Cummings adds. “Typeform also allows open-ended responses for qualitative data, which was helpful for me on questions where I wanted deeper answers.”

Trinka AI

Trinka AI is the world’s first grammar and language improvement tool designed specifically for academic and technical writing. It is unique as it not only checks grammar, punctuation, and spelling, but also provides explanations for correcting errors. It offers free version that includes access to all its features. The paid version offers uninterrupted usage and higher monthly limits along with access to the add-in for MS Word. It allows you to choose between the US and the UK style to make it easily accessible for researchers all over the world.

Its custom-built features such as maintaining academic tone, providing unbiased language, concept clarity, sentence structure, and alternative word choice makes it better than most grammar checker tools. It also offers subject-specific corrections, select style guides preferences, and 20+ publication readiness checks. It provides detailed explanations as to why a correction is suggested. Furthermore, it helps researchers in reducing word count by suggesting alternatives without changing the context.

SEMrush

Outstanding feature(s): Quick overview of competitors’ position and marketing spend.

This one’s another popular market research tool among the 60 marketers we talked to.

The team at All Phase Media, for example, uses SEMrush to identify marketing trends based on how keywords are used in their market. In Mike Errico’s words, “Our team uses SEMRush which allows us to identify trends in keyword usage across any vertical or niche market.

If we see a trend for a keyword relative to our company, or our clients, we can quickly create content and compete for that keyword.”

Similarly, Beth Cooper of KNB Communications shares, “SEMRush has been super helpful in gaining insight for our business. Everyone is online, so pulling market data by analyzing web traffic around domains and keywords makes a lot of sense.

We are also able to see digital ads domains are running and how much people are spending on marketing. It helps us benchmark our own success, set goals, and refine our marketing tactics and messaging.”

Grammarly

Grammarly is a popular browser application or extension developed to check grammar, punctuation, context, sentence structure, and readability. It is a real-time plagiarism detector on various platforms, including MS Word, WordPress, Facebook, etc. It is available in free and paid version. The free version offers basic spelling and grammar checks, as well as some suggestions. While the paid version offers the basic revisions and vocabulary improvement suggestions; additionally, it provides citation suggestions and can detect plagiarism.

Startquestion Software

Startquestion is a professional survey software designed to help businesses of all sizes, freelancers, nonprofits, educational institutions and more create online questionnaires for researching employees, clients and community. Key features include email marketing, question branching, custom survey URLs, customizable templates, multi-channel distribution and data analysis tools.

Teams using Startquestion can add company or project logo to questionnaires and establish brand identity with respondents. Built-in graphic templates allow users to personalize the questions, titles, answers, progress bar, frames, background photo, messages, buttons and other content of the survey design. Additionally, filter questions can be applied using transition

SurveySparrow

Surveys are a good way to get relevant information from the public regarding a product you’re about to launch, or a product that has already been in the market in a while. With SurveySparrow, you will create various types of market surveys from the available built-in templates.

SurveySparrow, as a company, also offers various other marketing solutions for obtaining insights about the participants in a market. More so, SurveySparrow surveys can be embedded on sites and applications. This marketing software offers a ton of exclusive features that guarantee good results.

Discuss.io

Discuss.io is a smart video platform that helps global brands and agencies plan, execute and share qualitative research conversations at scale. We help enterprise market researchers, UX researchers, product managers, sales professionals, brand managers and CX departments ramp consumer conversations and streamline the workflow. Built by market researchers, key features include live video interviews, mobile screen share, interactive whiteboards, built-in auto translation (100+ languages), powerful.

KPI6

KPI6 is a Software as a Service Suite adopted by Brands and media agencies to understand consumers, identify their needs, and define audience segments. It analyses a multitude of user-generated content and unsolicited sources like online reviews, social and web panels, digital open data to provide the critical strategic insights a company needs to drive innovation, opportunity assessment, strategic planning, segmentation, creative development, and media strategy.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is leading market research software where the user can easily conduct market research surveys. The user can comfortably reach to a specific audience through this software. The user can also research & analyze a target market, measure brand awareness, and easily gain insight into the future product through SurveyMonkey. It’s also a useful market research tool to compare the strategies with your competitors and for effective market segmentation.

SurveyMonkey Market Research Features : Data Management, Email / Online, Paper-Based, Statistical Analysis, Survey Management

Typeform

Typeform is a data collection tool where the user can turn data collection into an experience. The software offers refreshing ways to ask questions and fun way to get answers. The user can collect better data through the conversational feature. Typeform offers a user-friendly interface to the users. You can find different templates to boost your market research. It’s also a suitable option to integrate with the third-party software.

Typeform Market Research Features : Data Management, Email / Online, Survey Management.

SurveyLegend Software

SurveyLegend is a cloud-based survey solution for individuals and businesses of all sizes. The solution enables users to create mobile-friendly surveys, manage survey questionnaires, customize questions and track responses.

SurveyLegend lets users drag-and-drop field items to design surveys. The solution also offers various field options such as text-based comment boxes and choice-based rating sliders. Customizations like setting the input format, value range, and mandatory, as well as various question logic and branching questions are available.

SurveyLegend lets users collect data and responses, and provide real time analysis in various charts such as bar, pie, NPS, and donut.

Nfield Software

Nfield is a cloud-based solution designed to help market researchers create custom surveys to collect customer feedback and determine challenges and experiences. Features include real-time data, secure data storage, remote access and reporting,

The application enables professionals to create surveys using predefined templates including various question types such as rating/slider, numeric, matrix, single or multi-coded and calendar-style. Administrators can manage the number of invitations, broadcast surveys via email, web or social media and send reminder notifications for completion. It includes a survey setup module, which helps users plan new projects, upload media files or contacts and finalize publishing.

Cloudscene

Cloudscene is a data-driven marketplace platform that transforms the way businesses buy network services. By streamlining procurement and simplifying sales activities, Cloudscene makes way for stronger connections, easier tracking and management, empowered and agile teams, time and cost efficiency, and increased productivity for forward-thinking organizations. Our platform is backed by unmatched market intelligence as we believe the best business decisions are founded on powerful data.

Alchemer

Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo) transforms customer feedback into operational gold to create customer-centric organizations. Alchemer provides a customer-experience platform and pre-packaged solutions that enable businesses to collect and act on feedback to find, get, and keep more customers and employees. Only Alchemer puts customers at the center of everything a company does by integrating feedback directly into the systems and applications that power the organization today. Alchemer serves more than 15,000 global customers and 30% of the Fortune 500.

Alchemer Market Research Features : Benchmarking, Compensation Management, Data Management, Email / Online, Face-to-Face, Panel Management, Paper-Based, Phone-Based, Sample Management, Statistical Analysis, Survey Management

Social Mention

This software comes in handy if your business has already gained a strong social presence. It helps to monitor various social media and provides you with detailed report(s) on how your brand is performing across various platforms. With this marketing research software, you can easily track all comments or mentions about your product or brand on various social platforms.

Furthermore, the app provides clear customer insights, lets you manage your online reputation. Social Mention supports Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and virtually all social media platform you know. More so, it works in real-time.

Semrush Software

Semrush is a leading online visibility management software-as-a-service platform. With over 50 products, tools and add-ons across online visibility management, including tools for search, content, social media and market research, data for more than 140 countries, seamless integration with Google and task management platforms, Semrush is a critical solution for all companies who are serious about online presence. 

Semrush in numbers:

– Over 200 million unique domains monitored for 142 geo databases – Over 41 trillion backlinks – 20 billion keywords – Over 7 million users have tried Semrush.

Survey Planet

Survey Planet is probably one of the few online survey tools offering many attractive features in their free version. The basic version includes options such as unlimited surveys, unlimited survey questions, unlimited responses, pre-written surveys and SSL security to name a few. With Pro version, you will have access to additional premium features including custom themes, CSV reporting, and unlimited survey storage.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a versatile content and social media analysis dashboard that provides its users with data about the topics that are trending on the major social media platforms. It allows you to analyze data from a range of different time periods, like for the previous 12 hours or spanning many months. 

This way, you can now the topics in your industry that are getting the most social traction. It also offers advanced keyword search operators, backlink information, content type filters, and influencer marketing features. You can then export the data into another format and analyze it to a greater depth. 

Klipfolio

Klipfolio is a dashboard software that allows its users to create interactive dashboards that can host marketing-related data from various tools and channels. 

You can use it to pull data from Facebook or Google Analytics, which is good for tracking your performance and seeing all the data in an integrated dashboard. It comes with pre-built templates of dashboards that you can use without having to create your own from scratch. 

However, you can still create your own dashboard that will help you meet your needs. If you have many marketing channels and you need to monitor their data in one dashboard, use Klipfolio. It has 4 pricing plans that require you to pay a monthly subscription fee. These plans majorly differ based on the size of teams. 

Conclusion

The free market analysis tools is probably the most comprehensive and complete SEO study applications you can use to analyse anything on the internet. It comes loaded with free analytics tools so it doesn’t cost the earth to purchase and most of all is easy enough for anyone to use.

Leave a Comment