Essential Steps to Take for Conducting Market Analysis

For any business, doing enough market research is crucial in reaching the right people, standing out from the competition, and succeeding in the market.

Conducting a market analysis should be your top priority and this blog will cover how to conduct one effectively.

Moreover, introduce UPDF as a tool that can help you organize various PDF files of market research files you have accumulated during the study.

Let’s dive straight in to learn more.

Part 1. What is Market Analysis?

A market analysis is a research process where you carefully study the market of a particular industry. This includes learning about:

• Market value
• Potential customer segments
• Target market’s buying habits and patterns
• Names of major competitors
• Competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
• The volume of interested customers

Conducting market analysis helps deliver many benefits such as reducing business-related risks, discovering emerging trends, projecting revenue potential, understanding certain products and services to offer, setting benchmarks, and staying ahead of the market expectations.

When it comes to its cons, market analysis can be a costly process, often time-consuming, and might require a few helping hands to conduct an in-depth analysis.

Part 2. How to Conduct Market Analysis?

Now, let’s go through step-by-step how to conduct a market analysis properly.

1. Study the industry

The first step is to conduct an industrial overview—meaning to study the specific industry you’re getting into to understand the bigger picture.

This step includes learning more about how many businesses are present in this particular industry, the size of the market, the number of potential customers it has, the revenue this industry generates, opportunities, external threats, and different standards and regulations involved within the industry.

Remember that there will be a lot of documents downloaded for your research. Hence, make sure to organize files neatly using reliable document management software.

2. Research the competition

The second step is to learn more about the competition. This includes learning the well-known brands and companies in the industry, knowing their pricing strategies, unique selling propositions, technologies, and tools they use, and learning how they’re performing in the market.

In this step, you will identify two types of competitors—direct and indirect. Direct competitors are businesses that offer similar products and services as you. Whereas, indirect competitors are businesses that provide alternate products or services that solve the same problems you are trying to solve.

3. Define the target market

The next step is to define the target market—which is the most critical section of your industry. These are basically the ideal customers that you need to target and sell your products and services to.

In this step, you will carry out an analysis to learn your target market size, detailed demographics (such as age, gender, income, and education), geographical locations, psychographics, and consumer behavioral trends.

4. Identify gaps in the market

Learning about the industry, the target market, and your competitors, gives you room to identify any gaps in the market. Market gaps are basically pain points or needs of your target market that haven’t been addressed or fulfilled by other competitors.

This includes going through your research findings again and studying how the emerging trends can lead to a new pain point that needs to be addressed, asking customers directly what their pain points are, and getting insights on a solution that can help address their problem.

With the help of your team, you can gather data and responses from the target market, and use document collaboration tools to narrow down the market gap and opportunities.

Learn More About Document Collaboration Tool - UPDF Cloud

5. Analyze barriers to entry

The next step in your market analysis and which is usually overlooked is identifying the barriers to entry. This means knowing the conditions and factors that would inhibit you from entering and succeeding in this market.

For example, knowing barriers to entry includes learning about how much startup costs it takes to succeed in the market, the political, economic, legal, and social factors that affect the market, the purchasing power of competitors, suppliers, and consumers, and how many new competitors are entering the market frequently.

6. Plan a sales forecast

The last step in your market analysis involves creating a sales forecast plan where you estimate the future sales potential your business can make—-by taking in all the market conditions and research you have done.

This includes knowing the products and services you are going to sell, the pricing strategy you will implement, and estimating the costs behind production and distribution. You can organize all information and create your brand presentation, so you can show your work to others.

Part 3. PDF Tool to Organize Your Market Research Findings

After learning the steps to conduct an effective market analysis, you can probably tell that there are going to be a lot of research studies, files, reports, and many other materials involved throughout this process.

And most of them are going to be PDF files. This is where UPDF can help you organize all your PDF files of your market research findings and have them assessed properly by you and your research team.

UPDF is a tool that helps you to:

• Import and export PDF files with ease.
• Scan paper documents with its OCR feature and digitize documents.
• Annotate sections in your research files so that you highlight important findings and data.
• Organize PDF files and pages for a better reading view experience.
• Share files with others instantly using PDF links or send them directly in their mail.
• Encrypt PDFs before sharing.
• Make PDF files look like presentations and use the Presenter View to present your findings.

To present your market analysis data in an interesting way, UPDF has its template library where you can pick the desired presentation template to add your market research findings and show it to others.

Let’s go through each step to learn how you can do that.

• Download and Install UPDF on your PC.

• Browse the template library and preview any presentation template that suits your liking.
• Then, click Edit with UPDF to download and edit your template using UPDF.
• After editing and saving the template locally, you can share the PDF link with others by clicking the Share this file with others button on the right-hand side panel. You can also do the same for sharing any PDF research files you save on your PC and access with UPDF.

Use Your Market Analysis Findings to Your Advantage…

After conducting and organizing your market analysis findings, it’s time to make things kick off for your business.

Use UPDF templates to present your market research findings in a presentable manner and use your analysis to full effect by devising strategies that will make your business succeed.