The Importance of Conducting Marketing Analysis

Irrespective of the business and market size, conducting a holistic marketing analysis at a regular interval is a thing all business owners must adopt. This will provide knowledge of the consumer need for a product or service the business is offering to the public.

Conducting a marketing analysis means to determine the trends within a market and to understand the need of introducing a new product or redesigning an existing product to meet the needs of the consumers.

As a business owner, gathering of market data should be an ongoing process in order to be successful. Market situation changes from time to time. Therefore, the need to revisit previous strategies is important.

To get a clearer understanding of the importance of marketing analysis, it is neccessary to briefly describe what it really means.

What is marketing analysis?

Marketing analysis is the process of monitoring and evaluating market trends. In short, the process of this analysis is aimed at determining suitability of products or services within a specified market and how the product can be sold.

Marketing analysis also focuses on the behaviour of consumers in order to determine their pattern of buying activities.

For more, check out this interesting book: New Methods of Market Research and Analysis

Importance of conducting a marketing analysis

Marketing analysis is important because it give you the ability to uncover opportunities within a market; to know what you customers think of your products; improves your communication and messaging platforms with your customers.

In fact, marketing analysis is one of the key methods of improving customer satisfaction and knowing what factors affect your marketing strategies. Here is a list of most notably reasons for conducting a marketing analysis.

• Understanding of the market and customers
• Understanding of the value proposition of the product being offered
• To understand consumer needs for the company’s product and price settings
• Knowing the promotional ad or message to be used
• Knowing the channel of distribution
• Knowing what opportunities exist within the market

How does marketing analysis differ from market analysis?

As the sub-title denotes, how do these two terms differ from each other? Inferring from the word ‘market’ or ‘marketing,’ a layman may wonder what the heck is the difference. Well, marketing analysis is like a subset of market analysis.

These are two different terminologies. Due to the closeness in meaning, there may be a little bit of confusion when trying to differentiate these terms. After all, it is all about gathering data within a target market.

Indeed, data gathering is the basis of both. However, the type of data to be gathered depends on the nature of the analysis. The analysis can either be holistic or limited in scope. A better illustration of how these terms differ is shown on the figure below.

Unlike market analysis that analyses the condition of a market as a whole, marketing analysis focuses only on the marketing part. But the scope of the whole analyses or segment of the analyses depends on the business or industry being studied.

Read How to Conduct A Market Analysis to learn more. It is also possible to select segment that is relevant to the business goal rather than doing the whole analysis. Again, marketing analysis is done based on the company’s needs.

Conducting a marketing analysis

With the changing attitude of customers and the growth in economic diversity, having an in-depth knowledge of how your market operates is crucial.

Ideally, doing a marketing analysis is a systematic manner of gathering intelligence for business development in the area of marketing of your company’s products or services. This ensures that marketing strategies perform according to expectations.

Depending on your business goals, here are the key elements to carrying out a marketing analysis.

• Analysis of the market and target customers: Although marketing analysis has a broader scope, it can be narrowed down to specific targets. In that sense, the analysis has to be focused.
• This means you need to conduct this analysis on specific market and customers. This group of customers will become the target of your ads and promotional messages.
• Product and price analysis: This aspect deals with the feasibility of the product in a new market or the improvement of products in an existing market. Use the analysis to determine what your customers think of your product, evaluate the data, and find improvement.
• And for the price, it should be set according to the buying capabilities of your target customers. Although there are several elements to consider when determining price, it can also be done using these three pricing scheme.
• Advertising analysis: Advertisement is the process of creating awareness of your business, products or service through ads. Advertisement can either be displayed online or offline.
• An effective ad prompts potential customers to take action. For the analysis, you need to determine how your ad are performing in terms of click if online, and the number of response from people if offline.
• Sales analysis: For already existing products, the sales analysis is what will assist you in uncovering valuable data about your prices either by adjusting them or offering discounts. This analysis could also lead to a complete scrap of products that are not bringing in revenue.
• For robust ways of doing a sales report, check out this step-by-step sales report. It may be useful to apply it when doing your analysis.
• Promotion analysis: Promotional analysis is a technique used in evaluating the performance of promotional offers. Usually, promotion lasts for a short period of time and it is seasonal.
• Doing this analysis provides understanding of the past promotions, which can be used for improving future promotions. More specifically, promotion analysis is used to determine the impact of promotion on sales and the attitude of customers towards reduced prices.
• Distribution channel: One of the strongest marketing strategies is to plan how to locate and connect with customers. As part of the analysis, determine what channels will be used in distributing your products or services to your potential customers.
• Distribution of products can either be directly from your own warehouse / store or through a middleman.

For more, check out this interesting book: New Methods of Market Research and Analysis

Effective marketing analysis can help company avoid mistakes and overcome any possible problem about a company’s marketing strategies.

There are several marketing analysis tools available to support business owners or Marketing Analysts smoothly when conducting analysis for business development. Look into these tools and see which ones will best serve your interest.

If you are interested in my services, do check out what I do. And in case of any questions, please feel free to send a message. I will be glad to assist in any way I can.