5 Steps To Perform Your Market Analysis

To perform your market analysis, you need lots of information including information about your competitors, product, market environment, pricing, distribution, target market, and more.

I write about many of these topics on my blog, but specialize in market segmentation and gathering target market information. So I want to share with you how to do a free target market analysis that takes only minutes.

Step 1: You Need Demographics To Perform Your Market Analysis

First you must identify the best potential customers for what you sell. Then you need to know five major demographics for your target market:

1. Age provides generation and life stage characteristics.

2. Gender provides marketing appeals that differ between men and women.

3. Education provides social class and lifestyle characteristics.

4. Occupation is the best predictor of social class.

5. National origin, or race, provides characteristics that differ by culture.

Now this information is sometimes difficult to locate, particularly if your business is Internet based. But I recently discovered a site that provides age and gender demographics by keywords. You’ll be surprised at how many marketing characteristics you can learn from just these two demographics.

Why Knowing And Segmenting Your Market Is Important

I’ll cut to the chase.

Here’s why knowing your market is important:

• When you understand their fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations, you can offer them a well-suited solution to their problems or needs.
• When you give them what they want, the chances of them turning into your customers become much higher
• Because your have your intimate knowledge of them, you are in a better position to over-deliver value to them.
• With this, they will love you for it. And it will increase your customer loyalty towards you.

And why segmenting your market is crucial too:

• Customers respond better to specific offers
• Customers are happy because they get offers specific to their wants/needs.
• Again, when they are happy, they will stay longer with you.
• You make more profit!

These are a no-brainer right?

Now recently, I had the pleasure of communicating with Linda Morton via email. She is a Professor Emeritus from The University of Oklahoma.

And she is the author of Strategic Market Segmentation.

In her blog, you get the finer points of market segmentation strategies and how to discover what gets your customers ticking.