Market Awareness

Market Awareness: Gain Visibility Into Your Competition and Stay One Step Ahead

In an ever-changing market, keeping track of your competitors and your industry should be standard practice for any business. This information is typically referred to as market awareness or market intelligence.

Having this data on-hand about your competition and the goings on of the market allows you to act quickly and rationally in the event of an emergency—or an opportunity. By gathering and analyzing data about your market, you can gain valuable insights that allow you to make data-driven decisions. Understanding your market is invaluable and is a sure way to gain an advantage over the competition and propel your business further toward success.

In fact, according to a report generated by Impact, companies that update their intelligence on a daily or weekly basis are twice as likely to see positive revenue impacts than those that update quarterly to yearly.

With this data in mind, it's easy to see how market intelligence can provide a competitive advantage when used correctly. But how do you begin collecting the right data, and what do you do with it once you have it?

What is Market Awareness?

Market awareness uses multiple different sources to create a clear, accurate, and detailed picture of your business' existing market. This includes analysis of industry trends, consumer insights, competitive intelligence, pricing and sales information, and any prominent challenges within the market.

Data can be gathered from many different sources, including internally conducted research, trade journals, articles, customer surveys, competitor pages, and more. The key is taking the relevant data found and using it to conduct thorough analysis in order to provide businesses with all the data necessary to stay competitive and successful within the market.

Market Awareness Strategies

Market awareness should be used to answer any potential questions about your customers and competitors so that you can optimize strategies and meet your goals. This includes questions such as:

  • Do your company goals align with the current market?
  • Is your current market the best fit for your brand? Are there other markets or niches you could benefit from?
  • What are competitors doing that you aren't? Is it working for them?
  • Where is the best place for you to devote your resources?
  • What do your ideal customers look like? What are their buying patterns?

All of these questions and more can be answered with thorough market awareness data gathering and analysis.

Businesses use this type of market intelligence to make improvements in multiple areas, such as:

Brand Positioning

Market awareness can help you define your position in the market by providing you with competitor data and information on the wants and needs of your customers. This allows you to develop a stance that sets you apart from other brands, creating a position that's uniquely yours.

Competitive Analysis

Use your market awareness to perform a competitive analysis on your biggest competitors. Where do they excel? What are their weaknesses? How do they function and perform differently than you?

A competitive analysis can help you keep an eye on opposing brands and plan a strategy to stay one step ahead. This data can even help you to identify possible areas for new market expansion.

Investment Risk

With market awareness analytics, you can aptly calculate the risk involved with projects like adding new products or services.

To minimize the risk involved, you need to have a clear view of what already exists in the market and what pain points shoppers are still experiencing.

Types of Competitive Intelligence Tools

The nature of gathering market intelligence is that it can quickly consume a lot of your resources if you want to stay up to date. This is especially true for smaller businesses who have fewer expendable personnel.

Luckily, there are many different kinds of tools available to help you gather, analyze, and store your competitive intelligence data. Such as:

Customer Interviews

Companies often forget that one of their biggest resources for gathering data is the customers that are already interacting with and purchasing from their company.

Consider conducting face-to-face or phone interviews with current customers in order to gain their perspective on different aspects of your business. This gives shoppers the unique ability to share their honest opinions with you directly, which can be an inexpensive way for your business to gather invaluable information.

Your sales team in particular can be especially helpful with this strategy as they already speak regularly with customers.

Surveys

If you're focused on gathering unbiased, 100 percent honest feedback, then surveys are another possible strategy for gathering market intelligence from shoppers.

Surveys allow you to pose whatever carefully crafted questions you want to your customers and often make shoppers feel much less pressured and more at-ease about their responses.

As a bonus, this method is also generally very inexpensive. You can either send out an online survey using a third-party like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or Typeform, or you can include a link in their printed or emailed receipt.

In-House Teams

Some larger businesses can afford to create dedicated teams that focus specifically on gathering market awareness data and performing analysis. Specialists can provide a lot of benefits with this strategy as they bring a nuanced view of the market and are capable of catering research toward your brand's specific needs.

Generally, these teams will gather data by meeting with manufacturers, distributors, and anyone else involved with your product creation and distribution.

The obvious downside to this method is that it's a big sink in resources and most businesses can't afford to allocate that kind of manpower.

Market Awareness Software

Software as a Service (SaaS) products like Wiser's own Market Intelligence are another method of gathering data.

These services can provide you with all of the market awareness data you need without your team ever needing to lift a finger. This leaves your workers free to focus their efforts and energy on other projects without having to worry about staying on top of the latest competitive trends.

Conclusion

Market awareness can provide great insights into your industry and highlight areas for improvement and growth within your business. But it's only a useful tool if the information you gather is accurate and up to date.

Can you say with confidence what is going on with the competition, prices, and assortment across websites and marketplaces at any given moment? If not, consider a holistic approach to market intelligence to build effective eCommerce strategies.

Wiser's Market Awareness solution provides insights into many different aspects of your competition, including:

  • Price Indexing - See how your prices compare across competitors and categories you care about with a visual heatmap.
  • Catalog Intelligence - Compare your catalog to the competition at the SKU-level with a configurable dashboard.
  • Competitive Pricing - Improve your understanding of the market with matrices that highlight pricing, promotions, ratings, and reviews.
  • Live Price-Check - Clearly understand your market landscape and activities on retailer pages with an intuitive and easy-to-use plug-in.

Don’t let a lack of eCommerce data stop you from selling more and increasing your profit margins. Instead, use Wiser’s dashboard to monitor your product catalog, compare prices to competitors, create custom filters, and much more.

On the surface, data collection and analysis can seem like a real hassle. But, with Wiser, actionable insights are one conversation away.

Contact Wiser today to learn more about how we can help you improve your market awareness and make data-driven decisions quickly and confidently.

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