How to Identify New Market Opportunities For Your Business
To discover new market opportunities means to discover products or services that are potentially needed by consumers and are not being supplied by competitors.
A successful entrepreneur must keep an eye on market openings and adopt innovative ways to grow their startup. Pursuing new market opportunities is one way to stand out from the competition, expand your business, and increase revenue.
However, not all opportunities will have a positive impact on your business. Pursuing every market opening that comes your way can be dangerous to your business. It can lead to mismanagement, lower your team’s productivity, and ultimately hurt your ROI. You must know the company vision and evaluate your team’s capability to expand into new markets.
SMEs in Africa must understand how to identify new market opportunities that are worth pursuing. But how do you distinguish between market opportunities that are worth pursuing and those that aren’t?
The answer isn’t far-fetched. Carry out market research!
Explaining Market Research?
Market research reveals the attractiveness of new market opportunities before you invest in them. It involves collecting data and evaluating how your product or service will fare in new market territories. This will help you understand consumer habits, behaviors, needs, and purchasing power.
It will help you understand your competitors’ impact in the industry and how you can cause a disruption in the industry for the growth of your business. How can you go about analyzing a market? Here are 5 ways to identify new market opportunities to grow your business.
Let’s dive in!
Identifying New Market Opportunities
1. Study Existing Consumers
You can identify new market opportunities by simply studying your existing consumers. Listening to them can give you an insight into their needs and expectations. What are your consumers saying? Do they have any special needs and expectations? What is their feedback?
Identifying consumer needs will help you to know what products or services to offer in the future. Let’s say you sell baby products like diapers, toys, baby food, etc. you might want to ask, “What other products can I introduce as these babies get older?” You might want to introduce school bags or lunch boxes for kids. Studying your current consumers will help you spot potential market opportunities and identify products that are related to your business and valuable to your consumers.
2. Study the Competition
Studying your competition is just as important as studying your consumers. Do you want to diversify or introduce new products? Studying the competition can give you an upper hand in the market.
A study of their successes and failures can go a long way in discovering new market opportunities. What products/services are existing players offering? What products are they not offering? Are there gaps that your product can fill? Digging up this knowledge can help you spot the right market opportunity that can lead to the growth of your business.
3. Study International Markets
Your search might go beyond the local market and into the international market. Look for needs in other countries that are similar to the ones you have in your local market. Check for consumers who have similar or higher purchasing power as in your local market.
Several advantages come with going global. Some of which are higher revenue, talent acquisition, new investment opportunities, amongst others. Before branching out internationally, you will need to do your research on the country’s economy and what legal responsibilities you have. You may also need to hire more employees.
4. Study Societal Evolutions
Society keeps evolving and this can affect consumer preferences as well as their purchasing power. Consumers will always tilt to businesses or brands that meet their needs no matter how loyal they are to you. Studying societal evolutions will help you stay on top of consumer patterns and help you strategize on how to meet consumer needs.
Understanding changes in society and how it affects consumer needs will reveal new market opportunities for your business. For example, in today’s world, consumers are tilting towards environmentally friendly products like recycled packages. In countries like China, consumer needs are tilting towards luxury products.
5. Use Social Media
The impact of social media on business and marketing cannot be overemphasized. Social media can be used as a platform to get unedited opinions right from your consumers. Observing trends and discussions can help you understand what your audience thinks and needs.
You can engage with your audience one-on-one by carrying out polls, surveys, and studying feedback about your product and your competitors. This will help you understand their pain points and how to address them.
Conclusion
Gathering knowledge is the first and most important step to identifying new market opportunities for business growth. The second most important step is making business decisions with these findings. You must strive to reach out to the new demographic in this newfound market and seek to establish a rapport that your competition cannot easily match. Do you have questions or comments on SMEs in Africa? Kindly drop them in the comment section below!
