Speaker 1: Hi, everyone. It's Erica Olson with OnStrategy. Today we're talking about how to conduct a market analysis. Great strategy is built on understanding where your opportunities are, where you're going to grow, and that comes from looking at the blue ocean, where there's great opportunity and wide open potential, and the red ocean, where it's super competitive and maybe you don't want to venture into or get out of. A market analysis can be really complicated and really time consuming. I'm going to give you a quick breakdown on how to make it easy. That's what you expect. So let's jump in. First things first, it's all about the data, and if you don't have an understanding of what you're looking for, you could end up doing just a ton of data collection and not really get anywhere. We like to frame up all of our analyses in what questions are we trying to answer. These are some generic questions. You might want to build them out more deeply for your organization, but this will get you started. First things first, what's happening in your market or your industry? That's a pretty obvious question. Another way to think about it is what are the megatrends? What are those things that are actually going to be either helping you or holding you back and quite frankly, everybody in your industry? So what's happening? Megatrends. What's happening with your competitors? And really a nice way to think about it is when they're winning, why are they winning? And equally, when they're losing, why are they losing? Great market analysis. Really awesome. Take your top five competitors, dig in. What's happening with your customers? So what's happening with the ones that you're serving today and what new customers might be emerging based on what's happening with consumer trends, buying trends, et cetera? So what's happening with your customers? What are their needs and wants? Are there emerging things that you could step into that you could serve and other emerging customers that you could go get? And then last but certainly not least, looking a bit internal to understand how are you performing today in the markets that you're in and what opportunities might be presenting themselves either within those markets or adjacencies. Okay. So that's a nice frame. If I was doing this, I would literally get my WordDoc out and put these headers in and then I would go grab the data and start plugging data in. So what data are we collecting? Let's start with internal first. Look back three years. If you can grab it, that'd be amazing. If you have data from a profit and loss perspective by market or by product or by segment, that's magical. If you already have a three to five year forecast, let's grab that too because I will tell you how much you need to grow. If you're using this data to build it, then skip that. What's happening from your marketing? Where are we performing? Where are we not? Same thing with sales. Your staff, especially those that are out serving those customers frontline either from a sales perspective or a customer service perspective, great insights. These would be good questions to ask them, by the way. And then certainly all of your customer data. If you have customer survey data, let's bring it in. If you don't have it, go get it and or put it on the parking lot to go get. And you of course need external data. This is the part of the work that can be a little bit overwhelming, but here are some ideas of just buckets of data to go collect. Consumer data, labor data, economic data, supply chain data if you're in a product production business, local data for your region or regions that you serve. And of course the census is great place to get a lot of this as well as Statistica. That's another really great resource. So those are some of the free resources that we start with, including our industry associations and reports that they might have. A lot of this you can Google and then maybe you have a little bit of a budget to go buy some market research, which is always helpful. But net you need both, you need your internal data and your external data. So with that, again, big tip, get your framework set first, go get the data, populate it and determine what it's telling you. So with that, that's how you conduct a market analysis. Thank you for tuning in. Hit the like button, subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. We drop videos every Friday. Happy strategizing.