In the last post I covered common examples of market trends such as changing customer needs. The post also mentioned tips to assist you in working out what market trends are significant to your market and small business.
Today we will look at ways to plan to take advantage of opportunities or protect your business against adverse market trends.
You can examine market trends at any time; however an ideal time is when you are developing your marketing plan for the year ahead. By conducting the analysis at this time you can make sure your marketing objectives, strategies and tactics take account of a positive or negative trend so you can continue to grow your small business.
Planning Tips:
- Look at whether the trend is going to affect the whole market or just a segment of the market. If one of the market segment you compete in will experience declining customer purchases consider investing your marketing efforts in the other segments that will not be affected
- If the trend in your market seems to be moving more heavily into discounted pricing,review your costs to see if you can reduce them to preserve your profit margin. Or you could focus more intensely on adding value to your key customers only for the coming year instead of following others in reducing your price to gain new customers
- If the demographics are changing eg. children staying at home longer does your business have services or products that might appeal to both the parents and children? Eg. If you are involved in providing financial advice and your current customers are “baby boomers” consider adding their children to your target market with the right mix of pricing, products and service options
- If customers in your target market are increasing their product usage in certain categories, perhaps you can plan to introduce larger pack sizes before your competitors
- When you are planning to take action with your marketing, it is a good idea not just to see what marketing tactics you can implement, but look at all aspects, eg. distribution, service delivery, communication, product or service offering etc
Do you have any tips on how you plan to take advantage of potential market trend opportunities or threats?
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