Analyzing Your Market

Before even jumping into running your business, you will also want to analyze your potential market share and competitors in your industry. This will give you a good idea of your company’s potential and what your competitors are doing to succeed. In this section we will go over how to get some great ideas from big companies in your industry and how to understand what it takes to scale in your industry.

Start off by making separate social media accounts or you can use your personal account to follow some of your biggest and most successful competitors. Look at what they are doing on social media. Check out their websites, search for ads made by them on Google and most importantly, find out how they are driving most of the traffic to their business. Look at what keywords they rank for on Google by using a tool like ahrefs.com. Check what they are charging for their products and services by going on their site or calling them to ask. Make sure that you know everything you can find out in a day about your industry before getting started with your business.

Once you have a good understanding of what your competitors are doing you will use this information to try to fill a void in your industry. Maybe your competitors are too expensive, maybe they lack social media presence, maybe they take too long to get their services done or they have bad customer service and reviews. Whatever it is, you should use your research to find something you can focus on in order to set your business apart from the big guys. My favorite way to do this personally is by finding aspects of marketing that big brands are not taking advantage of. Many industries are still not making use of short form content platforms like Tik-Tok and Instagram Reels. Many industries are not using AI to create great graphics and enhance organic SEO. Check out our sections on marketing to get some good ideas on how to use marketing to separate your business from everybody else.

Now that you have an idea on how you can differentiate your business in your industry, it is time to analyze your market and get an idea of how much of that market you can carve out for yourself. This will give you much clearer goals and allow you to set realistic milestones for your brand. The first thing you want to do is determine where your potential customers are and how many there are, or the total dollar amount of business being done in your market. If you are a restaurant, then you will probably be looking at people in a 20-minute radius of your location. If you are an online business, then your potential could be the entire world. Take some time to look up the population in the areas where you are doing business and search up the total number of customers for your industry each year as well as averages in your area if applicable. You can even go to competitors and pick their brains if you do it in a sneaky way. You can tell them you are doing a report on the industry and message them online or you can find a friend of a friend that works for a successful business in your industry to try to learn more about their numbers and your potential. Once you do find out the total market value for your business, analyze the number of competitors you have and try to determine how many of their customers you could take on and how many new customers you could create based on the people in your market. If I had a pizza shop in Manhattan for example, I would note that there are about 65 million visitors in Manhattan every year and 1.69 million residents. One way we could estimate our market share is to choose a percentage of these people that we plan to make customers, but these are pretty much made up numbers in my opinion even though many companies do projections like this. It is better to do research on the total amount of pizza being sold in Manhattan each year and use this number to determine a more realistic market share for your company.

Once you have an idea on how many customers there are for the taking, it is time to create a marketing plan that will realistically lead you to obtaining that number of customers over time. Come up with a plan and a road map that will track your business goals over time based on the numbers you have found. To learn more about how you can do this be sure to check out our marketing section as well as our section on how to make a pitch deck to learn more about market analysis and milestone creation.