Competitive advantage is something that your company can absolutely create in today’s dynamic marketplace of numerous interconnecting niches. And your business can be especially successful in capturing competitive advantage if it learns how to really understand its consumer market in depth through an applied strategic planning initiative that’s based on heavy research.
The rewards of achieving this cannot be understated. By applying strategic planning and market research to your business in an in-depth and effective way, you will overcome your competitors, improve the heck out of your brand image and build customer loyalty in a way that dramatically grows and stabilizes your bottom line.
Luckily, there is a detailed new ebook from the people at Insights on Marketing on the web that covers exactly how to tame the strategic planning beast through a step by step process that results in better understanding of your customers, advantage over your competitors and sales success above all.
Let’s summarize some of the key themes.
Strategic Planning in a Nutshell
In basic terms, strategic planning, as covered in the book, revolves around using intensive research to gain insights about your market, competitors and most importantly your customers so that you can build a strategic plan which keeps you ahead of the curve in terms of the services and advantages you offer as a brand.
Strategic planning means asking yourself some very serious questions about where your company is going and how it plans to get there, and then forming a plan for achieving those goals by staying informed and ahead of the game.
The Value of Researching your Customers
This is where the value of researching your customers comes into the picture. As the strategic planning ebook explains in detail, there are many facets to the research your business will need to do if it wants to create an effective strategic plan. However, the most crucial component of this data gathering will involve finding out as much as possible about your customers so that you can really learn what drives their desires, wants and passions.
This process starts off with something called a consumer insights audit, in which you’ll seek to understand some of the following about your target consumers:
- their habits
- Professional information as well as marriage and family status
- Interests, affiliations and passions in their personal life
- What media and communications tools they most like to use
- Their awareness of ads and their habits around viewing them
- Their buying and browsing dynamics
- Their web surfing habits
- How they use your brand and how much awareness they have of you
- Perception of your brand and its image
Finding the Ideal Customer and Their Ideal Benefit
Through deeply targeted market research such as that described above, you can work towards reaching for what is arguably the holy grail of effective business marketing: finding your ideal customer and delivering to them their ideal benefit better than any competitor can.
This is the equivalent of a secret weapon in your business niche. Why? Because customers who see that you really understand what they want and are getting it delivered from you will be very loyal to your brand. Furthermore, they’ll spread the word on your behalf. This will give you an enormous strategic edge over competitors who fail to address their customers’ needs the way you can because of good research.
Don’t delay in taking a look through the Insights in Marketing ebook, there is some very detailed advice there that goes far beyond this summary in helping you make your business strategic and extremely competitive for the long term. Download the ebook here for free
About the Author: Matthew Zajechowski is an outreach manager for Digital Third Coast. Connect with him on Twitter and Google+.
