What are marketing opportunities and how to identify them? A marketing opportunity is a sales-responsible lead that has been identified to be in need of your good or service

A marketing opportunity is a sales-responsible lead that has been identified to be in need of your good or service.

The sales representative shall decide if there is an opportunity to sell to that person or corporation. Usually, the sales representative must decide if the prospects have the budget, the need, and the authority to purchase our product or service.

What is the role of a marketing opportunity?

Marketing opportunity development is a vital bottom-of-funnel indicator for B2B companies. The more options your company offers, the more buyers and profits you are expected to close.

Sustaining productivity is never a certainty in today’s business environment. Technological and scientific developments shorten product and service life cycles, market models shift and new entrants arise from outside the industry.

This persistent uncertainty makes it important to search for new market prospects. In this article, we will detail nine ways to find market opportunities for business development.

Firstly, you need to identify a structure to help you find opportunities. To achieve this, it is important to recognize your company’s market and have information on the tools, strengths, and skills of your business.

When you have a clear idea of the company’s priorities and fields of specialization, the next step is to evaluate the market and determine customer demands and how businesses are addressing them now.

In order to recognize potential prospects, the business model as a whole must be measured by defining customers and businesses and other considerations such as brand value ideas, direct and indirect rivals, supply chains, current legislation, and the general climate.

Let’s discuss how to evaluate these variables in depth below.

9 effective ways of identifying marketing opportunity

1. Understanding of the Marketing opportunity.

Knowledge of the existence and attractiveness of every potential includes a perception of the market as a whole. For eg, asking questions like:

• What economic factors are driving or restraining consumer demand, as well as the foundational pillars of the industry as a whole?
• What are the attributes that are unique to the company in question?
• Will the organization have the tools (talent, experience, time, etc.) to get the job done?

2. Segmentation of consumers

In order to understand the demand, you must recognize groups of customers that share similar characteristics. These variables can include “hard” variables such as age, sex, place of birth, educational background, profession, and level of income, or “soft” parameters such as lifestyle, behaviors, beliefs, and buying motives.

Hard variables may help to predict the number of possible clients a company might have. For example, the maker of diapers should recognize how many children under three years of age live in a particular country as well as the birth rate.

Soft variables may help to define motivations that contribute to buying choices, like price, reputation, ease, resilience, and style.

3. Analysis of the buying situation

Buying situations must also be analyzed in order to find prospects for growth. Questions to pose while analyzing the purchasing analysis are as follows:

• When are consumers buying our product or service?
• When do they need our product or service?
• Where are the people making the purchase?
• How are they paying?

Looking at sales networks, payment systems, and all other situations that require purchase decisions, you can learn how customers are shopping and how you can put the goods better.

New consumers could be willing to offer new purchasing alternatives. For eg, vending machines selling snacks such as yogurt and juices have been installed in the Santiago de Chile subway tunnels, encouraging on-the-go use.

Another factor that needs to be considered is the recognition of various forms of payment. Amazon, for example, has recently introduced Amazon Cash across the Us, allowing shoppers without credit cards to buy online by transferring credits to their private Amazon accounts.

4. Direct analysis of competition

In addition to analyzing demand and buying conditions, it is important to analyze supply. Knowing the existing players in the market where you participate or compete is critical when determining the opportunities. The relevant questions, in this case, are as follows:

• What are the products and services of our business that are growing more and why?
• What’s their business model?
• What sort of comparative benefit do we have over them?

For instance, SKY airline, operating in the Chilean market against an especially well-positioned brand such as LAN, found that there was a potential to distinguish itself from a low-cost model that had not appeared in Chile before then.

SKY reduced its expenses by removing free food and drinks for all passengers on flights and lowering its prices for tickets. This helped the airline boost its customer share from 10 percent in 2008 to 20 percent in 2017, according to Euromonitor.

5. Indirect analysis of competitors

Opportunities may also be defined by the study of alternative markets. For example, due to the decline in air fares, airlines could explore opportunities in the market segments currently served by other modes of transport.

Air carriers should study how many passengers ride on long-distance busses and trains, which paths are more in demand, how much passengers pay for their fares, what is the occupation rate of long-distance busses and trains, and what is required to convince the present commuter on busses or trains to opt to fly by air instead.

This method of research helps to create competitive advantages over indirect rivals and offers insight into potential opportunities for development.

6. Review of additional goods and facilities

Businesses should track the success of the goods of other companies, which are comparable to their own. For example, a packaging company should track the selling of goods that might possibly be packed, while a coffee machine company should gain information into the evolution of various forms of coffee sales. Trends in competitive markets should be taken into consideration when making a financial decision

7. Study the other industries

In certain cases, the goal of corporations is not to continue to work within the manufacturing field, but to broaden a particular market concept or ideology. For example, the British business Easy Group has begun to increase the occupancy rate of trips with the airline Easy Jet.

Easy realized that it was better to sell a seat at a cheaper price than not to sell it at all. Easy Jet decided on a rate control model that would rely on the utilization rate of the flights and the time left before the day of the trip. In this business model, it was able to increase the occupancy volume.

Easy adapted the same concept to the cinemas when he produced Easy Cinema and then busses for Easy Bus. In any scenario, it is important to think first about competition in order to penetrate a new industry: sector sizes, market positions, growth rates, unit costs, per capita revenues, and marketing strategy.

8. Study of international economies

When a business exists in a developed or saturated market, discovering other countries can give rise to increased opportunities. Markets in various countries are increasing at different paces for a variety of reasons, including differences in the degree of economic growth and local behaviors.

Getting details on the scale of the competition and rivals in other countries can help to estimate the value of the company. In addition to retail sales, you should also investigate what occurs in more developed economies in terms of usage trends. For instance:

• Howe many people use mobile to pay for their purchases?
• What is the market position of private labels in a given industry?

Responses to these questions in more developed nations may serve as measures of the potential indicators have in their own countries. On the other hand, watching what happens around the world could lead to new products or services already lacking in your current market.

9. Study of environmental factors

By this we mean market climate variables and, broadly speaking, they can be categorized into six categories:

• Technological progress
• Scientific developments
• Regulation of the Government
• Trade management
• Social and Cultural Values
• Economic change

So, how are these possibilities unlocked? Using technical advances as an example, the proliferation of smartphones in recent years has caused businesses like Uber and Airbnb to conquer their markets. If they hadn’t proactively found and filled the void, they wouldn’t have been where they are today; anyone else would have beaten them.

Alternative means of marketing

Businesses are constantly searching for innovative and different ways of marketing and selling their goods. The buying of goods from a retailer or supplier is the oldest and most popular method of delivery. Non-store retailing is a retail practice separate from the conventional store.

However, with dramatic developments in mobile media and the growth of the ‘superhighway,’ advertisers are now using electronic ads.

Two of the fastest-growing approaches are telemarketing and internet marketing.

1. Telemarketing–

This is the utilization of mobile phones or telephones to make a deal.  This style of advertisement tends to reach those customers who are home throughout the day where the bid for something free induces the customer to buy the commodity.

2. Interactive Technologies and Digital Marketing–

A current study shows that companies are turning away from the handset and to the internet for online contact.

It is reasonably easy and affordable for any company to acquire a domain name and a website and to start selling its goods on the Internet. Online shopping, though still in its early stages of growth, provides a range of fascinating marketing strategies.

It is just a matter of customers accessing shopping catalogs through the Internet, choosing a product, punching in their information, and getting the item shipped the next day.

Final Words

Consumer segmentation, buying decisions, direct and indirect rivals, complementary goods and services, business, international markets, and environmental research are the eight forms of analysis that can allow your company to find potential market opportunities.

Using a wide spectrum of research will help the company achieve a holistic view of the possibilities and help you build long-term strategic business strategies. When new opportunities have been identified, businesses must work rapidly to implement a strategy. It is important to build a value proposition, schedule the marketing chain, and forecast expenses, sales, cash flows, and funding needs.

Not all of the market opportunities found will work, but experimenting will offer responses to each other’s potential.