Market trends in a business plan are essential information that shares where your company sits in the broader picture of your industry. Your business plan should demonstrate why your business is a viable show where you fit in the market and what clients you serve. Exploring what the market looks like is a smart business move when starting out.
What are Market Trends?
Market trends are the direction changes of a specific industry and can be affected by customer behaviors or developing technology. Take the mobile phone industry, for instance; as technology has enhanced over the last twenty years, consumers have shifted from bulky handsets to slimmer smartphones that can do everything a computer can. Consumers have even gone back to the fashion of flip phones now that technology has allowed a bigger screen that can be folded to save space. This is a good example where both customer demand and technology have affected the direction of the industry.
Recognizing these trends when running a business ensures that you remain in the same way as the industry itself, moving with customer needs and adjusting your business as the sector and technology development. Ignoring market trends in the long term could mean you are left behind by customers, as they may move to companies that meet their needs more.
Why do I Need Market Trends in My Business Strategy?
Your market trend research should be part of a wider market analysis in your business strategy. Understanding where you fit in an industry and what differentiates your company from competitors will help you shape everything from your product to marketing and pricing plans.
It’s essential to focus on trends in this process so you can understand what appeals to your target audience. By analyzing the market trends and landscape, you will be able to serve your customers better. Later on, it will also feed into your marketing messaging and content design strategy. A market and trend analysis should be both quantitative and qualitative. Trends will fit into both types of research, and you should be able to find data and non-numerical data to support your examination of trends when writing your business plan. It’s essential to remember that a business plan is not set in stone. It can be a document that you frequently update to reflect your company and industry changes.
How to Keep up with Market Trends
Keeping pace in a fast-changing market is not simple– after all, you’ve got a business to run. Using social media and subscribing to relevant industry emails make it simpler to get the data you need. Doing this will let you stay on top of market trends to include in your initial business plan and more long-term future planning.
Follow influencers in your industry to see what they speak about and how they produce content for the audience that you serve. This will give you an opinion of what resonates with your target customers when it comes to content and the structure of content the influencer tends to use.
Read relevant publications in your sector to discover what is making headlines. Online blogs or magazines that share up-to-date ideas and thought leadership would help you stay on the pulse of what is essential to the industry. Reading detailed research reports can be time-consuming but give you a fair overview of the industry’s current state and any new developments. You can then update your business strategy to track the trends from any data you’ve seen.
