Written by Jim Dunbar, IMEC Marketing Coordinator
How much to do you know about your current market position? How are you gaining knowledge about the marketplace to launch a new product? What about expanding your current product line into a new market? Maybe you even want to diversify into several new markets. There are numerous reasons you should know your current and future marketplaces and they are enormously beneficial to the health and growth of your business.
Before a single decision is made as to what market(s) you want to break into, proper vetting of your own market position is a must and sometimes the hardest to do. It’s hard to justify the expense of dedicating employees’ time or hiring outside help to look into a market where you have been successful for years. Knowing where your bread is buttered is perhaps the most prudent step to take in your growth plans. This now begs the questions, “Where do I begin and how do I get the right information?”
An industry report is an analysis tool that simplifies your understanding of your current market position relative to what other companies in that same field are producing. Each report consists of key statistics and analysis on market characteristics, operating conditions, current and forecast performance, and major industry participants. Understanding the forces at work in the overall industry, related markets and economy is an extremely important component of an effective growth strategy.
Using a tool, like an industry report, will give you the insight to confidently engage in a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis that will help guide your company’s future. This is a vital step, as knowing the marketplace, customers, potential new entrants, suppliers and industry leaders will play a key role in how you set your growth plans and influence your company’s competitive future into new markets.
By having all this information on specific industries at your fingertips, it allows you to compare apples to apples, giving you a baseline of how to measure yourself against the industry competition. From there you are now able to make a more accurate and realistic set of future expectations.
Reach out to your local IMEC representative to request a complimentary industry report. Your local representative’s contact information can be found here: http://www.imec.org/Staff-Listing.cfm
IMEC has assisted many companies in Illinois in developing their growth strategies. Typically, we support the company by facilitating meetings and discussions, asking the “outsider” questions that often reveal new directions, challenging strategies and ideas based on our extensive knowledge of industries, and collecting third party information on clients or markets to make decision-making more effective. If you’d like to have IMEC bring our expertise into your growth planning discussions, call us today at 1-888-806-4632.
