Written by April Glosser, Thrive Market Intelligence
Effective Market Monitoring can provide early warning of threats, advance notification of opportunities and deliver a significant advantage over your competitors.
Here is a quick 4-step process to begin Market Monitoring in it’s simplest form:
Determine Market Drivers
Market drivers are the forces that will drive the purchase of your products or services. For a company serving the agriculture industry, for example, drivers may include demand, crop prices, input costs, weather conditions, and regulation such as the farm bill. Compile a list of market drivers that will impact your business.
Search for Indicators
Look for current data that can provide advanced notification of a change in market direction. Keeping with the same agriculture example, indicators would include tractor sales, US drought map, and net farm income – just to mention a few.
Bring in the Data
Much of the available data is published on a monthly basis, although not all on the same day. To stay current, it is good practice to set Google alerts, subscribe to RSS feeds or set reminders to check data sources. Even better, use a personalized dashboard such as netvibes.com to collect recent industry news, report on rss feeds, and bookmark important websites.
Take Some Time
Set a time aside each month to review the data that you have collected. Share with others in the organization and determine whether actions items are necessary to address current or changing market conditions.
No need to wait until you can implement a robust Market Monitoring solution. Start today, with a few data points, and build on it as you go.
For more information about April and Thrive's competitive marketing solutions, please visit www.thrivemi.com
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Whether you are searching for growth through new customers, new products, or new markets, you need perspective and insight to drive decisions. Begin exploring how to use competitive intelligence to develop effective growth strategies rooted in data.
To learn more about growing your organization, or to work with April and IMEC, contact IMEC at 888-806-4632 or info@imec.org.
