For any business to remain competitive, it is essential to understand the industry in detail. B2B market research provides insight into your competitors, customers, risks, and opportunities within your business.
While you might already be familiar with your market analysis to research funding requests, you also need to perform regular market analyses as it has their benefits. With it, you will understand marketplaces, and research helps identify the risks and opportunities.
The B2B Market Analysis
When you look at business-to-business market analysis, it helps you to make strategic decisions, like when making or wanting to market your business. Hence, it looks at your competitors, growth rate, market size, profitability, and more. So, it provides you with quantitative evaluations of the market. Here are the fundamental elements related to B2B market research:
- Economic Insights
- Customer Research
- Market Sizing
- Business Risk Analysis
- Competitor Identification
While these are only some elements, there are more, and the priorities vary by industry. Still, the B2B data gathered helps give you a deeper understanding of different factors that affect your organization’s bottom line.
B2B Business Customer Research
When it comes to the B2B marketing team, they need help to identify clients compared to their B2C counterparts. The reason is that B2B products or service appeals only to a limited customer base resulting from a low demand with higher prices.
When you look at B2C organizations, they often offer products for different people. Hence, consumer-facing businesses build profiles of the ideal customer based on age, gender, marital status, and more. But B2B cannot do the same as it is rarely a determining factor when identifying qualified leads.
Instead, the sales team needs to find businesses with a need for their services or goods and can afford them. Hence, these companies must rely on business information providers to help research their potential customers. Visit https://pmgco.com to learn more.
These databases comprise reports about how an organization performs financially, subsidiaries, with other firmographic information. Professional researchers, it goes a step further as they dig into corporate earning statements to help them understand what areas of the business are contracting or expanding.
B2B Competition Analysis
To craft a compelling value proposition, you must size up the major players in your industry. You do this by identifying your competition’s strengths to weaknesses to make strategic decisions for your resource allocation, pricing, promotions, and territory planning.
Here business information is essential as it helps identify customers to pull away from the competition. The information here is useful when looking at the threat posed by your B2B competition. First, you have the parent-to-subsidiary relationships followed by the sales territory.
Then there are the earnings, outstanding loan defaults, liens, or late payments. Lastly, you look at legal judgments and the recent news around that company. When you need competitive insights, it should not be only done around speculation, as you need the hard facts.
B2B Market Size
Determining the market size helps you with your sales potential with a given product or service. Whether you plan to launch new products or services or want to expand into another venture, you want actual data.
For example, you have a trucking company and developed a new way to refrigerate your tractor-trailers. So, to understand the size of your market, your management team will need to answer some questions that include:
- How many of your refrigerated trailers are currently in use?
- What is the average life expectancy of your refrigerated trailer?
- How many new refrigerated trailer models are purchased yearly?
Answering these questions takes work; you can get the answers using surveys, public financial documents, and government data to obtain figures. Hence, the market size you can express in units is how many refrigerated trailers are purchased. Or the dollars by looking at the total value of your sales.
Yet a B2B company also considers how much market share it could win. They look at the following:
- The business risk analysis as each business faces risks, and a comprehensive B2B market analysis will identify these challenges to provide contingency plans.
- They look at the financial risks from revenue to spending and how the company manages debts.
- Then you have your operational, compliance, technological, strategic, and reputation risks considered.
Still, each business faces different risks, from supply chain issues, and a decrease in foot traffic, to labor concerns. But looking at these risks, a successful organization also develops mitigation strategies to help minimize the damage. Hence, they know where to find added cash for unforeseen problems.
It Helps To Understand Your Economic Outlook
While you must be fully versed in your industry, you must also understand economic trends. For example, you need to know consumer spending data, employment numbers, and similar metrics to reach your expectations.
You can find economic data in different sources from your state to local government. In addition, there is the business media with valuable resources to help you understand your economic climate. So, as you can see, doing B2B market research and creating an analysis is time-consuming and needs attention to detail.
B2B Market Research: What is it?
Market research is a part of the market analysis, and it takes a closer look at your target markets to customers. As a result, it provides valuable information that helps you inform your sales to marketing teams to create the best strategies to resonate with buyers in the market. Hence, investing in a B2B market research professional can help you identify your market opportunities to threats. In addition, it enables you to understand your competitors to buyers and your market size to help identify trends.
What Information is Used for Market Research?
When you do B2B market research, it can include primary and secondary sources. The primary source can be communicating directly with clients or businesses in your target market by focusing on groups, surveys, or interviews. During the secondary research, you use public resources like company websites, financial reports, or analyst reports. As you can see, you need loads of tools and data, and best left to a professional.
