Business success today depends on understanding what market trends are most prominent, what your customers need and what types of competitive strategies are the most effective. After all, there's nothing worse than spending precious resources launching a new product or service that ultimately flops in the marketplace.

Fortunately, advancing technology makes it possible to conduct competitive market research more rapidly than in the past. Let's explore how to conduct a market analysis efficiently, as well as strategies that facilitate quick learning of key market trends.

Conducting a Customer Needs Analysis

The first step in mastering market trends is getting to know your customers. You should use any information and feedback collected to divide your customers into segments. Segments should share a common characteristic (such as age or location) and be large enough to warrant individual marketing attention.

Within each segment, it's helpful to develop buyer profiles. Picturing your customer as a human being, you'll describe:

• their demographics and background,
• motivations and challenges,
• what they spend their lives doing,
• how they communicate with the businesses they patronize and
• the messages that are most likely to appeal to them.

Your last customer needs analysis step will be connecting each target buyer's needs to a product or service. Call out your benefits, why the target buyer would or would not choose you over a competitor. If there are holes, consider refining your offerings to better address critical customer pain points.

Tools for Competitive Market Research

You don't need to spend a fortune with a prestigious market research firm to gain valuable customer insights. There are a number of low-cost, time-efficient ways of examining market trends, many of which are online.

One go-to strategy is crowdsourcing. You can use social media or online surveys emailed to your database to collect feedback about what's working (or not) for your existing customers. Be sure to ask the tough questions, encourage honesty and reward customers for their participation via coupons, discounts or gift cards.

In some cases—and especially if you are developing a new product or service—you might want to access the larger market. Online services like GutCheck and UserTesting allow you to use targeting criteria like gender and income to ask a series of open and closed questions to millions of pre-qualified individuals. In addition to completed surveys, these tools can capture customer emotions via one-on-one video responses and can summarize the results so you don't have to sift through raw data.

You might also deduce market trends through the use of text analysis software. These tools help business owners gain insights from structured and unstructured text data using natural language processing (or a program's ability to process human speech patterns).

Text analysis software leverages data from a variety of sources including:

• public reviews,
• emails sent to your organization,
• surveys and
• phone transcripts.

It can then pull out key language patterns that get to the bottom of customer sentiment. As an example, Thematic gathers customer feedback from your existing data sources and, by distilling common themes, analyzes your best route to keeping customers. Similarly, Chattermill takes unstructured input and translates it into clear actions meant to improve customer experience. And best of all, you can automate many steps!

Of course, your market trends analysis isn't complete without competitor monitoring. If you're not sure how to find competitors of a company, search Google for your service and location, and compare and contrast the features and benefits on the company websites that appear.

 A number of paid tools also help with competitor monitoring, including SEMRush, which provides data about your current online performance as well as that of your competitors and helps you accurately assess the search terms leading to your company and competitors. A second option is SpyFu, which allows you to search for any competitor and download their keywords.

You don't need to spend a fortune with a prestigious market research firm to gain valuable customer insights. There are a number of low-cost, time-efficient ways of examining market trends, many of which are online.

While conducting a customer needs analysis and market trends research doesn't have to take over your life, it may still be worthwhile to hire an intern or freelancer to employ these strategies on your behalf. You should probably repeat your analyses annually; it can help you become more proficient at minimizing time spent analyzing market trends!

Read more articles on market research.

Photo: Getty Images