Is it worth considering expanding your offering or products to another market? Is there any interest in what we offer? Is the market already saturated with competitors that came before us?
Let’s explore how to evaluate a new market’s potential with tools you’re most likely already familiar with.
This article is written with the Chief Marketing Officer, Marketing Manager, and/or Head of E-commerce in mind. If something does not sound familiar, don’t hesitate to reach out.
Thoughts on doing market research
By performing keyword research with known tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or Semrush, we can identify the search volume for specific products or services in a specific market and language. We can understand the market demand by identifying how big of an online interest there is in what we offer.
We must remember that if we do poor keyword research, the outcome will also be a poor insight into the market demand. This is not something that should be taken lightly or be done quickly, but thoroughly. Choose your battles wisely. This activity is essential and lays the foundation for evaluating a new market.
Need to perform keyword research to understand the market demand but don’t know where to start? At Curamando, we have a whole team of online researchers who do this regularly.
And then finding out who the competition is
Competitor analysis follows keyword research just like mustard accompanies your bitterballens (yes, I am a new fan of this Dutch invention). Who is the dominant player on the market, and how many players are fighting for the customer’s attention? There might be fifteen competitors to fight online or three.
Assessing your competitors in a new market is more than finding out who is dominating the search results and getting the eyeballs on their products or services. We also need to assess the pricing set by the market and its current players to understand if we’ve got a financial case targeting this new market.
And if there are any cultural differences
When we understand the potential and competition, we have to figure out if there are any cultural and geographical differences. Not in terms of “in Sweden it is considered evil to eat ice cream” but more in terms of “there is a short summer period in Sweden, and they really do love their Liqorice Puck, can we compete with it?” etc.
The cultural differences could also mean we must adhere to new economic or legal requirements. Is a milk super tax applied in Sweden, which we do not apply in the Netherlands? Are there any market-specific regulations or data protection laws?
And yes, you guessed it, we also have a rock-solid Insights & Analytics team that can make sure you follow all the laws and share and store data – the legal way if you need that support.
After all this, we can start to calculate what the cost, in days and hours, would take for us to profit from this new market. But let’s cover that another time.
Interested to know if you should expand to a new market? Reach out.
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