If you doubt why you should collect market insight systematically, here’s a list of solid reasons:
- Pick up trending topics in your communication
- Find inspiration for your product development
- Keep your educational material up-to-date
- Tailor products to upcoming market changes
- Spot chances for collaborations early on
- Find up-to-date triggers and hooks for sales conversations
- Gain insight from other markets and adapt it to yours
- Analyze and compare successful content patterns on different platforms – best practices for each channel
- Analyze successful communication patterns – how different channels play together
- Gain insight for your positioning
But we can’t settle with the list. Let’s dive in and take a closer look.
Only some ways to use market insight might be relevant to you. That’s okay. Find the ones that matter most to you and zero in on these. Only do what promises to move the needle.
Let’s get going with #1:
Pick up trending topics in your communication
They say that on the internet, every business becomes a media company.
And there’s quite some truth in that. Do you provide insightful content on your website? Maybe you even add new content from time to time? Do you post on social media using a business account? If so, you’re already in the middle of the game. You see: a part of your business is a media company.
That means you have to think about good content to publish. Because it’s not just for fun. It’s part of your business now. And to choose good topics, it helps to look at what’s trending.
What are your competitors talking about?
Your competitors are a good indicator of what’s relevant in the market. They pick up the topics they consider relevant, so there might be some truth to it. Follow their communication channels and watch out for trends. Then, you can consciously decide if you want to join in.
However, competitors tend to focus on communicating with a focus on their products. Thought leaders have a different approach.
What do thought leaders emphasize?
Thought leaders are being recognized as such because their communication is relatively neutral and not biased by specific products. They share a broad perspective on the topics they cover. Part of that is predicting the future. If they prove to be strong fortune tellers, they strengthen their position, and even more people turn to them to follow their direction.
That makes it easy for you to spot new topics. Just follow the thought leaders of your market. They know where the market is heading. If you listen to them, you get ideas for new topics constantly.
But remember the group that is most important in the market.
Problems potential customers talk about that you can address
The market’s customers are indeed the most critical group.
They spend the money to feed the market.
It’s mandatory to talk to them. But there’s more you can do. Find public channels where customers congregate to discuss their pains and needs. Start to listen there to expand your horizon beyond your customer base. You can also engage with them. But this is about learning from them, not about selling.
What you can learn here is gold. Pick up the market’s wording and struggles to promote respective solutions in your communication.
Find inspiration for your product development
Your product is fantastic, that’s for sure. 😉
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to improve or adapt to changing environments. Here’s what you can do:
Identify user needs your product doesn’t address yet
Listen to people complaining about existing products – not necessarily yours – or talking about needs and feature requests. You can learn a lot about their pains and ways to address them. If you understand what customers need, improving your product gets easier.
The best is to cross-check the insight you gain with your existing customers. Ask them for their opinion to assess the impact on your current business. Also, ask prospects if you have the chance to do so.
You can also listen to your competitor’s customers.
Think about ways to apply your competitors’ case studies to your product
Calling your competitors’ customers and asking them about their experience might be difficult. Luckily, there’s another helpful way: Check your competition’s case studies for relevant insight.
Yes, case studies are marketing. Keep that in mind.
But they also feature topics your competition considers most relevant about their offer. Gather that insight to analyze what could add value to your product.
If case studies are rare, there’s a more frequent type of communication.
Check if your competitors’ product announcements contain valuable ideas for your offer
Product updates are insightful because they emphasize what your competitor considers relevant. And they are concise because people want to avoid reading extensive product updates.
Take advantage of that.
Keep your educational material up-to-date
Outdated educational material is annoying.
People expect training material to be an insight into the latest knowledge.
If you’re charging a one-time fee for training or a recurring membership payment, your customers expect you to review and update your content as necessary.
Watching out for market changes helps you meet your customers’ expectations and surprise them with very recent insight. Use your findings to update
Even for videos or podcasts you can’t or don’t want to change, you can either update information in the notes or link to a different page that contains updates.
Be creative and show your visitors and customers that you care about staying up-to-date.
Tailor products to upcoming market changes
Your market will change. You don’t know when. But it will happen. And when change is due, it shouldn’t catch you off guard. So make sure you stay up to date to prepare for change as soon as it arises. Here’s how you can do it:
Respond early to upcoming regulation changes
The more regulated your market is, the more critical it is to watch regulation changes closely. You have to be aware if you’re affected yourself. And it can be a great chance if your customers are affected. Because if you’re among the first to respond to the changes, you can not only position yourself as an early mover.
You can even gain new customers looking for a solution. It’s no coincidence that change and chance are almost the same words. But you can still prepare for change, even if it’s not about regulation.
Identify topics where it’s worth building up expertise and positioning yourself as a thought leader and go-to expert
When there’s change on the horizon, people turn to experts for help. If you’re working as a freelancer for corporates of smaller businesses, you can craft offers tailored to upcoming changes. Corporations especially buy external expertise on the market to prepare for change.
If you’re early in the process, your customers might not yet be ready to buy. But they will notice that you’re an early adopter and turn to you when it’s time to get help. If you decide to integrate change-related offers, you also have to adapt your communication.
Pick up changes in your communication to underline the quality of your offer
Your communication should show your awareness and expertise outside your sales processes. Post about the changes you expect, explain the consequences for the market, and engage in discussions with other market players. That’s how you make yourself more visible without being salesy.
Try to develop long-form content about the topic and break it down into multiple pieces. You can also distribute different formats like text, video, and audio. Get a freelancer to support you with the process if you need additional resources. Change is a chance. Use it to your advantage.
Spot opportunities for collaborations early on
Even for videos or podcasts you can’t or don’t want to change, you can either update information in the notes or link to a different page that contains updates.
Engage with potential partners to position yourself
The Dream 100 concept usually focuses on sales, but you can adapt it to partnerships too. Follow the people or businesses you would most preferably partner with. Then, engage with their content to get on their radar. Focus on two things:
- Make them shine. You can ask questions they can reply to, showing their expertise and expressing your appreciation for their content and products.
- Add value. You can introducing an interesting perspective or facts that complement their content.
The idea is to show your expertise without talking about yourself. Make it about them but make it clear that you know what you’re talking about. You want to make yourself attractive without being pushy. At the same time, watch out for partnership opportunities.
Identify topics you can use to trigger partnership communication
While watching their content, look for topics to trigger partnership communication. What do these triggers look like? It can be
If there is an invisible link between your offers, find it; it can be an excellent hook for your partnership approach. And you can also make your partnership communication relatable to them.
Relate your partnership communication to their recent communication
If you talk about partnerships in the public, tailor your communication to the potential partners you’re currently after. It should align with your partnership strategy. But by relating your communication to their recent communication, you can increase the chances of connecting. This also increases your chances of being recognized as a potential partner yourself.
Find up-to-date triggers and hooks for sales conversations
Recent market updates can serve as perfect starters for your sales conversations. They are non-salesy and show that you’re up-to-date. Let’s see how you can use them to support your sales process.
Refer to mandatory changes to trigger sales conversations
These are the most robust conversation starters: Changes that will inevitably affect your prospects and customers. In this case, they will be most open to gaining up-to-date insight. It’s an educational conversation that you can tailor perfectly to your counterpart’s needs.
If your offer addresses the upcoming change, you can emphasize the challenges and sketch out the best ways to solve them. This will build authority and make them ask for a solution. And even if you want to sell them something unrelated, you can still position yourself as a guide. Show them that you can help them, and they will turn to you again to ask for your help.
But even with no mandatory changes, you can still find triggers for future sales conversations.
Reply to a prospect’s or customer’s communication and show how you can help
Refer to their recent communication when reaching out. No matter if they talk about a win, new products, or share their expertise. They talk about it and want their messages to be recognized. Show them that you noticed their content and dig deeper into the topic. You can ask questions, connect them to other people, refer to additional sources, or challenge their opinion with a different perspective.
In any case, you use their hook to start the conversation. Make it a valuable discussion for them to increase your status.
What if they don’t publish relevant content? We still got you covered …
Position yourself with reference to other market player’s updates
Pick up other market players’ content and talk about it. Adapt your conversation to the source and the topic:
Make it conversational, and listen to what they have to say. You can gain much insight that will help you assess your contact. And if you have the chance to prove your expertise, take it.
Gain insight from other markets and adapt it to yours
Not all markets change at the same time. Innovations appear in one market and spread to other areas over time. So, innovation might be unexpected in the first market but is more predictable in the following ones. Watch other fields that could be role models for change in your market. Here’s how you can utilize this insight:
Watch different business models and explain them to your market
From time to time, new business models arise. Adapt them to your market and figure out how they affect the way businesses work in the future. Modify the model according to your market’s needs and discuss your predictions in public to take thought leadership.
To gather relevant insight, watch markets of your interest and try to spot change. Follow innovation leaders and outstanding businesses to understand their predictions about future business models. Then answer the question: How will this affect my market? Business models often relate to technical innovations, so look out for them too.
Discuss technological innovations and their impact
Currently, ChatGPT is being discussed widely: A technical innovation in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) that could significantly impact the future of chatbots as it promises better language models for communication. Could this impact your market? If so, follow relevant sources talking about the topic.
I’m thinking of the thought leaders and businesses like OpenAI. Learn from their public communication to gain a good understanding. Be the first to translate these insights to your market’s language to become recognized for your expert knowledge. However, this is not about ChatGPT. It can be any other technological innovation that can potentially disrupt your market.
Help other market players prepare for the change; you will quickly earn their respect and appreciation. The don’ts will also be very insightful when looking at other markets.
Show bad practices and show how to avoid them
Traditional car manufacturers reacted slowly to the rise of electric mobility. They fell behind quickly and still need to catch up again to keep their strong position. Look for examples like these and conclude how not to behave in your market. Find similarities and differences. Discuss their impact on your industry.
To do so, having an eye on thought leaders is promising. They are most likely to reflect on their market’s behavior critically. This type of thinking is what you should adapt: Learning from other markets is smart, expands your horizon, and sets you up as a subject matter expert.
Analyze and compare successful content patterns on different platforms – best practices for each channel
To publish successfully on different content platforms, you should follow each platform’s rules. Some rules are explicit, but some are not. Taking a closer look at the patterns of successful content can help you craft more successful content yourself. Let’s take a look at how you can do that.
Learn from content that does well on your preferred platform
Let’s start with your preferred platform for publishing content. If you want to be more successful in followership, engagement, or lead generation, find similar accounts that do better than you. Follow them and analyze what they do differently. Look for differences in:
Try to find out what makes their content more successful. That’s what you can adapt for your content. But don’t just copy. Adapt it to your needs and find your own way. After improving your favorite platform, you can shift your focus to other platforms.
Analyze content patterns of your competitors on platforms you don’t use
You can also pick up successful content patterns from other platforms. Adapt them to your favorite platform. If you find similarities between your favorite platform and other platforms, consider publishing content on that platform too. You might cover them with a little extra effort.
And what if you find out you’re betting on the wrong platform? What if all other market players succeed more on a different platform than your favorite? In that case, it might be time to switch the platform.
Take a close look at the data and make a well-informed decision. The next step can be to systematize your content production.
Develop a content guide to facilitate your content creation process and improve content quality
After identifying your industry’s rules for successful content, you can put them in a content guide. This can be a checklist that explains how to craft successful content for your different platforms. Findings from your research can serve as best practices or illustrate the don’ts you want to emphasize.
You will also find new content patterns from time to time. Analyze them and add them to your existing content guide. It will evolve over time. And the truth is: You’ll never complete it. :-/
Whenever you want to add new platforms to your portfolio, start by developing a guide first so that you can publish successful content from the get-go.
Analyze successful communication patterns – how different channels play together
Each piece of content should be crafted well – according to the content guide we suggested in the previous section. Orchestrated content creation processes go a step further. They repurpose content and even relate content on the different platforms to each other.
That doesn’t mean you link from a tweet to a YouTube video, from the video notes to a Facebook post, and from there to a LinkedIn article.
Don’t overdo it!
But mixing content types and referring content to your website and newsletter can be a clever tactic. Let’s take a closer look at what you can do:
Analyze how content is being repurposed on different content platforms
While working on a piece of content, think about different ways to repurpose the content. Here are a few examples of what you can do with long-form content:
If you’re looking for real-life examples from your industry, follow some content pros and analyze their communication patterns in more detail. They use intelligent approaches to keep their workload low.
Even though there are many possible ways to repurpose content, you should start small.
Figure out which platforms you can easily integrate into your communication mix using the existing processes
To expand your content reach quickly, look for additional platforms you can use to repurpose your content. But which ones should you choose?
Using the same type of content makes repurposing easy. Other than that, we recommend following your market. Which platforms do other thought leaders use to distribute their content? Follow them for a while and check if the platform appeals to you.
You’re ready to go if your target audience uses a platform and it’s easy to post your content there.
Gain insight for your positioning
We’re getting to the end. And this time, we’re getting strategic.
To position your business consciously, you must understand your competitor’s positioning. Because only then can you make well-informed decisions about your best place in the market.
So, let’s see how to support this strategic task.
Identify (and fill) white spots in your competitors’ communication
Communication plays a central role in positioning. How and what you communicate defines how you’re perceived. And that’s what positioning ultimately is: Shaping the market’s perception by communicating accordingly.
However, you and the other market players influence the market’s perception. That means you’re positioning yourself as related to the rest of the market.
That’s why it’s essential to watch your competition’s communication because only then can you position yourself consciously. Find white spots in the market and decide whether you want to fill them. Understand how other players communicate and determine how you want to be perceived differently.
Your market insight is also an early warning system for change.
Jump on upcoming trends and regulation changes early to position as a first mover
Closely following leading sources of your market helps you spot trends and relevant changes early. This can be:
The earlier you spot upcoming change, the more flexible you can decide how to respond with your offer – and your communication. Because being among the first market players to start communicating about a new topic can significantly help position yourself as a market expert and thought leader.
But even if a change is not in sight, insight can help you in your daily operations.
Learn about your market’s pains and address them head-on
When listening to your market, you will notice its problems and weaknesses.
Address them in your communication and your offers to show your understanding and expertise. By discussing the market’s challenges and offering solutions, you empathize with your audience and gain their respect.
What kinds of pain can that be?
No need to look far. There’s always something going on, and by addressing these topics head-on, you can help other market players build an opinion – and position yourself and your business as a go-to expert in the market.
TL;DR
As you can see, it’s mandatory to watch your market. The insight you gain can help you:
- Pick up trending topics in your communication
- Find inspiration for your product development
- Keep your educational material up-to-date
- Tailor products to upcoming market changes
- Spot chances for collaborations early on
- Find up-to-date triggers and hooks for sales conversations
- Gain insight from other markets and adapt it to yours
- Analyze and compare successful content patterns on different platforms – best practices for each channel
- Analyze successful communication patterns – how different channels play together
- Gain insight for your positioning
Now, it’s your turn. Leverage the insight you gain about your market.
How do you follow your market’s players? We’ve got you covered.
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