When running your own business, you have to consider the numerous factors that affect your success. Things can happen that are out of your control. Today, we’re discussing how to use and quickly adapt to market trends for your business strategy.
Let’s dive in!
What Are Market Trends?
Market trends are patterns of data that display changes in the market’s behavior and operations. It’s important to monitor these changes to stay competitive.
When the iPhone was first released, it revolutionized the cellphone industry and pushed BlackBerry’s market share down to 3%. BlackBerry struggled to keep up with trends, and it eventually pulled out of the market.
A more recent example is artificial intelligence. AI has been around for years (think about how your Netflix account recommends new shows), but the small business community remains divided on whether or not to adopt the tool. As of 2022, OpenAI has a monthly active number of 21.1 million users. Those who learned how to use ChatGPT are now well ahead of their competitors who didn’t.
How Market Trends Impact Your Offerings
Market trends are prevalent in every industry. They can significantly influence consumer behavior by shaping preferences and purchasing decisions. If a trend indicates a shift toward a particular product or service, consumers are likely to follow suit. Therefore, businesses need to monitor and adapt to these trends to stay competitive and meet changing consumer demands.
This is often due to products or services that seemingly benefit consumers or improve their daily lives. For instance, a growing trend toward eco-friendly products can make consumers more conscious of their purchases and choose sustainable options. When entrepreneurs don’t adapt and make a strategy shift, they can easily fall behind and lose market share.
Strategies to Adjust Your Offerings Based on Market Trends
When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in November 2022, it took the internet by storm. At Interact, we quickly implemented the tool to help our customers with their number one pain point: getting a quiz live to start collecting leads. This was a move pioneered by our CEO, Josh Haynam, who understood that AI would improve our customer experience tenfold. The decision was made based on years of strategies that helped us move swiftly. This process is a great way to understand how to use market trends in your business strategy.
Conduct Market Research
As a part of our daily practice, each member of our team is constantly conducting customer research. Market research will help you find trends within your specific audience, and the most effective way to accomplish this is by interviewing your customers.
The best way to do this is to:
- Start with a small set of questions you know you want answered.
- Make it conversational, noticing if additional questions naturally arise and adjusting your questions accordingly.
- Write down everything you hear—or even copy and paste the exact text.
- Compare findings with customers’ blogs, social posts, or reviews.
Remember: using the same language as your customers will build trust and offer more value.
Know what jargon they are using, how they are asking questions, and what they are actually saying.
Implement Change Based on Data
When making business decisions, reference trends you noticed during your research.
- Make the best decision based on the current information you have and what your customers need.
- Discuss the necessary steps to launch.
- Pivot and implement as quickly as possible (even if it’s a bit scrappy at first).
We like to follow this motto: done is better than perfect. Prolonging a launch could mean falling behind competitors, losing sales, or missing out on learning how to improve your offering.
Only implement change as needed. For example, when we first launched InteractAI, a person manually did all the email communication. It was the quickest way to start the project and figure out how to automate.
We also decided to be among the first to rank for AI keywords in Google Search and Youtube and promptly adjusted our content marketing to match. This means talking about AI on all our channels in conjunction with topics our customers are already searching for.
Test and Refine Offerings
How you adjust your strategy based on market trends will depend on the first iteration of your launch, and, most of the time, these adjustments require manual work. Learn and process what your customers need by testing out different things. As a small business with fewer resources, this works well for us at Interact; it’s a small price to pay for reaching the optimal goals of our projects.
Takeaways:
- Take note of where you can add efficiency and automate processes.
- Organize what you’ve learned.
After six months of testing and increased demand, we finally decided to build automations.
While InteractAI is in assisted beta, the customer-facing team frequently meets with the engineering team to report on current trends to help build the full product. As you can see, we are still in the early stages but are learning and implementing as we go.
Wrap Up
Understanding how to use market trends in your business strategy is crucial for businesses to adjust their offerings and stay competitive. Market trends—patterns of data collected over time that display changes in the market’s behavior and operations—can significantly influence consumer behavior and shape preferences and purchasing decisions.
By monitoring these trends, businesses can anticipate changes, make informed decisions, and adapt strategies accordingly. This can be done by conducting market research, implementing changes based on data, and testing and refining offerings based on market trends. Stay proactive in responding to market trends to prevent falling behind competitors, losing sales, or learning lessons to improve your offerings.
