When starting a new business, or coming up with a new business plan, it is always a good idea to conduct a market assessment to help you evaluate aspects of your target market.  A market assessment will give you key insight towards market opportunities by looking deep into market trends, size, growth, competition, and risks factors.  If your business, or soon to be business, can thoroughly investigate your market positioning, you will be able to asses whether your business will be successful or not.

To start a market assessment, the first thing you will need to do is conduct research.  When researching, try your best to not only investigate secondary resources (ie. consulting the internet or previous studies) but also look at primary research, such as customer surveys and focus groups.  By looking at both primary and secondary sources, you will be able to distinguish facts from fiction and generate a more accurate analysis.  So what kind’s of things should you be researching?  You should be researching all aspects of your target market such as market trends, growth (or decline), market size (current and projected) as well as who your market segments are.  Once you can understand all of these aspects, you will have a better idea as to how to map your product.  Mapping your product is a step that entails looking at aspects of how your product, or service, will meet the expectations and or requirements of your market.  This is a very important step as the results of this will dictate what direction your product will need to go in, in order to fulfill the needs of your customers.  Lastly, you will need to examine your competition.  Find out what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong, and how your product(s) differentiate from theirs.  By finding out what their strengths and weaknesses are you will have a clear indication as to how your product should be positioned in the market in order for it to succeed.