Building a market map is an effective way to measure your service, your competitors and your audience to improve your sales prospecting efforts.
Market mapping allows you to analyse the competitive landscape, discover gaps in the market and create an informed strategy. This way, you can position your product or service accordingly to get the best sales results and bring in new business.
Here, we will show you exactly what a market map is, how effective they can be and the things you need to consider when making your own.
What is a Market Map?
A market map is a tool you can use to analyse your competition in a specific market.
Market mapping is the process of using a graph to visualise a determined competitive environment. You can do this by plotting individual competitors on the map using a set of two variables, positioned on each axis.
This competitive market map is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing playbook.
It can be used to analyse any market, whether you are a B2B technology company, or working within the B2C space.
One of the two variables on your market map will commonly be price, but it doesn’t have to be.
For example, a market map could showcase the competitive landscape of price versus quality, or price versus customer age, with each of your competitors featuring on the graph.
Market Map Examples
With each analysis you undertake, you must first determine your objective.
You can use two variables each time to reach this objective.
As mentioned, this often includes price. However, there are an unlimited amount of variable combinations you can use.
Examples of variables for your market map include:
- Necessity versus Luxury
- Low quality versus High Quality
- Inconvenient versus Convenient
- Low Tech versus High Tech
- Simple versus Complex
- Short Term Results versus Long Term Results
Whichever variables you use will help you gain an understanding of the competitive landscape you are dealing with and where your service fits into the market.
It also shows you where gaps form in the market, allowing you to give your business a unique advantage over your competitors by solving an unmet need of your target market.
Creating a Market Map: Why is it so Important?
A market map can be an extremely valuable positioning tool you can use to nail down an effective sales strategy.
This is largely because it’s not always easy to visualise your competitive landscape.
Using a market map allows you to see a visual representation of where your business fits in compared to your competitors.
This visual snapshot can display an entire market, making it easy for your marketing team to understand and to make a quick market analysis for making key decisions.
This visual aid is important to help your team fully understand the market from a strategic point of view, especially as over 65% of people are visual learners.
Other benefits of market mapping include no longer having to rely on prior assumptions to gauge your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
Instead, you can build a metric-based evaluation to get to really know your competition and exactly where your business fits into its prospective markets.
Conducting this process allows you to alter your messaging to catch the attention of your total addressable market and increase conversion.
As well as analysing your competitors, another type of market mapping you can use is segmentation.
Using a Market Map for Segmentation
One of the most powerful sales prospecting tactics is market segmentation.
You can use an effective market map strategy to identify your target market and approach the prospects who are most likely to benefit from your service and become a customer.
By focusing on the journey of your end user, you can use a market map to target areas such as location, company size, individual decision makers, or need.
If you are consumer-based, you may want to consider demographics such as location, age and gender.
Before you create your map, you must first define what it is you are hoping to find out, before finding the relevant metrics to populate the graph with accurate data.
Whichever data points you use, you will be able to see a visual demonstration of where and how you may like to position your service to them.
How to Market Map Effectively
To put your market map into practice, we’ve narrowed it down to six key steps you can follow to complement your market strategy and make more sales.
1) Define Your Target Market
Create buyer personas for your ideal customers.
If you are B2B, are you targeting start-up companies, or enterprises? Are you hoping to speak to CEO’s, or marketing managers?
Clearly define which market you want to analyse by setting specific rules. As well as which companies you are targeting, decide if you’re going to research a specific location.
Try to be as niche as possible at this stage, so your results are not too broad.
You want to compare your company with real competitors, so you need to be true to analysing the market your business is operating within.
Remember, this process is easy to repeat, so be as specific as you can. You can always create another map later.
2) Self-Evaluate Your Brand’s USP’s
Next, you need to look internally.
To accurately compare with your competition, you need an honest assessment of what your company has to offer.
What are your unique selling points? By comparing your USP’s with price, you can determine the market value of the qualities your business has to offer.
3) Conduct Market Research
This step is important as the more metrics you can gather, the more real information you have to narrow down potential prospects.
As a starting point, consider using data you have already collected by importing information from your CRM. This will help you to build a real world analysis.
Then, you could consider metrics such as advertising data, engagement, company growth rates, revenue, and any marketing data you can find.
Make sure you stay within the rules you have already defined from point 1.
4) Keep it Visual
During your research, keep adding to your graph.
Each time you have conducted research on one of your potential customers or competitors, add them to the graph wherever the data suggest they belong.
It can be really exciting and eye-opening to see how the graph unfolds and which areas of space may be left for your company to exploit.
How your graph looks will depend on which market you are exploring, but remember to pick just two variables for each map you create.
For example, service price on one axis versus service quality on another.
5) Create Solution-based Messaging
Now that you have seen a visual representation of your target market, it’s time to position your brand and roll out your sales strategy.
A huge part of converting sales is to ensure you have the right messaging across each step of your sales funnel.
To create effective messaging, your team should first document what problems, wants and needs your target market are facing.
Then, frame these needs into a narrative that hammers home the solution.
By understanding the problems your ICP’s are facing, you will know how to speak to them in a way that gets their attention.
6) Rinse and Repeat
By repeating the market mapping process, you can view how each map has changed over time to measure how the market is changing.
This can help to showcase what is important to your potential customers and may allow you to predict upcoming trends within your industry.
It also helps you keep tabs on your competition and assess what tactics they are using to bring in new customers.
Wondering how you can Grow Your Business?
Sales prospecting comes in many forms.
Building a market map is just one of many methods a sales team can use to hone in on potential customers.
It is a valuable exercise as it can help you and your team develop a deep understanding of your market and the scale of the opportunities for your business to pursue.
Not only that, but as you gather more and more market research, your efforts will become more streamlined, saving you valuable time and resources.
At Excelerate360, we understand the power of sales prospecting strategies, as we strive for metric-driven results for our clients.
If you need help tracking down your ideal customers and generating warm business leads, perhaps you may consider outsourcing your sales efforts?
Get in touch to learn more about how you can improve your sales performance and grow your business.
