You have the product. You have the means. You have the audience. But are they a good fit for each other?

We touched on product-market fit a bit in our Building a Strong Foundation post, and we’ll both reiterate and expand on the concept here. Why? Because while the three areas we identified in that post are vital to starting your business on the right foot, achieving the right product-market fit is the difference between success and failure.

What is Product-Market Fit?

First defined by Marc Andreessen, product-market fit means having a product that solves a need, and selling that product in a market that has that need.

It may sound simple, but many startups throw cash at their product without carefully researching what market it belongs in. As business owners, we often inject our own assumptions of what people want and who might want it—and often those assumptions are challenged when real, tangible data is collected.

When you achieve good product-market fit, your customers recommend you to their friends, are loyal to your brand, and don’t need much convincing to buy what you’re selling. In contrast, if you’re finding that you have to work hard to make a sale or that customers aren’t engaging with you past the first few weeks, you likely have the wrong product or are marketing it to the wrong customer base.

How to Find the Right Fit

Finding the right product-market fit is a bit research, a bit data, a bit trial and error, and a lot of validation.

First, research who your target market actually is (hint: it’s not always who you think it should be). Interviews, focus groups, and competition analysis can be a great way to see with whom your offer may resonate.

Next, take a lean methodology approach to your platform launch and strategy. Always keep improving and fine tuning your messaging, your offering, your delivery. The key here is to hone in on what your customers perceive your value is, not what you think the value is. Like your target market, sometimes what draws your clients in is not what you initially expected.

The company Slack focused their attention on the individual user experience, choosing to be super speedy in resolving any reported issues and thinking carefully about their UX design. By hyper-focusing on these areas, they differentiated themselves from their competition and grew their customer base by 7300% (not a typo) in just over a year.

Finding the right fit also requires some experimentation and pivoting. You simply might not get it exactly right on the first try. Actively solicit feedback from users (especially the ones who are no longer active on your platform). Combine that feedback with hard data like heat maps and usage reports to make iterations on either your platform or your target audience (or maybe both). In the end, you want an offer that satisfies an unmet need, marketed to an audience that actively has that need. Being flexible and willing to try new things will make that far more likely.

Measuring Success

So you do your research and iterate based on data—how do you know when you’ve achieved success? More data, of course! As we said above, having the right product-market fit means you have users that don’t hesitate to recommend you, actively use your platform, and buy what you sell with little effort from you. So, to measure those elements, you look at:

1. user engagement levels

2. quantity of paid users

3. quantity of organic users

4. net promoter score

By evaluating how many people are using your platform and how many would recommend your platform, you’ll get a clear picture on the performance of your software.

Maintaining Success

The SaaS market changes as quickly as you can come up with your next great idea. If you’ve achieved a great product-market fit, don’t assume that will remain true forever. Taxis were a great offer until Uber came along. Hotels served a specific purpose until AirBnB swooped in. It’s a bit cliché to say, but if you don’t disrupt you’ll be disrupted. Even AirBnb intentionally reinvented themselves in the height of their success, redefining their product from the booking of the property to the trip itself. By thinking about their product as the entire trip, AirBnB was able to come up with new offers to complement the property bookings they’d always had.

Continuously measure your fit, keep an eye on the market, and never stop making improvements. If you stay lean and iterate based on your data, you’ll continue to offer a service that delivers just what your customers need.

Humans move about the world by experiencing it. Everything we do/see/touch/feel/taste is an experience, and we use that experience as a natural feedback mechanism. Positive, purposeful experiences drive us to repeat the behaviours that created those experiences. They make us loyal advocates. Positive and effective experiences drive engagement.

A good user experience (UX) design is imperative to creating loyal, engaged users and employees. It makes a difference in data accuracy, work output, and even profit margins. It is about solving problems and optimizing results, and good UX designers are more pragmatic and analytical than creative.

Experience design is also an ongoing process, not a one-time venture. Your UX needs to evolve with your users, market, environment, and available technology. By continually asking yourself “What can be improved?” you are setting the stage for an effective user experience that leaves a positive impression.

The Elements of UX Design for Driving Engagement

UX design is built on data analysis. What do you need to know about your users? What do you need to know about your business? What is your baseline, and what are your desired results? What are your user’s goals, and how do they compare with the business’ goals? The more you know about where you are and where you’re going or need to be, the greater chance of designing an effective solution.

Of course, in order to do this analysis, you have to be collecting the right data first. Do you have the right insights given the questions you’re trying to answer? If not, how can you acquire them? Finally, how can you take this data and transform it into actionable improvements?

Once you’ve got the insights and actions, you can translate them into these key elements of UX design:

Psychology

UX design taps into the user’s motivations for using the software. It considers the user’s subjective thoughts and how the process makes them feel. Further, it takes into account habits that are created in the process (are there steps always being ignored? If so, why?). Good UX aims to create effective experiences that inspire a positive impression and repeated engagement.

Usability

This element evaluates how easy it is to use the software and whether some things are being made harder by design. UX designers can ask themselves questions like: can we get the same outcome with less input? Are there any common issues we can prevent? By grading how the employee uses the system and how easy it is for them to accomplish their end goal, you can make valuable changes.

Design

The design element focuses on functionality rather than aesthetics. Does the design clearly communicate the purpose without words? Does the design lead the user to the right place to perform the right actions? If navigation is intuitive by the user, you will reduce pain points and effort required.

Copywriting

The words you write need to complement the design you create. Copywriting is most effective when it overcomes objections, provides helpful instructions, and communicates the benefits to the user. Does your copy tell the user exactly what to do? Does it motivate the user to do it? Does it steer clear of assumptions about knowledge or background? Focus on the user’s motivations rather than features, figure out what users need to accomplish their goals, and guide them to achieving those needs.

Internal & Business Ops UX Design

Different teams likely have different needs and goals, and may need to be presented different UX experiences to meet those needs. What are the user’s goals, available knowledge, environment, access, etc.? A field consultant on the move will give you different answers than an in-house IT team. Don’t assume that one size fits all, even within the same company with the same software. You’ll often find out that what works for some, needs to be tweaked for others.

Overall, you need to communicate what the platform/page/action is, what the benefit is to the user, and what they should do next. There is a balance to meeting user needs while achieving the organization’s needs. Prioritize objective (facts that can be proven and measured) over subjective (feelings with no right answer) research to design to a subconscious, effortless experience.

Good UX is noticed by designers while bad UX is noticed by everyone. If you’d like an expert to help you with your UX, don’t hesitate to get in touch! Our team is at the ready to start driving engagement and results.

Influencer marketing has been a hot topic for a while with two very different outcomes. Some claim to have gained their way to fame using influencer marketing techniques while others recall campaigns of wasted time and money. Let’s discuss who influencers really are, if influencer marketing really works and the one overlooked alternative.

Anyone Can Be An Influencer

The truth of the matter is that anyone can be an influencer. A high level exec, a blogger, or your friendly neighbour down the street. What dictates an influencer’s influence is the scale of their followers on the web, social media, or in local communities. An influencer builds their own community of followers around themselves and becomes the trusted source for one or more topics of interest.

On Instagram – we see many travel influencers, on Linkedin – recruiters talking about team dynamics. Every community has influencers and followers, you can distinguish them by those who voice their opinions, and those who listen.

Is Influencer Marketing Dead

Many influencer campaigns may seem fail-proof at first due to the large audience size however, audience size is often confused with true influence. With what seems like everyone having an opinion on something these days, we must draw the line between reach and true influence.

Having a large audience does not guarantee influence as the influencer’s audience may not be trusting enough to be influenced. On the other hand, you may come across an influencer of much smaller scale whose followers will actively listen to and act on every recommendation put forth. It is no longer the reach that need be analyzed but the engagement and conversion rates.

It is also important to keep in mind that influencers have their own objectives. With the appropriate incentive, they will share your content if it’s relative to their followers however, their main objective is to grow their name, to grow their brand, and increase their following.

It is less common nowadays to find an influencer of large scale who will genuinely connect with a brand and experience the company’s products/services as a customer rather than a paid advertiser. There is an inadvertent subconscious bias in paid promotion and the influencer’s followers can see it. Moreover, as soon as the incentives stop, so will your company’s promotion.

With the rise of influencers, there is a growing immunity to sponsored messages. There is however one alternative that has been around for centuries and always proven itself to be effective: advocacy marketing, also known as advocate marketing.

What Is Advocate Marketing

An advocate is someone who has a personal relationship with your brand. It is typically a highly satisfied customer, although it can, and should also be your employees, partners, and suppliers. These are individuals who will speak up about your brand, advocate for it, not because they are incentivized to do so, but because they genuinely loved their experience and have something to say about it.

This is a simple psychological phenomenon that stems from the law of reciprocity. It is an inherent obligation to give back to those who helped us, those who we feel indebted to. Their passion for your product, service, or brand, is genuine and effective as their listeners are mainly comprised of their family and friends.

Advocate marketing is a process of capitalizing on the opinions and experiences of your customers in your marketing strategies. It is a more authentic form of marketing because it utilizes true emotional experiences and connections. This can be done in the form of references and referrals, video testimonials, social media features, case studies, etc.

With advocate marketing, you gain warm referral leads. Unlike having a cold lead go through the Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat customer life cycle, with advocate marketing, your warm leads jump straight to the Trust stage.

01. Know

The point at which an individual learns about your company.

02. Like

The individual becomes more familiar with your brand and develops a deeper connection without any commitment.

03. Trust

When the individual realizes a sense of trust in order to learn more about your company and what you offer.

04. Try

With a sense of trust, the individual proceeds to try your product or service prior to any significant investments. This may be in the form of a free trial or a low-risk commitment.

05. Buy

The leap of faith is taken to purchase your product or service and the result is compared to the expectations.

06. Repeat

If the expectation in the previous step have been met or surpassed, the individual becomes a repeat customer.

07. Refer

When undeniable value has been delivered to the customer, they will want to refer you. At times, your customer may need help in referring you such as in the form of a share link, a few business cards, or other referral opportunities.

As long as you keep your advocates happy, they will refer you to others and keep coming back for more.

How to Capitalize on Advocate Marketing

To grow your advocates there is one key rule: give people something they truly value. What is it that motivates them? Influence within their communities? Advancement? Networking? Sense of achievement? Once you know exactly what they need and value, help them achieve it, whether it is as simple as being recognized, learning something new, or making their life easier.

For efficiency and scalability, it is important to create an advocacy marketing system for this process which will help you discover, nurture, and vitalize your advocates. The audience size of each advocate will be smaller than that of an influencer but their strong connections within their respective communities will make each referral much more effective.

People won’t listen to what you have to say about yourself but they will listen to what others have to say about you. One of the fastest ways to grow your advocates is through social proof. Surround your business with happy customers’ reviews, social media features, case studies, etc.

This is one of the few aspects that can be a numbers game, the more positive social proof they see surrounding you, the more likely they are to trust you, try you, buy from you, and become advocates themselves.

Is There Ever a Place for Influencer Marketing?

We can’t completely disregard influencer marketing, but it’s simply not for everyone. When embarking on an influencer campaign, you need to be definitive in your goals. It may not provide the highest conversion rates but it may offer significant brand exposure. The best offer an influencer can make is expanded reach simply due to their scale of followers.

You need to ensure you have an influencer strategy, timeline, and budget. It will take time to find the right influencers, ones who can portray a level of authenticity and credibility in talking about your brand despite most likely having no previous experience with your product or service.

Because influencers typically don’t have strong relationships with their followers, their impact on their followers’ decision making process may be very limited. Considering you picked the right influencers and the right target market, how many times would it be appropriate to present your brand to the influencer’s followers before they reach the Know, and potentially the Like stage of the cycle? It can take quite a few exposures, and each endorsement to a large audience can be costly.

Which One is Right for Me?

There is a time and place for both influencer and advocate marketing. Although influencer marketing can bring some short-term exposure, in the long run, advocate marketing is more effective. Advocates refer new business continuously and accelerate the sales process for you while gaining a sense of satisfaction for themselves by helping others.

When it comes to what drives your users to use a web platform (often company employees) and what drives your business, those goals often look different. Yet the business benefits when users reach their goals, and the user benefits from business goals that help them realize success. So what might these goals look like and how can they align?

User Goals

Your users are just like you—humans with individual goals and needs. Users generally want to do their job faster and better, be more productive, and streamline their work. These are people who also have career goals and personal goals, and sometimes they just want to get home a little earlier to spend time with their family.

In a work environment, different user groups can also have different work-specific goals. A sales team will likely have goals pertaining to units sold or value per sale, for example. An IT team may have goals about turnaround time, while a customer service team may have goals about efficiency and satisfaction. Each user within those teams will primarily be focused on their own individual performance and the resources required to achieve their goals.

Business Goals

The business’ goals, on the other hand, are far more high-level that the typical user’s goals. While the user is focused on individual output and getting home at the end of the day, the business is focused on overall metrics and performance of the company. Business goals may focus on a social mission, the bottom line, employee work output, customer retention, and more.

Starbucks’ stated business goals are ethical sourcing, environmental stewardship, and community involvement. Apple’s business goals are to leverage the ability to design and develop, enhance and expand, and be responsible to the environment. Business goals are more strategic and overarching.

Bringing User and Business Goals Together

The business benefits when users achieve their goals. Users are happier, more engaged, and more productive—which equals to employees more willing to help the business succeed. So how do we align user and business goals so that everyone is moving in the same direction?

For starters, make sure that the things you reward your employees for help in the pursuit of your company’s goals, match with the pursuit of theirs. If one of your business goals is collaboration but your compensation structure is set up on commissions (encouraging employees to compete rather than work together), for example, you may be holding your business back from true success. User reward should be directly tied to business goal advancement.

Next, in consideration of the primarily digital working environment, how does your software’s UX design helps achieve your user’s goals? In our last post, we talked about designing an effective user experience for platforms. Since user goal achievement helps advance business goals, it makes sense that you want systems to make those goals easier to obtain. A sales team that can seamlessly enter and manage their leads in the system will have more capacity to obtain additional leads. A customer service team that can quickly access customer accounts and provide resolution will be able to attend to the next customer much faster. Identify critical processes that your software may be making harder, and fix those gaps early.

By structuring your hierarchy, reward, and compensation structures to inspire individual user goals that align with overarching business goals, and then creating UX design that makes those goals easier to achieve, you’ll be ahead of the game from the start.

Ruthless Evaluation

Businesses fall short when they don’t aggressively and ruthlessly evaluate their structures. It can be easy to approach strategy from a place of bias and history—but what worked in the past isn’t necessarily going to set you up for success in this rapidly changing digital age. It’s important to take a step back and objectively assess what is working and what isn’t, and then dig into the root cause. If you’d like a strategy checkup, don’t hesitate to reach out to Motiv Studio for help! We’ll help you plan a seamless digital experience to help both the business and the user achieve their goals.

It’s a hard truth that having a great idea isn’t enough to sustain you. According to the Small Business Association, 50% of new small businesses will fail in the first 5 years. According to Fortune, 90% of startups suffer the same fate.

Our job is to help you be part of the 10%, and doing so means you need a strong business foundation when developing any new digital product. There is no shortage of startups these days, so the difference between success and struggle can boil down to simple fundamental oversights.

The 3 Most Common Pitfalls

When we review the reasons products and businesses fail, we start to see trends. Start out ahead of the competition by avoiding these three common issues.

1. Poor Product-Market Fit

Good design is intuitive. Don’t Make Me Think explores the keys of an optimal and smooth user experience from intuitive navigation to information design for the digital realm. Full of practical applications and insights, a must-read for web designers.

It may sound simple, but many startups throw cash at their product without carefully researching what market it belongs in. As business owners, we often inject our own assumptions of what people want and who might want it—and often those assumptions are challenged when real, tangible data is collected.

When you achieve good product-market fit, your customers recommend you to their friends, are loyal to your brand, and don’t need much convincing to buy what you’re selling. In contrast, if you’re finding that you have to work hard to make a sale or that customers aren’t engaging with you past the first few interactions, you likely have the wrong product or are marketing it to the wrong customer base.

Think of recently failed Teavana, a subsidiary of Starbucks. Starbucks, of course, is massively successful, but not really because of their coffee. Starbucks stores offer an experience—a place to go and study, hold a business meeting, or just kill some time. Their product-market fit was with millennials who were after more than just a quick cup ‘o joe, and now it’s nearly impossible to go more than a block without seeing a Starbucks location. Teavana, on the other hand, was mostly found in retail spaces. It sold tea but offered nowhere to sit. It focused entirely on the product and not on the experience and, by doing so, they completely missed what made Starbucks so attractive.

2. Defining Product Buyer vs. Product User

Who buys your product isn’t always the same person that uses it. When it comes to sales, you need to focus on the product buyer rather than the user, or you risk coming up short.

Think of diapers. The product user for diapers is, well, babies—but it certainly wouldn’t make sense to try to market them to infants who can’t even talk, much less make a purchase. Instead, diaper companies market their products to parents, because parents are the product buyer.

We often encounter this scenario in enterprise organizations. A company invests in state-of-the-art software, without consulting the employees, to later be surprised with extremely low adoption rate or user engagement. It’s important to consider the needs and habits of the users, which in this case would be the employees.

It’s worth it to really define who will be using your product and who will be buying it. You may be surprised to find out it’s not the same person.

3. Choosing the Sales/Distribution Channels

Related to product-market fit and product buyers, successful launches choose the appropriate sales channel for the audience. A product geared towards millennials and Gen Z will likely do well when marketed through social media, but a product meant for seniors would not realize the same success. The key is to know where your product buyer spends their time, how they make their purchasing decisions, and then deploy an intentional strategy to reach them in their preferred environment.

Even within populations there are nuances that influence behaviour, such as region, interests, etc. Invest in market research from the get go to avoid costly mistakes later on.

If you can start your new business or product by having a clearly defined product-market fit, know who your buyers are, and where/how they make purchases, you’ll be well on your way to success. Avoid the temptation to rush to market if you haven’t nailed down these three elements. We’re always happy to help evaluate your product’s viability. You have an idea that belongs in the 10%—let us help you stay there.

What is User Experience Design?

UX, or User Experience, design takes into account all aspects of the customer experience. It can be easy to simplify that to just website or mobile experience, but true UX design encompasses so much more than that. It definitely is important that your end users (we’ll call them customers, that feels more personable) have a seamless and easy online experience, but if you stopped there you’d be missing a huge part of the story.

Think about your client’s brand (fonts, colours, tone), design (including offline marketing materials), usability, and customer base. No matter what you’re doing, there should be consistency throughout—and the customer needs to be the focus of every single decision made.

UX Design, On and Off the Screen

We’ve already hinted at it, but user experience extends far beyond a company’s online presence. And arguably, the online experience is the easiest one to tackle, because there’s so much rich data through things like heat mapping and analytics.

It all starts with knowing who the customers are. Not who you want them to be, but who they actually are. Do research on your customer demographic, then cater to the results. Decisions about everything else should revolve around who’s actually engaging with the content.

Next comes the brand strategy. Knowing the customer from your previous research, decide on your brand’s persona. What is the tone of written material? What are the colours? Fonts? Carry that brand throughout every single piece of company literature including brochures, business cards, website, and social media.

Now that you know the brand, you can move on to the online presence. You already know how the website should look, now think about how it should flow. Are you making it easy for customers to journey from end-to-end? Are there strong calls-to-action, and can a customer go from info to purchase in one click? How fast does the page load and how can you improve that speed?

UX design is the entire user experience, starting long before a customer ends up on a webpage.

The Effect of Good (and Bad) UX Design

Customers today are looking for experience. They base their decisions on how easy it is to do business, not necessarily the price. Your product obviously needs to be priced comparatively, but if you make it hard for customers to get what they want, they’ll gladly pay a few bucks more to save their sanity.

Further, customers base much of their purchase decisions on trust. It can take awhile to convert a customer, and it all starts with consistent messaging and predictable experience. If your UX design extends across your entire portfolio, it’s easier for customers to recognize and, by extension, trust you.

A sloppy, disjointed UX design will cost you conversions, and that’s money not in your pocket. Google is paying particular attention to page load speed, mobile responsiveness, and content “above the fold,” ranking faster pages with better experiences higher in their results.

Always Validate Your Design

You’ve nailed down the customer, you’ve thought about the experience, you’ve made your first designs. It would be easy to stop there, but work completed on assumptions rarely outputs the best possible results.

You should have already done research into your true customer base, now it’s time to test your design with those customers. Float your UX design to a group of customers in your key demographics and see how easily they navigate through your creation. This will give you true data and validation, highlighting those areas that are still causing effort or lacking in consistency.

True customer testing needs to be done correctly to be relevant. The most crucial role is your moderator—someone to be with your tester and guide the interaction. This person cannot asking leading questions, must stay poker-faced at all times, and must keep the tester on track. Questions like “how would you make a purchase from this page?” are good, because it allows the tester to show you what they would try (and is a goldmine into how your customers’ brains work). Questions like “click on buy now, do you like where that is located?” are too rigid in nature, and pigeon-holes your tester into an opinion without getting them to share their raw and honest thoughts.

Next, you need a panel of people observing the interaction in a different room. Video conference where the tester cannot see the panel is great, and in a pinch you can play back the video for a group at a later time. Have them observe where the tester is clicking, their facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. The panel should take notes, then compare. Where did the tester look frustrated? Confused?

Repeat with several more testers and find the trends. Make changes as appropriate.

Of course, you could send out a beta page or brand package and ask customers to fill out a feedback survey, and that kind of data can be great, too—but you miss natural reactions and facial expressions that often tell a much bigger story than answers to a survey ever could. In the absence of resources or budget, any kind of customer feedback is better than none, but in the long run, it’s absolutely worth it to invest in this research from the get-go.

In the digital age, with new businesses entering the market faster than ever before, things change quickly and strategies evolve even faster. It is vital to have a deep understanding of your business, your product, and your environment, in order to maintain a degree of flexibility, be able to evolve quickly, and stay ahead of the curve.

There are three main strategies to be explored: overall business strategy, corporate strategy, and competitive strategy. It is vital to have a solid understanding of the three strategies and how they interact with each other which will help guide decisions, measure success, and answers the question of how your objectives will be achieved.

Building your Strategy

Start with an in-depth internal and external analysis. Look at your resources and capabilities; resources is what you have, and capabilities is what you’re capable of doing with them. This includes talent, capital, assets, IP, etc., and can be in the simple form of a list.

For a more in-depth internal analysis, we will be exploring the Business Model Canvas, and for the external analysis, Porter’s Five Forces.

Internal Analysis: Business Model Canvas

The best strategies are those that are utilized by the entire team, adaptable, and easy to follow. To help us with that, keeping in mind our resources and capabilities, we use the Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder which will help you summarize your entire business strategy on one page:

Starting with the middle, we have the Unique Value Proposition (UVP). The UVP answers the questions of: What value is being delivered to the customer? Which problem is being solved? What unique solution will you offer to satisfy the customer’s needs?

On the left side, we have the canvas blocks in relation to the product, the internal operations.

Key Partners: Who are your key partners/suppliers? Which key activities do they perform or key resources that they supply?

Key Activities: What key activities are necessary to carry out the UVP? Operations? Production? Distribution?

Key Resources: What key resources are necessary to carry out the UVP? Financial? Physical? Human? Intellectual?

Cost Structure: What are the costs associated with carrying out the UVP? Consider both fixed and variable costs. Will you be a value driven business focusing on providing premium value? Or will you be a cost driven business focusing on providing the leanest cost structure?

On the right side we have our canvas blocks in relation to the market, the external operations.

Customer Segments: Who is the customer? Who is the end user of the product? Where can you find them?

Customer Relationships: How will you connect with the customer? What kind of relationship do they expect? Does this relationship come at a cost?

Channels: How will you reach your customers? Where can you find them? Which way is the most effective?

And lastly, we have the Revenue Streams. For what value are your customers willing to pay? How do they prefer to pay? When do they prefer to pay?

The Business Model Canvas gives you an overview of your overall business strategy on one page and assists in evaluating an appropriate product-market fit.

External Analysis: Porter’s Five Forces

Next, we will delve into the external environment by utilizing Porter’s Five Forces analysis. Although it is meant to determine the competitive landscape and attractiveness of any given industry, it is useful in directing how to position yourself within that industry.

Threat of New Entrants: What are the entry barriers? Are people loyal to their brands? What are the capital requirements to open a business? Are there any affecting government policies? What are the switching costs?

Threat of Substitutes: How many substitute products are available on the market? Are there any tendencies for buyers to seek out substitutes? What is the perceived level of differentiation? Relative price performance of the substitutes?

Bargaining Power of Suppliers: How many suppliers are there? What is their scale? How unique is their product? How easily are you able to substitute?

Bargaining Power of Buyers: How many customers are there? What is the average size of their orders? How price sensitive are there? How big is the differentiation between you and your competitors? How easy is it for your buyers to substitute you? How much and what kind of information is available to your buyers?

Rivalry Amongst Existing Competitors: How many competitors are there? What is their diversity? What is the yearly industry growth? What is the differentiation between competitors? How loyal are their customers? What are the barriers to exit?

You should now be well equipped with three analysis: a list of your resources and capabilities, a Business Model Canvas, and an in depth market overview using Porter’s Five Forces. These three analysis will aid in building your business strategy, positioning yourself within the market, and being aware of the interdependencies within your business and the industry. The key to success in the digital age is being on the forefront of information, keeping your strategy lean, and always being prepared to adapt.