Investigate

Creating a winning strategy requires a deep and broad understanding of the market, customers and business. The objective is to align the business and its capability to the opportunity, with the aim of standing firmly ahead of the competition.

Tidal Marketing follows a stringent process throughout the investigation stage, split into four parts:

(1) Investigate the Market

Tidal Marketing investigates the change themes, opportunities and threats within the market. This involves identifying:

• The potential and total size of all the markets, including adjacent markets
• Identification of the most opportune markets
• A market review of what’s happening now, along with what’s expected to happen including PESTEL (political, economical, technological, social, environmental and legal) research
• Potential and transferable capability for future growth, whether internationally or into other sectors
• Market accessibility and routes-to-market to understand the best way to penetrate the market
• The ‘barriers to entry’ or ‘barriers to growth’ that may limit penetration
  

(2) Investigate the Audience

When looking at the audience Tidal Marketing splits these into:

• Decision-makers
• Users or beneficiaries
• Influencers
• Partners or route-to-market audiences

It’s important to segment the audience, as each will have different requirements, in which their motivations for engagement will change and therefore a different strategy will need to be created for each.

We investigate the needs, motivations, challenges and pain-points for the audiences along every stage of the customer journey, to get a full understanding of how to meet and exceed their drivers.

(3) Investigate the Competition and Substitutes

When considering the competition, it’s important to not only investigate the direct competition, but additionally, consider all possible alternatives competing in the same space. Even the newest, most unique products or services will never have the luxury of being completely free of competition as the audience will have limited resources, and so you will be competing on budget or the potential they can solve the problem themselves.

We will investigate the competition’s market share along with their offer, capability, strategy, positioning and market perception, and consider how these are aligned to the audiences’ requirements. We will then test this information by producing a ‘gap analysis’ to understand the difference between these requirements and the existing offers, to ascertain the opportunity.

(4) Investigate the Business

Having understood everything that is happening in the market, we then turn our attention to the business, by investigating its internal capability, its current position in the market and its long-term vision. This is done through workshops and spending time working with internal stakeholders to intimately understand the business. It’s important to do this last so that the market and customer research is objective and the opportunity is clearly understood.

This process allows us to determine the differentiation and how to meet and exceed the audiences requirements above and beyond other players in the market. We then create the most effective product, go-to-market, growth or marketing strategies, with a clear route to win.