Conducting large scale customer research can be time consuming, not to mention costly, and buying expert reports may not necessarily provide the level of detail required to identify specific locations to focus your sales efforts on.
However, there is a quick and inexpensive way to evaluate market potential and to locate the most promising places for business expansion using information from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and some clever tools. Surprisingly, these tools can yield very accurate results with very little effort.
As a demonstration, let’s consider a supplier of haircare products who intends to tap into the Sydney market. Using Mapdeck’s Thematic Mapper application it only takes a few mouse clicks to create a map with all the essential information for analysis:
[Household expenditure on haircare products by postcode]
The map clearly demonstrates that locations around Parramatta, Blacktown or Liverpool offer much bigger potential for haircare products than Sydney city and Eastern Suburbs (i.e. high concentration of dark red polygons indicating higher consumer spend).
With a few additional mouse clicks, it is easy to determine the estimated value of total haircare product sales in these 3 locations - for example, by defining a 5 km radius around the main retail precinct as a catchment area. It would yield the following result:
Estimated Market Size for Haircare Products:
Parramatta: $17.8M p.a.
Blacktown: $6.8M p.a. (excluding locations within 5km radius from Parramatta)
Liverpool: $15M p.a.
And how big is the overall market for haircare products in Australia? A few more mouse clicks are required to download the data and to open the csv file to reveal the big number:
Estimated market size for haircare products in Australia is almost $1 billion p.a. (lower bound is $950 million and upper bound is $1,035 million p.a.)
Not bad for 5 minutes work.
There are over 600 product and service categories to choose from to conduct your analysis and information can be mapped down to Statistical Area 1 (SA1) level, which means you can examine data over areas as small as just a few neighbourhoods.
Whether you are evaluating overall market potential or just investigating opportunities in specific catchment areas, the information available via Mapdeck can get you answers quickly. Ultimately, this will help save time and money so you can concentrate on exploring any identified market opportunities and not on chasing the data required to conduct the initial analysis.
For more information on this and other cost effective market intelligence solutions for business of all sizes please contact us via enquiry form on mapdeck.com site.
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