Guest post by Nico Prins.
On June 28th, 2011 Google Plus was launched with great fanfare. The full weight of Google, a $700+ billion behemoth, pushed to make the new social media platform a success. People who wanted to use their other products, such as Gmail or YouTube, were forced to sign up to the platform.
Yet despite the brilliant minds who conceived the platform, the amount of revenue invested in trying to make Google Plus a success, and the arm-twisting to get signups, it has turned out to be an expensive failure. This isn’t an exceptional story. The business world is littered with examples of companies that have struggled to enter a new market.
Thankfully, there are new market entry strategies that work, as long as you’ve done your business model homework to understand customer needs. Here are six crucial steps to successfully enter a new market.
Analyse the Competitive Landscape
Unless you have a truly blue ocean product, most marketplaces are competitive with established, often dominant, actors. The number of customers in that marketplace are finite. No company wants to lose customers or clients. That’s a given, but it’s a point worth emphasizing.