The cursor blinking on a blank page is the writer’s white space waiting for sweaty palms and dry throat to relax and get over the excruciating writer’s block. In business, things are not that different or as nerve-wracking yet very exciting.
It is all about identifying the target and formulating strategies to acquire these white spaces on the eCom landscape and uncover new opportunities.
Is it that easy? Certainly not.
Brands need insights and comprehensive analysis of competition or lack of it in the geography or pin-code to target. The omnichannel shopping avenues and new demographics turning to online shopping have opened up white spaces for brands to target and make their brand presence felt in the untapped territory.
For Example, global QSR giant, McDonald’s started with just two items on the menu. They surveyed competitors and found out that they need to hyper-focus on best-seller items instead of expanding the menu to propel customer satisfaction. These were the white spaces in their industry. The insights helped them focus on customer service which was lacking among the competition at that time.
Just imagine what ecommerce competitive analysis can do now for business – identifying White spaces and beyond. Understanding what was missing from the market, identifying what customers were lacking, and turning that industry gap into a success.
Let’s dig deep and find out what exactly are white space opportunities, and how can they be turned into an asset.
Benefits Of Digital Commerce Analysis to Identify White Space
Digital commerce intelligence across e-commerce platforms, geographies, product categories, sub-categories, and variants vis-à-vis competition provides actionable insights. These insights and analysis help uplift product performance in existing space along with displaying brand untapped potential.
Analysis of white space could help improve the product sales process, strengthen customer relations, acquire new customers, grow business reach, and enhance potential. Here are some key benefits brands can achieve from analysis and identifying white spaces:
- Expanded customer base
- Increased opportunities for upselling and cross-selling
- Improved customer relations, acquisition, and retention
- Refined sales approach and strategy
- New opportunities for innovation
The white spaces are filled when the unspoken and unmet needs of the customers are uncovered by brands holding on to new opportunities, leading innovation, and expanding product reach.
How to Find White Space in the eCom Landscape?
Map New Opportunities
It’s time to map your white space opportunities. The mapping can be done in 3 ways – internally-focused, externally-focused, and future-focused.
- Internally focused white space mapping – identify your brand or company strengths, abilities, potential opportunities, and competitive threats. The comprehensive analysis of own product performances across the digital commerce ecosystem provides a clear picture. It helps businesses determine how effectively act upon the market barriers, opportunities, and competitive threats.
- Externally focused white space mapping – identify products and services in the existing market failing to meet needs – potential gaps in the system, lack of competition, non-consumers, or new market spaces.
- Future-focused mapping – strategic forecasting, based on insights, devise business strategies based on actionable insights.
Analyze Your Findings
The compiled data on KPIs and power SKUs help connect the dots. The data tells the story of your product performance vis-à-vis competition. Brands monitoring their own and competition across platforms and geographies keep them on their toes. Understanding customer needs, finding out and plugging gaps in brand performance, discovering new areas to focus on, and identifying existing region that needs a boost based on platform, geography, and product-specific data insights. The analysis will highlight the white space and illustrate where you can target customers with better solutions.
Accelerate Revenue by Identifying White Space
Smart businesses take advantage of customer data, sales performance metrics, and competitor information to formulate cutting-edge strategies. Full visibility into your sales, delivery TAT, and customer sentiments find the gaps in your offerings and fill them with suitable action. This leads to accelerate revenue generation from the existing system and venturing into new untapped markets and demographics opens new avenues for revenue generation and expands brand reach.
Final Thoughts – Get the Competitive Advantage
There are many different interpretations of ‘white space’ in business. Some consider it to be all about unchartered territories, while others feel it is a lack of competition. The key is finding the white space in your market segment and identifying market opportunities that your business is capable of capitalizing on. Map out new opportunities that your business has the capability, resources, and drive to meet.
Evaluating the competition marketing strategies find a white space and define your target customer. Figure out What you do better than our competition. And What do they do better than you? Competitive advantage helps position the brand in the eCommerce market segment.
Finding white space may sound straightforward – but it is not. Plug in mScanIt, a Digital Commerce Intelligence Solution, to get real-time actionable insights across the digital commerce ecosystem. Monitor and analyze your product performances vs competition at every touchpoint across the customer journey. Your ‘white space’ lies in Identifying key needs within the target market that are currently not being met by any other provider. This is where the brand focus for growth should be.
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