In my last post I discussed a few things I had learned from professionals who are experts in the area of creating business plans. Reading through the different articles again and coming to the end of a great month in my Business Plan Development class, I thought I would spend a little time talking about the act of market forecasting and also honing in on the right target market for your business.
In my last post, Scott Shane’s article “Start Your Business in a Favorable Industry That You Know Well” was a great building block in digging deeper into market research and forecasting for my business. Because his article only covers a fraction of what I need to learn I decided to look for other articles that talk about the importance of forecasting to get some ideas. One article I came across was simply titled, “What is a market forecast?” by Tim Berry. Mr. Berry unpacks the importance of doing in depth research of your particular industry to make sure there is promise of a growing market in years to come. For my school program I am working on creating a reality television company and have done a bit of research about the television industry in general. For my market research I learned that according to Nielsen, in 2011, there were 115.9 million television households in the US, while there is a suspected first-time-ever decline in 2012 to 114.7 million (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/media_entertainment/number-of-u-s-tv-households-climbs-by-one-million-for-2010-11-tv-season/.) I also learned that according to eMarketer, the average adult spends 4 hours and 34 minutes each day on a television set, which is up 10 minutes from last year.
In terms of revenue, the large national networks are raking in a TON of money:
NBC Universal - $5.2 billion, up 17% in Q4
CBS - $3.9 billion, up 11% in Q4
ABC - $10.4 billion, up 7% in Q4
In addition to the above information, I have learned from reading articles and books that it’s important to be very specific about your target audience. The more specific, the more specialized you can be in your marketing efforts, which will pay off in the long run. Thanks to my Business Plan Development class, I have been able nail down a specific target market as well. Rather than broadly targeting the ever-popular 18-49 year old group that most advertisers go after, I am targeting a group within this group, particularly the passionate millenials (18-29 years old) who have a desire to do something meaningful with their life beyond making money.
With the research I have conducted in the last several weeks I believe that I have been able to see more realistically what my competition and future market success can be. I also have realized that your research is never really complete. Things are always changing and evolving within your market, and it’s important to stay on top of trends in order to make your product as attractive and popular as possible. Overall, I have picked up invaluable insight and advice regarding creating a successful business plan from my professors at Full Sail, as well as all the online research from experts in the business world and entertainment industry.
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