Good market research is not a forgotten story for any successful business owner. It’s a success formula for all business owners. You already know how significant is it for any business, but you might be wondering where to start from. So, you need to understand how to do market research before you even get your business off the ground.
Here are a few important steps you need to learn how to do market research to capture the hearts and minds of people towards your product or service. Let’s dive into what is a market research and how to do it!
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What is a Market Research?
It is a process or activity of gathering information about the market needs and preferences of your customers and the industry. When you start a new business, you’ll need to answer:
- How much is the demand for your good or service?
- What is the market saturation rate in your industry?
- What is the economic status of your target audience?
- Where are your customers located?
- What are the rates of products or services that your competitors are charging?
By getting all the answers, you can better predict customers’ needs, avoid mistakes, tailor your brand messaging and marketing efforts to better engage with your audience. It helps you to design and package your product or service as per the needs of your customers. As a result, you will get higher conversions, sales and revenue.
Importance of Market Research?
Getting information about your customers and market is crucial before starting a business. Without getting full information about your customers:
- You can’t ascertain their problems and solutions
- You can’t work out your marketing message and advertising
- You can’t know whether your customers are going to spend money on your product or service
- You can’t reduce your business risks
- You can’t find out your competitive position, and the strengths and weaknesses of your clients
- You can’t improve your marketing and sales process
So market research is crucial to find all the answers to the above questions.
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How to do Market Research in 5 Steps?
Doing market research may seem to be a difficult task. However, it is a straightforward process if you know what are you looking for. Here are the basic steps you need to follow to conduct your market research:
1) Know your Audience and Market
Psychographics and demographics play a very important role in determining what your audience actually wants. Make sure you understand your customers, their problems and are that you’re willing to solve. Know their age, gender, ethnicity, interests, etc. You must humanise your brand to ensure that it appeals to the audience.
The more human your brand sounds, the more familiar it will be for an audience. Remember how you chose a soap bar on a countertop just because it triggered all the happy emotions? That’s because it’s been branded like that.
Your audience normally tells you what they expect from your brand. Simply send out a questionnaire to your target market and let them tell you what do they expect from your brand.
2) Identify the Customers to Engage
After knowing your audience, their problems and interest, you can use this information to find the customers to target and engage with. As not every person will be your customer, so you need to determine who your potential customers are by understating their behaviour.
To find out their behaviours, you can reach out to them through different mediums and do exploratory research in different ways. You can ask open-ended questions to your customers by:
- Surveys
- Emails
- Phone Calls
- Face-to-Face Meetings/interviews
- Discussions on Focus Groups
- Call for participants through social media
- Leveraging your network to get participants
3) Identify Your Competitors
Knowing your competitors is important to know their audience, the strategy they opt to interact with them and how they are unique in the market. You can learn a lot of things from their failures or successes so that you can implement their fruitful strategies and avoid the mistakes that have caused trouble to them.
You need to get as much information about your competitors to make better decisions. Then, you can apply those things to your marketing and branding.
4) Analyse Data
Now you might be overwhelmed with a ton of information during the process, so you need to analyse and manage the data in proper order to get the most out of it. Here are the points you need to know to analyse data:
- Segment your data into groups
- Create different customers personas ( if you have a broad audience base)
- Create a matrix chart to know the overlapping information
- Generate a customer journey map
Analysing data will help you to get meaningful insight from the information collected. This will further improve your marketing and advertising efforts.
5) Summarise Your Findings
At last, to organise information that is simple and easy to understand, you need to summarise your findings by making a report through presentation software. You can use diagrams, tables, quotes and infographics to make it more engaging and attractive. Here are the things you need to remember whilst summarising:
- Goals of the study
- Your participants & customers
- Your future plans
- Themes of the report
- Key decisions to be made
- Action Plan
You can take help from a professional to do marketing research for you. The following points are the simple yet effective ways to do market research for your business.
Quick Sum Up
Hopefully, after reading this post, you have now learned how to do market research in 5 steps. Before starting your business venture, market research is crucial to know your customers, market, competitors and what forces your customers to make purchases. Effective market research will help you to avoid the big mistakes in the business world. It is imperative for making key business decisions, and for rapid business growth.
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Disclaimer: This blog provides basic information on doing market research.