Doing market research is not an easy task, but it’s totally worth it in the long run! You will save time by doing your due diligence up front, and you’ll get better results than trying to prove what people already believe about a product.
Your company can’t succeed if there’s no proof that people are buying or using its products, so do some research to see why people choose to spend their money on them.
You don’t have to look very hard to find helpful information. A few minutes of brainstorming and recording your findings will give you all the insights you need.
The internet makes gathering info much easier because you don’t have to visit every source physically. There are many free tools available for collecting and analyzing data too.
Market researchers use a combination of these methods to make intelligent decisions about how best to promote and sell a given product. In this article, we’ll go over some basic tips on how to conduct effective market research.
Create a marketing plan
First, you need to know what market you are targeting! Doing research and looking at past performance is integral in determining who your target audience may be.
By doing this, you can determine if there have been success stories or not, as well as get some insights into how they marketed their products/services and what worked for them.
By creating a marketing plan, you can start to formulate strategies to promote your product. You will also want to think about where you would like to advertise, length of time needed, budget, etc.
Conduct market research
Doing marketing is definitely not easy, which is why there are so many people with different strategies of success. What’s worked for them may not work for you, but that is what gives us an advantage over others!
As mentioned before, knowing who your audience is is one of the most important things to do as a business owner. Once you have found this audience, it is next to impossible to find out if they know about your product or service.
This is where market research comes in. You can use surveys, talk to people around you, and even create a page just like this one to gather information.
Surveys are question-and-answer sessions that depend on you asking proper questions and gathering good data. Talk to people around you to determine how well known a company is and whether or not their products seem reliable. Visit local businesses and see if they have any recommendations for the product or service you offer.
There will always be someone more experienced than you when it comes to something, so finding these people is very helpful.
Conduct focus groups
So how do you actually conduct market research? Focus group is one of the most effective ways to find out what people are talking about these days and whether or not there are potential solutions to your problem.
A focus group comes in the form of a conversation with up to eight participants, typically conducted via phone or online chat applications (like Google Hangouts). The moderator will ask open-ended questions that can be answered with yes or no, and some examples can be given.
The goal of the focus group is to determine if there’s significant interest in solving the participant’s current challenge through having an informal discussion about it. If there is, then the next step would be to have them tell you why this solution works for them and whether they would pay money for such a product.
Focus groups cannot provide direct quantitative answers, but they give important qualitative insights. By asking open-ended questions, you get more detailed information than just “yes” or “no.
Conduct online surveys
Online survey tools like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms or Qualtrics are great ways to do market research. They’re easy to use and don’t require too much technical knowledge.
You can create your questionnaire and publish it quickly, without needing any coding skills! Some companies will even pay you to take their surveys if you qualify.
Surveys can be fun and insightful, so don’t feel shy about asking questions. The only thing we ask is that you are careful not to mislead people in your questions. Make sure they know where you work before asked if health insurance was included as an incentive for them to buy the product.
Market researchers often have to check off lots of categories so there are many things you need to consider when picking which one to pick.
Ask your customers what they think
As mentioned earlier, talking to people is the best way to do market research. But how should you ask your questions? What types of questions are good and bad?
Good questions help you learn more about the product or service. They also give you insights into whether the company is trustworthy and if there are any potential pitfalls.
Bad questions may sound helpful at first, but eventually prove useless as you dig deeper into the product. For example, asking if someone else used the product can tell you something about the effectiveness of the product, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you much about the product yourself.
This article will go over some tips for asking really effective questions.
Make a list of your competitors
As mentioned before, defining your product is the first step in marketing anything. The second important area of market research is figuring out who your competition is!
Finding your competition can be tricky, however. You don’t want to just look at the big name brands as your main rivals, because then it seems like you are trying to compete with yourself. Plus, big companies have bigger budgets, so they spend more money on advertising than you could ever dream of having.
Instead, choose groups or individuals that are close to you and your ideal customers. These people may not actually sell your competitor’s products, but if they praise them loudly, that gives you some clues about whether their service is worth looking into or not. You also might find out why they prefer one brand over another – something that can help you determine what types of products you should make.
The best way to identify your competition is by thinking about things you love and how good those things made you feel. A classic example of this would be going after a job you have always wanted- taking business classes was a way I learned how to do business. If someone else offered similar courses, I would compare prices, services, and qualifications to see which one seemed better for me.
Create a marketing strategy
Doing market research is not the same as doing market analysis, nor does it include conducting surveys or asking questions of people about products. Marketing research includes studying your competitors’ strategies, determining what messages are working for them, and creating your own successful campaigns.
The first step in doing market research is defining what type of research you want to do. This could be defining what industry you are targeting, figuring out how much funding you have for advertising, or assessing whether there are already well-known brands that can help spread the word about yours.
After this, you will need to determine what types of research are needed. Is information about your competitors’ strategies enough? What about their advertisements or testimonials? Or must you also survey the public about reactions to their product?
Once these two steps are done, the next thing to do would be finding sources of information to learn from. You can visit online forums or talk to other business owners in your area to find out more.
Create your website
Now that you have a platform, you can start marketing! Finding products or services that are close to what other people are offering and then improving on them is a great way to begin.
You can also find companies that are similar to yours and see how they market themselves and learn from their strategies.
By creating an online presence for your business or product, you will be able to use various tools to promote yourself. These could include blogs, social media pages, advertisements, etc.
And while some may say that advertising is not necessary anymore because everyone has access to information anywhere, anything, at any time, this does not mean that it is useless. Advertising still works and there are ways to do it smartly.
Finding out if advertising is worth it for your business depends on several things such as the size of your budget, the types of customers you want to reach, and the results you expect to get back.
