5 Criteria You Must Consider When Doing Market Research
Friday, July 10, 2020, 6:00 PM | Leave Comment
Whether you want to learn more about your ever-changing market or you’d like to expand to a new one, you need to conduct market research.
If you’ve already established presence someplace, that doesn’t mean your products or services would always fare well there.
Consumer needs and behavior change, so you need to regularly gather essential information that will help you continually improve and satisfy those needs.
And if you’re looking to tap into a new market, researching it is a no-brainer. That way, you don’t invest blindly and risk losing a lot of money.
Conducting market research can be challenging the first time around, simply because you’ve never done it before. But as soon as you get the hang of it, you’ll realize that it’s a fairly simple process, as long as you do it right.
Here are the most important factors to consider to ensure your market research bears fruit.
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Market Profitability
Will your target market make you profitable? When you subtract all your overhead costs, will you be able to make some real profit regularly?
No one can predict the future, but proper market research comes really close. If you know where to look, you’ll be able to determine whether your new business endeavor will pan out.
The key to researching market profitability is to find out more about your target audience. It would be best if you learned about their interests, preferences, spending habits, and pain points to see which products or services they are willing to spend money on.
That’s critical if you’re expanding to a new market, but it’s also crucial if you’re launching a new product or service. You need to know if people would be interested in your offerings. If not, then that market isn’t profitable.
If you fail to check for profitability, you would be marketing to your audience with a blindfold on, hoping for good results that might never take place.
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Niche Market
Trying to sell to everyone is never a good idea. Not everyone will be a good lead, so that you would waste a lot of precious time and money.
That’s why you should always go for a niche market. You’ll be able to manage it much easier and generate qualified leads and conversions.
If you try and research everyone, you would end up with too much irrelevant and inaccurate data. It would be as if you were back at square one when you had no research data, to begin with. So, you’d make bad decisions that could only hurt your business.
So, when doing market research, focus on a specific niche. That way, you’ll gather accurate information that will be invaluable for your business success.
However, if your target market isn’t a niche, break it down into segments. Audience segmentation will help you pinpoint consumers who fit perfectly into your buyer personas.
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Market Research Goals
When conducting market research, you want to obtain information that will help you make better business decisions, uncover new opportunities, and avoid failures.
But what is it that you want to accomplish? Learn more about new customer demographics? Retain existing customers? Market new products or services to existing customers? Pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of competitors? Find influencers to collaborate with?
Whatever your goals are, make sure you clearly define them before doing the research. Not only will that help you use your time and resources wisely, but it will also result in useful data that you need.
You’ll also be able to come up with the right questions for all your customer surveys and interviews.
Keep your goals in mind during the entire process, so that you don’t stray away from what really matters. Every step you take should be perfectly aligned with your goals and objectives. -
Competition
Researching your competition is also very important for your success. If you have no idea what your competitors are doing, how are you going to ensure you do better?
So, conduct a competitive analysis to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of other businesses in your industry or niche that have an established presence on your target market.
Find out how they are attracting and approaching customers, how they interact with them online and offline, and how they are addressing their pain points. Find out everything about them that could point you in the right direction to standing out.
Also, if you’re looking to hit a new market, you might want to choose one with fewer competitors. Competing with too many big guns could be a risky endeavor.
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Research Strategy or Research Types
When doing market research, you also need to think about your research strategy or research types.
There are two main research types:
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Primary Research
Primary research refers to all the information you gather on your own or with the help of a professional.
Primary market research can be:
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Qualitative
The qualitative method includes conducting online surveys, questionnaires, and interviews (phone and face-to-face). Surveys are great for collecting numerical data for statistical analysis, while questionnaires and interviews are excellent for gathering information.
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Quantitative
The quantitative method includes creating focus groups and user groups (observations), which are great for diving deeper into consumer needs, preferences, and interests.
Keep in mind that focus groups can be risky if you’re a complete rookie. For instance, if there’s a dominance bias, you could end up with inaccurate results.
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Secondary Research
Secondary research refers to looking at already published data by various public and commercial sources.
Those are typically your competitors, research companies, and government organizations that frequently publish market reports and statistics based on consumer trends.
You can also use internal sources for your secondary research. If you already have historical sales data in-house that’s relevant to your market research, it might help you learn more about your buyers.
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As you can see, doing market research is pretty straightforward. It may be a bit daunting for a beginner, but you’ll agree it’s not rocket science.
And if you have a professional in your corner, you’ll have invaluable data before you know it. You’ll supercharge your marketing campaigns, delight your target market, and ensure long-term success.
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