Market research is an incredibly vital ongoing process for businesses, for use when starting a business to regular monitoring to ensure that businesses stays ahead of the market by knowing your customers (everything from who they are, their buying patterns and their needs and wants), your competitors (what they sell, how they sell, how successful they are), the industry trends (what is the forecast for your market, how is it changing, what new developments are expected). Below a brief explanation of what exactly market research is, why is it important in addition to some tips to help you do it well.
What is market research?
Market research is the ongoing process of collecting data on customers, competitors, and the market in general. In essence, doing well will answer three key questions: who your customers are, what their shopping and buying habits are and how many of said customers are there.
Why is market research important?
Simply put, if you don’t know your customer (i.e. you haven’t done your market research) then you probably won’t be able to sell them your product or service. Sure, you may have a general idea of who your customer is, but business decisions made on assumptions is only one type of business: risky. The most successful companies have one thing in common – they know their customer. If you don’t prioritize your customer and their needs, you stand to lose them to a competitor who knows them better.
What are the best tips on doing market research?
To help you begin the ongoing process of market research, we have highlighted some of the key aspects used by successful businesses.
Persona creation
Business owners should create customer personas. Giving your customer a name and “personality” helps to steer your product development, marketing and sales teams in the right direction. This data can be gathered from surveys, interviews, or on-page data gathering. To get the right data, it is important to keep the questions short and sweet to avoid user fatigue. It is also important to know the right questions to ask which includes asking the users who they are, what their goals are when using the website, and the obstacles that they may have had when trying to get to their goals.
Getting the message to potential customers via surveys
The best way to know would be to ask and business owners can do this via surveys. Be direct with the questions but it is also important to ask only a few. Taking note of their answers is a very important aspect as it tells a lot about the market and the potential customers. As a way of saying thank you for answering the survey, businesses can offer discount vouchers. These surveys can also help businesses let people know about the business by mentioning the brand, product, or service.
Know your industry.
While a product or service may be quite good, if the industry is small or perhaps in decline then your business may not do well or may only experience short-term success. That is why it is important to do research to understand the market in which you operate, from the size to the trends and the expected growth or decline. If the market is not big enough to keep the business going and if there are a lot of competitors, then changing the service or product you sell may be necessary. We recommend using the HubSpot market research kit to help get you started.
Competitor Research
As you get to know the industry as mentioned above, it is important to take note of, monitor and analyze your competition. This helps business owners understand what success and failure looks like in the industry, so you know what to adapt and what to avoid.
Put it all together
All of the above information should be combined to form a final report which includes the key findings from your research, and, most importantly, how to use this information to reach your company goals by setting recommendations and actions.
Solid and updated market research should form the backbone of product/service development and sales. By continually knowing your customer’s needs and habits as well as monitoring the competition and the industry, helps business owners plan for the future, develop new ideas, increase sales and customer loyalty, all with the aim to increase the bottom line.
published under Business Address Guides
