The Power of Research, or How to Get To Know Your Audience and Outsmart the Competition

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

The fundamental truth about running a business is that you need to understand the market if you want to succeed. This means that you should learn a thing or two about the industry, your target audience, their needs, preferences, decision-making and purchasing behavior, and so on.

This will help you prepare for any significant action: kickstarting a business, venturing into new markets, launching a new product or service, starting a new marketing campaign, and so on.

If you don’t understand the market or your audience, your strategy might fall apart and you can end up losing money (depending on the scale of your business, it might be a huge sum of $$). That doesn’t sound good, right?

That’s why research is essential. But how exactly do we get this super-important knowledge?

The good thing is that you don’t have to invent the wheel: the entrepreneurs and marketers who came before you have explored different research paths — you can pick the one you like and adapt it to your situation.

The knowledge you’ll get through market research will give you a solid foundation to stand on, and you’ll be able to develop strategies based on relevant data instead of assumptions.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the details of what market research is and what it consists of.

Types of market research

First, we need to understand what kinds of market research are there.

Primary research, as its name makes it obvious, is a method of collecting the initial information about your market. In general, it’s mainly aimed at learning more about your target audience, and it comes with two stages or variations:

• Exploratory research is usually the first step that helps to gauge the general trends within the market. Usually, it’s done by conducting surveys, interviews, or focus groups with open-ended questions;
• Specific research is the next stage that delves into particular questions/problems that were discovered previously.

Secondary research is based on data that was gathered by you or other researchers (like public research centers, commercial agencies, etc.), e.g. statistics, trends reports, sales data, etc.

Now it’s time to ask the question: what exactly do you need to research?

Research your audience

The successes or failures of any business start and end with our customers — this is our North Star, the Alpha and Omega, the people that we’re doing it all for (hopefully). That’s why market research should always include your target audience.

More than likely, you already have some assumptions about who your customers are and what they need/want. Based on these ideas, you can develop your buyer personas, i.e. generalized representations of your customers.

Remember that your first buyer personas might not be very accurate — they’ll be based mostly on your guesses. But any type of research requires a hypothesis to test, and after you’re done with it you’ll be able to correct and make your initial personas more reflective of your real target market.

Sometimes your hypotheses will be confirmed as a result, but it’s way more realistic to expect that you’ll discover something about your customers that you haven’t thought of before.

You can use basic characteristics like age, gender, location, job title, income level, and common pain points for creating buyer personas, or come up with unique customer traits that are specific to your business/industry. You can also create as many buyer personas as you need to cover all groups of people within your audience.

After you create buyer personas, you’ll need to select a specific persona to make the research scope more manageable and start the process.

For example, you can research a group of customers who have purchased from you before to figure out who they are, why they decided to convert, what value they’ve got in return, what needs they’ve satisfied with your products, why they chose your brand over others, etc. You can also research those that didn’t end up converting to figure out what factors influenced their decision.

Here are some questions that can guide your research:

• What groups of people make up your target audience?
• What are your customers’ pain points, problems, and needs?
• What values do they share with each other? What do they relate to & find interesting?
• Where do they usually spend time (online or IRL)?

It’s also important to research the journey your customers take from when
they first learn about your brand to when they make a purchase and, finally, stop using your products/services.

This journey can include different stages, and they usually depend on the type of your business (B2B, B2C, etc.) and the price category of your products. For example, the journey of a customer that buys a car will typically be longer and consist of more steps than the journey of a customer that buys a bag of potato chips.

This journey does not always conform to common sense, however: some people will buy an expensive car on a whim while others will stand in front of the supermarket aisle for half an hour before they finally decide what to buy. That’s why it’s important to do proper research to understand how your customers think and behave.

These are the basic questions about the customer journey:

• How do people become aware of their needs (or whether they become aware of them only after someone will point it out — this is often the case when your business offers something completely new)?
• How do people figure out that your business can satisfy their needs? Where do they go to search for solutions? How do they discover your offers?
• What influences their purchasing decisions?
• What obstacles do they meet along their journey? What prevents them from buying or staying after the purchase?
• What customer needs are not being fully addressed by you or other players in the industry?
• How do they purchase your products or book your services? How do they prefer to receive them? How do they use them? At what point do they stop using them?

In short, you can ask questions about every tiniest step of the customer’s journey, just make sure that you cover the basics.

Research your business

You may think that you know your business as the back of your hand, but is that really so?

Researching your business just as you would research your audience or competitors is crucial for figuring out your current place within the market and finding possible ways to change or keep it.

Let’s go through the main characteristics of your business that you can research:

• Category — what kind of products/services do you offer, for whom, and for what price?
• Strengths — where does the secret power of your business lie: in product quality, price, design, features, or relationships with customers?
• Weaknesses — what are the less developed aspects of your business? You can either work on improving them or focus more on your strengths to counterbalance them.
• Brand awareness & sentiment — how ‘popular’ is your business among potential customers? How many people know and recognize your brand (especially in relation to your competitors)?
• Message — how do you usually communicate with your customers? What tone of voice and personality does your brand have, and what marketing message will fit them?
• Differentiation — what makes your products/services different? Does your business offer something new, or does it do something better than others?
• Disruptive potential — what can set your business radically apart from others in your industry? Can you be innovative and carve your own path?
• Your WHYs — what does your brand want to achieve in the long run? What values/principles does it stand for? Does it want to change something in the industry or the world?

These are just the basic aspects of your business that you can focus on, so start with them and then formulate more specific questions to answer.

Research your competitors

Of course, we can’t really talk about market research without mentioning competition as one of its primary targets. If you don’t know who you’re playing against, you risk losing your potential customers to businesses that satisfy their needs much better.

The key things that you’ll pay attention to when conducting competitor research will be the same as before (i.e. category, differentiation, message, etc.), with the addition of these two aspects:

• Pricing — how expensive are your competitors’ products/services? How do they justify their prices? What subscription models do your competitors use?
• Trends — what trends do your competitors follow, and what trends do they set? How do they use trends in their marketing campaigns and business strategies?

While researching your competitors, you might want to subscribe to their email lists or use tools like MailCharts and Really Good Emails to see what email marketing strategies they use and what offers they make.

Also, don’t forget about the easiest thing that you can do — googling keywords for your brand/products to see which of your competitors rank high and what Google ads they’re running.

Now let’s consider specific tools that we might use for research.

Research tools

The good old SWOT analysis is the basic tool for both understanding your own business and your competition. Its name stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats — the core characteristics that can help you describe a particular business in detail.

There are dozens of readily available templates for SWOT analysis, like this one by Venngage

Analyzing these characteristics will require some effort on your part: you’ll need to research the main aspects of your competitors’ business models, their target audience, their positions in the industry, etc. You can do all of this by browsing their websites to learn the details about their offers and prices, going to review and social media platforms to find out what their customers say about them, and so on.

Market surveys

Surveys are essential for researching your audience, and they can help you make the first step to getting to know your customers a bit better. Before you start conducting them, you’ll need to select a representative sample of your audience to get “good” data and make sound conclusions.

Your surveys can include questions about who your target audience is (i.e. demographic Qs), about your brand and how people perceive it, your products/services and what people like/dislike about them, the usability, price, and so on.

To make sure that you collect high-quality data, formulate your questions clearly, and keep them short and to the point to get precise answers. Depending on the topic, you can use both simple multiple-choice questions and questions that demand open-ended responses.

Keep in mind that your customers are probably busy, so give them an incentive to participate in your surveys and save more complex questions for further research.

Interviews & Focus groups

While surveys are conducted with large groups of people and are aimed at gathering quantitative results, interviews and focus groups are more about going deeper, narrowing down the scope of research to a specific sample, and collecting qualitative data.

The main difference between these two forms of qualitative research is that interviews are being conducted on an individual level, i.e. separately with each member of your sample, and focus groups are a form of a group interview where interactions with each other are encouraged.

This is the best time to ask questions that require detailed answers and allow you to get to know your customers on a deeper level.

With quantitative methods you might discover what features your customers would like to see in the future, while with interviews and focus groups, you’ll be able to learn why, or explore the specific motivations and needs that they can have.

For example, you can ask people about their concerns, frustrations, and expectations, which is something that won’t be reflected fully in the survey’s data.

Social listening

Social media will be your best friend no matter what kind of research you’re conducting. It’s one of the best places to find out more about your audience, their needs and preferences, trends and topics that they find relevant, how they perceive your brand, etc.

It’s also a place to learn more about the rates of brand awareness or reputation of your competitors, their social marketing strategies, their tactics of audience engagement, and so on.

I’ve already written about social listening before, so you can check this article for more info.

Trends analysis

This is another basic research method for finding out which trends are dominating the market landscape, which are just starting to gain traction, and which are on a decline. Analyzing trends will help you discover possible factors that influence the decisions of both businesses and customers and find ways to stay relevant in the constantly fluctuating atmosphere of modern markets.

Obviously, we can’t talk about trends analysis without mentioning Google trends — this tool is quite basic and yet essential. It can help you discover seasonal trends, niches with the most stable interest rates (to separate the long-lasting trends from fads), find product categories related to what you’re selling, monitor competitors’ performance, and a lot more.

You can see how to interpret Google trends data here.

And don’t forget about other sources of trends data as well, including social media. You can also search for top industry publications and expert blogs to keep an eye on current trends and emerging tech.

P.S.

I hope that by now you have a clearer picture in mind of what market research is & how to do it. You can start small with the basics that I’ve covered here, and then customize this simple strategy to better fit your goals.

Last but not least, check out these helpful resources:

• Market Research Kit by HubSpot (it includes helpful templates);
• Miro’s templates and guides to different kinds of research: competitive market, audience, SWOT, PEST, and gap analysis;
• Semrush’s guide to market research;
• Qualtrics’ market research trends report.