Ways to Conduct Market Research
The relationship between the market and a product is somewhere between a friend and a foe. The market is an organization’s best friend when it keeps its product at the top and the enemy when it is at the bottom.
Before introducing any product in the market, it is significant to understand the market and its needs. This will help a company to provide people in the market with what they are looking for. Additionally, this will also lead to the product becoming a friend to the market and the people. Market research is a beneficial process by which you can get to know the requirements of the industry and develop a product accordingly.
Before delving deep into the ways and methods of conducting market research, let’s begin with understanding the meaning behind market research.
What is Market Research?
Market research can be defined as the process by which the feasibility of a new product or a service can be analyzed and evaluated through research that is conducted with potential clients and customers directly. The main purpose of market research is to see how a market is faring with a particular product and on this basis, decide the reactions of the customers to the product.
Every company should conduct market research for their product. Primarily, market analysis helps in understanding the needs and requirements of the customers. But moreover, market research is a smart process conducted by any company to gain a competitive advantage against other companies with other products. Free industry reports help a company to have a basic structure and knowledge about the market.
Objectives of Market Research
The objectives of conducting market analysis mainly include
- Reducing the marketing costs
You can reduce the selling, advertising, and other marketing costs by the results of the market research. - Evaluating the concept and the need for a product or a service
One of the main purposes of conducting market research is that you know about the trends in the market and create a product accordingly. - Rating the customer service
By conducting market research, you can analyze the overall satisfaction of the customers based on multiple parameters like quality of communication between employee and customer, quality of the product, etc. - Understanding the market competition
You can get to know about the amount and severity of the competition your product will be facing once it is introduced in the market. For this, free industry reports are considered useful.
Types of Marketing Research
- Primary Research: Refers to the basic collection of the data that is obtained from the direct source.
- Secondary Research: Refers to the collection and evaluation of second-hand data that is already known by everyone.
- Qualitative Research: Based on understanding the beliefs and experiences through non-numerical data.
- Quantitative Research: Comparison of the beliefs and experiences through numerical data that can be either primary or secondary.
How to Conduct Market Research
Conducting market analysis is based on 5 basic steps.
- Determining the purpose & the state of the industry
- Identifying the potential customers
- Understanding your competition
- Collecting & Analyzing data
- Providing a product or a service based on the analysis
Ways of Conducting Market Research
Surveys
It is the most common form of qualitative research in which the respondents are asked a series of questions delivered as a questionnaire or via email. It is an inexpensive way of conducting market research which helps a company to understand the trends in the market based on the answers of the people.
It is crucial to ask the right questions as good questions will result in better analysis.
Interviews
Interviews are a direct form of communication with the respondent. Conducting interviews with potential customers is considered to be insightful as it helps in gaining greater empathy for their experience.
Conducting interviews is perceived more useful as the interviewers can ask deep questions that will help them to investigate and evaluate better.
Focus Groups
Focus groups bring a selected group of people together where they discuss market trends and innovations. In many cases, conducting focus groups leads to the creation of new product ideas.
Focus groups are informal as compared to surveys and interviews which encourages people to share more about their perspectives.
Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis is when researchers evaluate the competition in the market. It is one of the strategic forms of conducting market research. Competitive analysis helps the researcher to determine the product which rivals their product. In this way, there is a scope for improvement of the product.
In addition to competitive analysis, free industry reports help a researcher to get to a better conclusion.
Secondary Research
Secondary research involves all the quantitative and qualitative data gathered by the researcher from third parties. This type of research is useful as fewer resources are used and the quantity of data is more.
The results are according to the developing trends in the market. After all forms of primary research, this type of research helps in gathering better results.
Conclusion
In the end, where budget allows, a survey with a representative sample is great, but this requires market research professionals for survey design, sampling, weighting and, data analysis. This can be high-level stuff like brand awareness or much more useful things like choice modeling studies where you understand what aspects of the product are driving purchase behavior. It is super useful if you want to know how your product is perceived against the rest of the market and where to focus to drive uptake.
Summary
This article discusses market research and the different ways by which you can conduct market research. Market research can be defined as the process by which the feasibility of a new product or a service can be evaluated through research that is conducted with potential customers directly. Free industry reports help a company to have a basic structure and knowledge about the market. The objectives of market research are to reduce marketing costs, analyze the need for a product in the market, rate customer service and test the market competition. The four types of marketing research are primary research, secondary research, qualitative research, and quantitative research. Market analysis can be conducted by determining the purpose & the state of the industry, identifying the potential customers, understanding your competition, collecting & analyzing data, and providing products based on the analysis. The various ways of market research include conducting surveys, interviews, organizing focus groups, competitive analysis, and conducting secondary research.
