How to Do Market Research
You need to learn about your industry, your competitors, and your customers in order to run a successful business. By doing market research, you will get information about your potential customers and your target market. Following are a few tips on how to do market research.
Define the purpose of your research
There are a lot of reasons why businesses do market research, for instance: creating opportunities, reducing issues, assessing business risks, and so on. Before you start conducting your research, determine its purpose.
Develop your research questions
Once you define the purpose of your research, develop your research questions. For instance:
- Does the location where you operate have a stable economy?
- What are your competitors’ weaknesses?
- What are your competitors’ strengths?
- Where are your customers located?
- How do your target customers behave?
- Who’s the ideal customer for your brand?
See who your potential customers are
You must determine who your potential customers are when you analyze the market. You need to know where your customers come from and who they are. Look at things like your customer's age, income, location, gender, occupation, marital status, education level, and so on. Once you know who your customers are, find out their interests and needs, demographics, and personalities. Once you have different customers’ characteristics, you can build different personas so they can represent your typical customers (you can have more than one customer persona). By knowing your target audience, you will serve the market and your potential customers more efficiently.
Understand your competition
You need to understand your competition in order to further analyze the market. Make sure to research what other businesses are in the industry, what they offer, who is their target audience, and what is their location. Then, make a list consisted of your main competitors. Determine their weaknesses and strengths, whether they are a threat to your business, would a customer pick their product over yours, what do they have that your business doesn’t have, and so on. Once you’ve answered these questions, determine the marketing position of your business and its advantages.
Gather your data and interpret it
Methods for collecting data often include personal interviews, online surveys, mailed questionnaires, telephone polling, and so on.
Surveys are the most commonly used method, and they ask users a series of closed-ended or open-ended questions. Online surveys are cheap and easy to conduct, and you can quickly gather a lot of data.
Interviews are consisted of having conversations with someone from your target market. They provide in-depth knowledge about your target customers and market.
Another method is organizing focus groups and inviting a few people from your target market. A moderator leads the conversation and you use the opinions you hear on the focus groups to get deeper insights on a certain subject.
Group and organize your data so it will be easier to come to conclusions. While interpreting the data, make sure to identify any major trends, and use diagrams, tables, lists to better organize your data.
Group and organize your data so it will be easier to come to conclusions. While interpreting the data, make sure to identify any major trends, and use diagrams, tables, lists to better organize your data.
