How to Conduct a Market Research — Infographic

Who never thought that he/she had the best product idea? However, without any proper market research, you might hit the wall and figure out that either your product idea is not good enough and/or that the target audience was wrongly specified.

Unfortunately, as our psychic power is not yet allowing us to read people’s mind, we must check the market directly by asking if our idea is the one of a mastermind. If you don’t conduct a proper market research, you might misjudge a fair market price, how to use the product at best or who will really buy your product for instance.

There are several ways of doing a thorough market research and there is no universal recipe. However, we are trying in here to give a scheme that can be adapted when you want to launch a new product on the market. We are defining through an infographic the main steps of doing an optimal market research in order to know if you are ready for the next steps, e.g. the further development of your product.

There are three different parts while doing a market research. You first define the research hypothesis, then you collect the market research data, and finally, you analyze the market data.

Define The Research Hypothesis

Before conducting a market research, you already have some ideas and/or expectations of who are your targets and who might be your best customer. However, you need to define it at first in details. The first step will be to define the product needs, e.g. if the product needs the power to work, and if there is any other special requirement to be using it. Indeed, they will help you understand the type of customer and a part of the profile you will be using for your market research.

Once this is done, you will be able to find out who your potential target audience is. Your audience can be divided into few categories: the person that will pay for your product, the person that will influence the person that will pay (aka “influencer”) and the supporters, persons that will spread the word about your product. The best is to go deep into details for the market research, which means you will have to define their age, gender, jobs, hobbies, etc etc. It’s like building a profile.

Last but not least, you will need for this market research to know where your potential customers might be living. It will help you narrow the targets and be more accurate. They are called target demographics. It can influence many things, such as your future marketing strategy, the color of the product, the shape and so on.

Collecting Market Research Data

Now that you have defined the hypothetical results of your market research, it is time to validate them and find out if you were right or not. For that, you have the opportunity to choose two directions: the primary research and the secondary research. You can combine them or only use one of them, this is your choice. most people focus during their market research only on secondary research. It might be a mistake as in this case you are only using data collected by other agencies and/or organizations. The primary research is often one of the best as you are directly getting in touch with the public and some of your future customers.

Primary Research

This type of research is one of the most effective when targeting direct opinions. However, this is often one of the most time consuming as you need to create the content. It will allow you to get the freshest content out there by targeting the profiles you want, according to your hypothesis.

Most of the time, this is performed through online surveys, such as SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Zoho Survey, and so on. Some are free, some are not, and we truly advise to go down the package option as it has way more options.

Once you have decided which platform(s) to go with for you primary market research, you will have to decide what you want to ask the targets you defined at first. You might want to plug different people in, just in order to get a better overview. It can be different departments, friends, etc. Then, time to shoot the survey and get results. You can indeed try to target different groups to get more results. You can also define a range of questionnaires and target different topics.

Secondary Research

This is usually faster and easier as a market research because you are checking some already analyzed and interpreted information. Some other researchers have already gathered information through their own primary research. You will need to define the most beneficial resources in order to make it happen, e.g. statistical, location, specific to certain industries, government studies, associations, and so on — the list is endless.

The only problem which might arise during your secondary market research is that your data collection might be outdated and/or not suitable according to your requirements. Hence, the secondary research is highly dependent on the sources of the data collection.
Once you have defined which information you needed, you will extract them and use them for your analyze and/or maybe combine them with the data you got from your primary research.

Analyzing Market Data

That’s it. You just made a thorough market research using probably the primary and secondary researches and now you need to find out if this matches your research hypothesis. This analysis will tell you if you need to adjust your market research and go back to the stage “define research hypothesis”. Indeed, this market research might show you that you were not accurately right about your market hypothesis and that you need to dive in different directions in order to find out which markets are your targets.Once you are satisfied with the results, you will perform the final analysis, establish the complete profile of your target audience and define exactly the demographics.

Once this market research has been done, you will be ready to jump on the next level. That said, it means you can now define the business model in details, find out if you can go on the B2B road, the B2C or even both. It will help you narrow down your marketing strategy as every target has a different way to be reached. All in all, nothing can go wrong after a market research and you will have the certain feeling of confidence in terms of moving forward with your new product idea.