How to Do Successful Market Research for Your Projects
You’re building a new product or working with a new client. Planning a launch or revamping your promotional strategy. You want the results to be really good. Let’s say you want to be the best in the market. What do you do? Where do you start?
The solution that you’re looking for is — market research.
Put simply, research helps to make sure we’re making the right plan of action for the right target audience. It is like ringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.
In this post, we’ll explain you the key elements of our market research process — be it for client projects or our in-house products.
Let’s dive straight in! 🚀
Have A Plan
When we are working on any given project, the first thing is to make a plan for creating solutions. When we involve market research, we concentrate on the following points:
Step 1: Make a problem statement or have an objective
Step 2: Develop an overall research plan
Step 3: Collect relevant data and/or information
Step 4: Analyze
Step 5: Present your findings
Step 6: Use your findings to make a decision
Think — “A good plan is like a road map: it shows the final destination and usually the best way to get there.”
Ask Questions
As Erika Hall puts it, “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have the right answer — it’s a good thing. But you don’t start by just having the answer inside you. You have to ask questions.“
It’s a fact — we all know a lot less than we think we do. Understanding and filling this informational gap and educating ourselves by using surveys, one-on-one sessions and community forums is what we recommend and also practice.
An example from one of our projects last year: To construct the marketing strategy for a client’s product related to menstrual hygiene, we first worked on understanding the mindset of the target audience by asking a set of important questions.
Competitive Landscape
Competitors data can be another solid asset for research. It not only helps you in assessing their strength and weaknesses, but also to reflect upon your own. Monitoring your competitor’s marketing reports, company blogs, Angel List and Crunchbase profiles proves to be of immense help. With an increase of the transparency culture all over the world, getting access to these data points and reports has become a lot more easier.
For example — companies now share crucial details and inside scoops through their open blogs, you can also find interesting pitch decks and presentations on Slideshare and similar platforms.
A few important aspects to analyse about competitor data can include:
- What are their key value prepositions?
- What marketing and distribution channels are they using?
- Who are their customers, where are they found the most?
- What are their pricing strategies or revenue models?
- What do you like the most about their brand and it’s presence — be it in terms of design, voice, or in general.
However, these may vary according to the industry and products you’re in. Analyzing your competitors helps to reflect on the question:
How do you stand out as a business/brand in an increasingly busy world?
The answers to this question is important to anyone launching a new product or for existing businesses to fight for their share in a crowded market. You should never ‘stretch’ the meaning of your brand under the influence of new competitors or technologies. Stay sharp, clear and consistent. The meaning of your brand/product should never erode and market research can help you here to keep your focus.
Market Trends
Thanks to Google, we have more information at our fingertips than ever before. A high quality market research is possible when we combine the information collected using interviews and surveys with the resources available online.
As an agency when you’ve to present a plan of action to clients, strategy backed by trends is much more believable and convincing. You should always be able to answer these questions:
- What are the “big picture” trends in your or your clients environment?
- How can you progress (or monitor/adapt) to these external factors?
Try to support a qualitative trend through quantitative analysis.
Our go-to resources for trend analysis include:
- Think with Google reports
- Your target country’s census data
- DeepDyve
- Research reports & knowledge base published by brand like HubSpot and Buzzsumo
- Google Scholar
Go Offline — Test With Focus Groups
Another technique that our founder Sajid highly recommends is inviting the target audience to be a part of small focus groups. Here our two approaches are:
- Arranging a discussion around the product/service with a relevant target group.
- Giving the users time to play with the product or try the service. You can even monitor or record the actions and observe their behavior.
The key here is to initiate as much activity as possible in these focus groups. It helps everyone from the team to be on the same page and act on the observations immediately. You can even do rapid prototyping during the session and take immediate feedback from the users.
Quick Tip: Holding these sessions somewhere in the early week can give you enough time to iterate and run follow-up tests later in the week.
How does your approach towards market research look like?
These are the key elements of market research we consider at The Create Labs. We’d love to learn more about your process! Are there any other strategies you use? What’s the most important factor for you or your company when doing research? What are your go-to resources?
We’d love to keep the conversation going in the comments below! 😃
Love,
#TeamCreate
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