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Market research is assembling data about your target market and customers to confirm the success of a new product. In addition, it helps your team iterate on an existing product or understand brand perception to ensure that your team effectively communicates the value of your business. Market research tools include focus groups, telephone interviews, and questionnaires. The market research results inform the product’s final design and determine how it will be positioned in the market.
Understanding Market Research
Market research determines the viability of a new product or service. The results can be used to revise the product design and refine the audience presentation strategy. This may include information collected to determine market segmentation. It also informs product differentiation, which is used to personalize advertising.
Market research is an essential tool businesses use to understand what customers need, develop products that those consumers will use, and maintain a competitive advantage over other businesses in their industry.
A company engages in various tasks to complete the market research process. First, it gathers information based on the market sector the product targets. This info is then analyzed, and relevant data points are interpreted to conclude how the product can be optimally designed and marketed in the market segment for which it is intended.
Types of Market Research
- Interview
- Discussion groups
- Research on the use of products/services
- Observational research
- personality research
- Market segmentation research
- Price Search
- Competitive Analysis Research
- Research on customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Brand awareness research
- Campaign Research
How to do Market Research?
1. Define your buyer persona.
Before diving into how customers in your industry make buying decisions, you first must understand who your customers are. This is where your buyer personalities come in handy. Buyer personas, sometimes called marketing personas, are fictional and widespread illustrations of your ideal customers. Use a free tool to build a buyer persona your entire business can use to market, sell, and serve better.
Some key characteristics you should want to include in your buyer persona are:
- Age
- Gender
- Lease
- Job titles
- Family members
- Revenue
- Major tasks
The impression is to use your persona as a guide to effectively reach and learn about actual audience members in your industry. Additionally, you may find that your business lends itself to more than one persona – that’s good! Therefore, you must consider each specific persona when optimizing and planning your content and campaigns.
2. Identify a personality group to engage.
Now that you know who your buyers are, use this information to help you identify a group to engage with to conduct your market research. It should be a cross-section of your target customers so that you can better understand their natural characteristics, challenges, and buying clothes.
The group you identify to engage with should also be people who have recently made a purchase or deliberately decided not to. Here are some additional guidelines and tips to help you find the right participants for your research.
How to Identify the Right People to Hire for Market Research?
When deciding who to hire for your market research, focus on people who exhibit the characteristics that apply to your buyer persona. You should also:
- Aim for 10 participants per buyer persona.
- Choose people who have recently interacted with you.
- Gather a mix of participants.
- Pull a list of customers who have made a recent purchase
- Pull a list of consumers who were in an active review but did not make a purchase.
- Call for participants on social networks. Try reaching out to people who follow you on social media but have decided not to buy from you.
- Operate your network. Let your colleagues, former colleagues, and LinkedIn connections know you are conducting a study.
- The finest method to ensure you get the most out of your discussions is to be prepared. It would help if you always created a discussion guide for a focus group, online survey, or phone interview to ensure you cover all the priority questions and use your time wisely.
3. Prepare research questions for your market research participants.
The best way to ensure you get the most out of your conversations is to be prepared. It would help if you always created a discussion guide for a focus group, online survey, or phone interview to ensure you cover all the priority questions and use your time wisely. Your discussion guide should be in outline form, with time allotted and open-ended questions for each section.
Yes, this is a golden rule of market research. You never want to “lead the witness” by asking yes and no questions, as this puts you at risk of unwittingly influencing their thoughts by leading with your guess. Asking open-ended questions also helps you avoid one word.
4. List your main competitors.
List your top competitors — keep in mind that listing your competitors isn’t always as easy as Company X versus Company Y.
- Sometimes a company’s division can race with your chief product or service, even though that company’s brand may put more effort into another area.
- Content-wise, you may compete with a blog, YouTube channel, or similar publication for incoming website visitors, even if their products don’t overlap with yours.
Identification of business opponents – To recognize competitors whose products or services overlap with yours, determine the industry(s) you are researching. Start at a high level, using terms such as education, construction, media and entertainment, catering, healthcare, retail, financial services, telecommunications and agriculture.
Make a list of companies that also belong to that industry. You can build your list in the following ways:
Review your industry quadrant on G2 Crowd: This is your best primary step in secondary market research in some industries. G2 Crowd totals user ratings and social data to create “quadrants,” plotting companies as competitors, leaders, niches, and top performers in their respective industries. G2 Crowd specializes in digital content, IT services, human resources, e-commerce, and related business services.
Download a market report: Companies like Forrester and Gartner offer yearly free, gated market forecasts on the vendors that dominate their industry.
Search using social media: Social networks make significant business directories if you use the search bar correctly. On LinkedIn, for example, select the search bar and enter the name of the industry you are pursuing. Then, under ‘More,’ select ‘Companies’ to limit your results to companies that include that term or a similar industry term on their LinkedIn profile.
Identification of content opponents
Search machines are your best friends in this area of secondary market research. To find the online publications you compete with, take the general industry term you identified in the section above and develop a handful of more specific industry terms your business identifies with.
5. Summarize your findings.
To make the process easier, try using your favorite presentation software to create a report, making adding quotes, diagrams, or callout clips easier. Feel free to add your style, but the following outline should help you write a perfect summarization:
- Background: Your objectives and why you conducted this study.
- Attendees: Who you spoke to? A table works well to break down groups by persona and customer/prospect.
- Summary: What are the most exciting things you got to know? What do you plan to do about it?
- Awareness: Describe common triggers that cause someone to enter into an assessment. (Quotes can be compelling.)
- Consideration: Provide the main themes you discovered and detailed sources used by buyers when evaluating them.
- Decision: Describe how a decision is made, containing the individuals at the center of influence and any product structures or data that can make or break a deal.
- Action plan: Your analysis has likely revealed a few campaigns you can launch to introduce your brand to shoppers sooner and more effectively. Provide your list of priorities, a timeline, and the impact this will have on your business.
Final Thoughts
Market research is vital to a company’s research and development (R&D) stage. It helps companies understand the viability of a new product being developed and see how it might perform in the real world. The market research services are overgrowing, which signifies a strong interest in market research as 2023 dawns. Consequently, the market is expected to grow from around $75 billion in 2021 to $90.79 billion in 2025 at a compound annual growth rate of 5%.