Executive Chronicles | Useful Market Research Tips | Consumers today wield a great deal of influence. They have at their disposal a vast amount of information to make purchasing decisions. Thus, it’s crucial to understand current market research tips and trends to bring your new product or service to market.
For instance, consumers nowadays tend to look at online reviews and listen to family and friends’ recommendations rather than ask a sales rep. By understanding modern consumer behaviors, you’ll be better positioned to know the right questions to ask in your market research.
In this post, we’ll take a look at seven useful market research tips to help your business find the right pathways to success. But first, we’ll make clear what market research is and why you should do it.
What Is Market Research?
Market research is obtaining information regarding your company’s customer base, target market, and consumers. You do this to evaluate how feasible and profitable your products or services could be, or already are, among such individuals.
In simple terms, you’re trying to understand all the relevant people interested in what you have to offer. By understanding them, you can then make necessary changes to how you sell and market your products or services.
This approach is practical when the digital world grows louder and requires more of your attention. You can see it like separating the core signals from the vast noise out there.
The great news is, if you know where to look, you can learn a lot about your current and potential customers. You can find out the problems and desired solutions of many consumers to help you meet their needs.
So now, let’s run through our seven marketing tips to give you a solid market research edge among your competition.
Understand Primary Market Research
Primary and secondary research are indeed two main forms of market research to consider. Understanding how to use market research approaches like these will help all your company to gather relevant info.
Primary research is all about gathering first-hand info about your customers and market. It helps find information to segment your market and figure out buyer personas. Exploratory and specific market research are two primary market research types you can consider.
Exploratory Primary Research
This type of primary market research is concerned with possible issues worth solving as a team. It’s less to do with looking at observable customer trends.
You tend to do it at the preliminary stage before you do any particular research. Companies tend to include open-ended surveys or interviews with small groups of individuals at this stage.
Specific Primary Research
You often use exploratory primary market research after specific primary market research. It’s an excellent way to delve deeper into challenges or opportunities that the company has recognized as essential.
In this phase, a company might seek information from a more focused market subset to solve a perceived problem.
Understand Secondary Market Research
Secondary research refers to all of the data and public documents you have access to develop conclusions. For example, you may use trend reports, industry content, market statistics, and sales data you already have in your business.
When performing secondary market research, such sources become your initial and most accessible source of content. They tend to be free to locate and evaluate, so you get a lot of value for money here.
Secondary research is very beneficial when assessing your rivals. The following are the key categories into which your secondary market research will be about:
Internal Sources
Companies should give more credit to internal sources for assisting market research than they have. This reason is that this is market data that your company already possesses.
You can determine what customers are looking for by looking at the average revenue per user or sale and customer retention rates. You can also use various other historical data about the health of new and old accounts.
Public Sources
One of the most popular forms of public data is government statistics. This makes sense as the government gathers so much information from the public, in democratic societies at least.
The Bureau of Labor & Statistics and The U.S. Census Bureau are two examples of market data made public in the United States. Both provide helpful information about the condition of various sectors around the country.
Commercial Sources
There are also many market reports from various commercial sources that a company can make use of. Bear in mind, the cost of such information tends to be high.
However, it’s always worth looking into commercial sources. This is because you can sometimes find highly relevant data for your particular industry and your products and services.
Another great source of data is opinion polls. These are questions posed to the population about the specific subject matter. Then research companies extrapolate the info into generalizations that can be useful. One example here is Will Johnson, The Harris Poll.
Know the Types of Market Research
We’ll mention several market research types here to consider. By at least knowing these options, you can go ahead and research them all further. This way, you see if they fit with your plans for carrying out market research.
Interviews and focus groups allow you to see how potential customers react to questions. These methods will provide you with subjective information that you can add to the bigger picture of your research.
Service or product use research focuses on learning why and how your customers use your services or products. Here, you should be aiming to measure the usability of your products or services.
You can also look into observation-based research. Here, your aim is to take note of what users do with your products or services. This is a sound research methodology for knowing how well your UX design works.
Other forms of research include:
- Buyer persona research
- Pricing research
- Market segmentation research
- Brand awareness research
- Competitive analysis
- Campaign research
And we’ll mention that customer loyalty and satisfaction research is always worth looking into. Now let’s move on to some more direct and practical tips for using market research.
Getting Started
So now you should have all your primary and secondary sources that you want to use loosely figured out. It would help if you also had some solid ideas of the methods of research you want to use to find specific info.
To make all these things clear, maybe have a document that outlines your intentions. You could list out what you’ve decided and then put it aside.
And before you delve into new research, why not take a look at what info your company already has? If there is any that seems relevant, create another document that highlights what might be useful later, and put that aside too.
Begin With Google for Secondary Sources
Beginning with Google is such an obvious place to start when conducting market research. By searching about the topics you’re interested in, you’ll gain a realistic impression of what’s out there.
It’s worth trying Google Scholar as well as the standard Google search. Maybe make a list of questions that pop into your mind about what you what to find out. Don’t be too fussy at this point. The idea here is to get the ball rolling.
Copy and paste any relevant information, charts, graphs, or quotes you think appropriate. Once you’ve accumulated enough info, you can then go back and organize it better.
Contact Market Experts
If you find someone who appears to be an expert in the area you’re looking into, you have little to lose by contacting them. A quick talk with an expert may generally offer you a fair overview of the field you’re looking into while also identifying crucial concerns to think about.
Some experts may cost a lot, others not so much, and some may give you free information. You could also work out a deal where you provide a backlink from your website to their site. You could do this in exchange for some of their knowledge, for example.
Whatever the case, getting a different perspective from other people in your market can be invaluable. They may even suggest avenues of research to pursue you never thought of before.
Make Your Own Graphs and Charts
Once you have collected a fair amount of information, it’s time to stop and synthesize what you’ve found. A great way of doing this is to create your own graphs and charts for the data you’ve found.
This information will be helpful for future presentations down the line. But, it will also help you understand what’s going on in your market at a deeper level.
Some Handy Market Research Tips
We’ve now run through seven useful market research tips. To begin with, we believe you need to identify the sorts of info you need. Then, when it comes to the actual research part, you won’t be so confused and lost in all the mountains of data out there.
Many thanks for checking out this post; we hope you found it helpful. If so, please consider checking out our blog for further tips and advice.
