What Are The Steps to Market Research?
This post will outline the steps of basic market research.
Such research is essential for any business - it allows you to understand your target market, identify your competition, and determine what products or services people are interested in.
First, you need to figure out who precisely you are targeting, age range, gender, income level, educational level, occupation, and hobbies.
The second step is determining what products or services people are interested in, and what do they look for when making a purchase? This can be done by conducting focus groups and online quizzes and surveys.
Focus groups allow you to gather feedback from a small group of people (Many focus groups ask naive questions which are not very useful. Be sure to use real experts with proven track records).
Surveys and quizzes will collect input from a more significant number of people.
The third step in market research is to identify your competition. Ask yourself questions such as:
Who are your direct competitors?
What products or services do they offer?
How do their prices compare to yours?
What is their market share?
Many companies market in only two or three ways, using tactics that are traditional in that business section. What other tactics could you use to go beyond your competition? Are there marketing methods you can borrow from other business sectors to promote your business?
Developing a Marketing Plan
Now you can develop a marketing plan. This will include your target audience, the channels you will use to reach them, and the budget necessary to do so.
Here is a critical and often misunderstood point about “budget”. To the greatest extent possible, all your market should be tracked, so, ideally, you know the return from every investment. Yes, you need to make your best guess at the beginning and gamble, but then the tracking can start.
If your tracking is effective enough, you can get to a position, for example, where you KNOW that for every $100 invested, you make a $200 profit. Then you can go beyond the concept of “budget” and just keep spending money as long as it keeps giving you a tracked profit.
Some companies will also create a prototype of the product or service. This will allow you to test different versions before launching into mass production, and it also allows for user feedback which can help improve the final product. You may also field test by having people try out your product or service for free so that you can see how well it works before launching into mass production.
You’ll analyze the data collected during testing sessions and make changes based on this information. You will want to look at things like user satisfaction rates, which features were liked best by customers, and any other information that might be helpful when considering whether to launch into mass production or not or what the final version will look like launching.
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After completing the steps listed above, you are now ready to start doing market research on a larger scale!
Remember – your goal is always trying new ideas out and testing them before rolling them into full-scale production so that they can become profitable ventures.
Good luck!
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