Effective market research is the pathway to the success for your business. What does market research accomplish? It primarily studies the factors influencing consumer behavior - cultural factors, social factors, personal factors and psychological factors.
The need for market research – Your company needs market research mainly to identify potential consumers who can be the targets for your products and service. Knowing your customer in and out, market segments study, setting targets and working towards them are some of the factors that help in making your product or service a tremendous success.
Market research can be classified into primary or secondary.
The need for market research – Your company needs market research mainly to identify potential consumers who can be the targets for your products and service. Knowing your customer in and out, market segments study, setting targets and working towards them are some of the factors that help in making your product or service a tremendous success.
Market research can be classified into primary or secondary.
1) Primary research – gives you insight into consumer actions and behavior. The data is gathered directly from consumers through opinion polls, telephonic interviews or surveys.
2) Secondary research – is conducted with the help of reports from other competitor websites or from blogs.
Deciding on which research type to use can vary depending on the purpose of conducting research. You can also choose to use a combination of the two.
Steps to success –
The following steps can effectively lead you towards a successful marketing research strategy.
Deciding on which research type to use can vary depending on the purpose of conducting research. You can also choose to use a combination of the two.
Steps to success –
The following steps can effectively lead you towards a successful marketing research strategy.
1.Start with identifying the purpose of your research. Determine what you want to know. This can make the research more focused and the data churned out will be more valuable.
2.Get your interview questionnaires or hypotheses for your target consumers in place. Think of a logical flow of questions and follow-up questions that can help you gain comprehensible data.
3.Search for a relevant group of people to conduct your research. For e.g. if your research is about a household product, that you need to populate housewives or homemakers who can be perfect target for your research.
4.Select your method of conducting research. If the target audience size is small, you can consider personal interviews. If the size of the audience is large, consider social media or email lists.
5.Once your research is done, it is time to make sense out of it. Analyze the information got and you have already begun putting your company on the pathway to success.
Simply take care to avoid these errors –
1. Relying solely on competitors’ reports and websites.
2. Using only web sources. These could be outdated and misleading.
3. Conducting surveys only on acquaintances, family or friends once again can provide misleading results.
To sum it up, your market research when conducted effectively will answer the following questions–
- Who are your customers?
- What are their buying habits?
- Why do they buy?
Now that the importance of market research is clear to you, why don’t you take the next step towards conducting primary or secondary market research for your company and expand your business???
