How To Do Market Research
Today consumers have a lot of power. They can make their purchase decisions on their own and they can research about any product from anywhere and anytime. On the basis of that research they can make decisions on their own.
Similarly, you should go for the same pace and adopt that strategy through which you can identify the consumer, their research, what they buy, and from where they buy. Before that, you must know who is your buyer and the influence on them and what is your market.
Before diving into how to do market research, know that;
What Is Market Research?
Market research is the technique to gather information and to understand the target market of the company. It helps in identifying your target customers, their buying behavior and habits, their buying power, their buying patterns, what is the size of your target market.
Through this research, you can identify the customer’s problem, their desires, and the solutions you can provide. On this basis, you can build a better product or service to solve their problem, enhance their experience and fulfill their desires.
Why Do Market Research?
Market research helps you to meet your buyer and where they are. Without the research, it will be impossible to better understand your customer and their needs and wants. Through understanding of your customer, you can give them solutions about their problems.
Market research will help you in better understanding your customer because market research is usually conducted on a large scale.
With a huge number of sample size of your target audience. It helps in removing any biased data, manipulative responses, and eliminates bias, and you can reach to the heart of your customer’s behavior.
From this, you will be able to understand the bigger picture and make better decisions according to your customer’s needs and wants.
Through research you will be able to better understand the following things;
- Who are your target market customers and from where they are conducting the product or market research
- Their problems and the possible solutions you can provide
- Their behavior towards the price of the product or service
- Which competitor of your company is currently providing them solutions and to which competitor they look up to for the solutions
- What in the market is currently trending
- Converting an unaddressed customer to your buyer
- Is their demand of your business products or service
Types of Market Research
There are basically two types of market research, that are primary and secondary market research. There are further types under these two umbrellas.
1. Primary Research
A research you conduct by yourself or you hire someone to do research on your behalf. It usually is going directly to the source of information like customers, potential customers in the target market. Asking them the questions and gathering information on the basis of answers.
While conducting primary research, you are going to have two types of information;
1. Exploratory Primary Research
It involves long interviews with the individuals or small groups, and it is general and open-ended. This type is more concerned about potential problems, and to identify them.
2. Specific Primary Research
This type of primary research is used to solve the problem that is identified during exploratory research. It is more precise, involves structured and formal interviews.
Primary research includes;
Interviews
Interview is a virtual or in person face to face discussion, with a member of your target market. It’s a natural flow of information, question answer and you watch out the interviewee’s body language. This will help you knowing their preferences, and their choices.
Furthermore it will also help you design buyer persona. Buyer persona is basically a profile of your customer which covers their age, gender, family size, job title, and lifestyle. This profile will help you in shaping your product and marketing strategy.
Surveys
Survey is mostly and commonly used technique in research. Within which you ask the respondent a series of open or close ended questions. You can both use online or in-person technique for it, but now-a-days online surveys are very important and popular.
Questionnaires
A questionnaire is basically a printed or written series of questions. The purpose of it is to gather the information from the respondents or the people from your target market.
Focus groups
Focus groups is the handful amount of carefully picked people. To which you can have test your product, and you can show them a demo. You can also ask them the questions, and they can provide you the feedback about it.
This type of research will help in you in generating ideas for product differentiation. Not only this but also you can enhance the product quality or you make necessary changes in the product before launch.
Observation
Observation is when you sit-back and observe what your customer do with your product, how they react to it, and how they feel while using it.
During this, someone from the company will observe them closely and take notes about their live experience with the product.
Continuing the types of research, here we are going to discuss the second type of market research.
2. Secondary Research
In secondary research, data has already been collected, compiled, summarized, organized and published by others. It is helpful in analyzing the competitor of your business.
It is all the data and public records, including reports and studies from different governments, agencies, trade associations, or other businesses in the same industry.
For a small business with a limited budget, this type of research method is very useful and beneficial, because it way more faster, easy to access and affordable. Many firms can find these data easily as they all have been made public and available on internet.
The main source of secondary research involves;
Public Sources
This is most easiest accessible way for accessing the market research data, because they are often free. For example, government statistics agency reports are the most common examples, like U.S. Census, and Beareu of Labor Statistics.
Commercial Source
These sources are often in the form of market reports, gathered and compiled by the industrial agencies like Pew, Gartner and Forrester. They usually cost some amount of money to download the data.
Where to find market research data?
Here are top 5 sources where you can find market research data;
- U.S. Census
- Beareu of Labor Statistics
- Consumer Expenditure Survey
- Mybestsegments
- SBDCNet Business Snapshot
Top 5 best market research tools
Here are top 5 best market research tool;
How to do market research?
Now, here we are going to discuss how to do market research step by step. These steps will make you clarify about who are the users of your business products or service and what they want from your business.
1. Define and create your buyer persona
Before going into details about the buying behavior and decision of your customer. Firstly, you must take a look on who they are. Buyer persona’s are usually created on the basis of fiction, or general perception about an ideal customer.
Buyer persona is basically created of people who buy the product or service or use websites similar to yours.
There are some characteristics that should be in the buyer persona;
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Location
- User status
- Job title
- Family size
- Their problems
You can identify those personas and you may see that you business may fall into more than one persona, but that’s totally fine. Simultaneously, you should keep in mind the buyer persona, when you are planning and creating your marketing plans.
You can use email, virtual or online surveys and interviews to get better understanding of your customer and develop a persona. Whatever you may ask, make sure they should answer that who are they, what are their main goals, and the barrier between those goals.
2. Engage the identified persona group
When you have defined and created your business persona, now you will use that information. Immediately after that, you will be able to identify who are your business persona group. They will represent your target market so that you will be able to understand their buying habits and behavior.
You must identify at least 10 members per buyer persona and have separate samples for each buyer persona. You must select those people who recently made purchase or interacted from you, and have a mix of participants so much so that they will have information from all ends.
3. Conduct research
Create a discussion guide or key, and it should be for all the types of researches, like focus group, interview, survey, or observational research. So that you must know the possible answers before, time allotted, cover all the questions and use time efficiently.
You can conduct an interview on individual basis from the members of your target market. Dig deeper and explore them and their concerns, which can give all of your answers.
You can ask them open-ended questions, the questions which cannot be answered by simple yes or no. This will help you in exploring them more and so that they may talk more and you listen more.
Here are some tips to conduct it, like you can;
- Ask them more and more about their lives, their likings and disliking, their needs and wants, and how your product is going to help them.
- Listen to them more and talk less. With this they will open up and be more confident to give answers and you should be curious to know more and more about them. You can ask why questions to go more and more deeper in them.
- Record the overall conversation, so that you may not be busy in taking notes, and can better focus on the ongoing conversation and ask more and more and explore the person.
You can also use another technique that is the observation, to observe someone using your or your competitor’s product. In this technique, you can use one of two methods;
- Overt observation in which you let customer know or ask them if they let you watch you using your or your competitor’s product.
- Covert observation in which you don’t let customer know that you are observing them using your or your competitor’s product.
In both cases, record their each and every movement and also mention their work flow.
4. Identify your competitors
It is very important step because there are competitors in the market who may not be your direct competitors, can be your indirect competitors. Any division of a company might be competing with your main product.
You must know who are your competitors, direct and indirect both, their products or services, their offers, their sales and marketing strategies, their performance in the market and how they can be a threat to your business.
5. Summarize and analyze the findings
Now it’s time to summarize your data, make a report and add necessary information you collected during all the process.
You can add;
- A background of your study like why you conducted this study and what was your goal
- List of group of buyer persona and their participants
- A summary of things you learned during the whole process and what you are going to do with the data
- Mention your decision
- Make an action plan according to it, that what steps you are going to take to support your decision
Conclusion
Here we conclude how to do market research and here you learned that what is market research, why to do it, how to do it. But overall it is a lengthy process but for any business it will be very beneficial to conduct a market research.
It will not only provide you a clear look on the future, but also it will help you in crafting and altering your current strategies so that you can make your business more profitable and give more and more solutions to the customer’s problems.
How To Do Market Research FAQ
1. How to do market research?
- Define and create your buyer persona
- Engage the identified persona group
- Conduct research
- Identify your competitors
- Summarize and analyze the findings
2. Can you do your own market research?
Yes you can conduct your own market research, using secondary research resources and existing resources. These resources will save you a lot of time but the data will not be according to your customer group. You can also directly approach customers with your own generated surveys.
3. Do I need a market research firm to get reliable data?
No, you don’t need a market research firm to get reliable data. Rather, we suggest you take small steps and do it on your own. By following a simple strategy of questionnaire, surveys, or interviews, you can gather results. You can test them whether they are the positive results or not.
4. How to do market research for a product?
In the case of product, you can follow the similar steps which are mentioned above;
- Define and create your buyer persona
- Engage the identified persona group
- Conduct research
- Identify your competitors
- Summarize and analyze the findings
But all of these portions will be covered for the product, not a business.
5. What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative research?
In qualitative research, researcher asks questions that cannot be minimized to numeric value. For example, what you like the most about our service?
In quantitative research, researcher asks questions whose answers can be minimized to numeric values. For example, what you like the most about our service? Rate between 1 to 5.
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