5 Steps to Market Research: a Guide for Entrepreneurs

Marketing research is a key component in any business. It allows you to understand what your customers want and need, and how they feel about your products or services. In this guide, we will discuss 5 steps that will help you with effective marketing research for your company!

In order to conduct market research, you need to gather information and collect market data about a market within an industry. Your analysis should study the dynamics of a market and what makes target customers tick.

Primary market research is the research you perform yourself. You collect data from interviews, questionnaires, and surveys for your potential customers.

Secondary market research is market research that has already been executed. This includes reports and academic studies performed by institutions or universities but they usually cost more for the business.

1) Identify the purpose for conducting market research

It is very important to clearly identify why you want to perform market research. This research will cost you time and money so you need to make sure that it is worth it. There are many reasons why to perform market analysis; risk assessment, identify potential competitors, reduce your costs or find new opportunities in the market. You can also search for past problems so that you can predict futures difficulties.

2) Industry outlook of the target market

From your secondary research, you can find numerous reports and studies with qualitative research and demographic data that will help you assess your industry. Through this industry assessment, you can find the industry’s potential threats from external environments like government barriers of trade or digital transformation. Furthermore, you can explore further what are the opportunities arising in the industry and what are the potential threats your industry might face in the future. You can also have a clear view of your competition and what are the solutions they are offering.

3) Find your potential customer’s profile

In order to perform your own market research for your business, you need to also identify the target audience of your product or service. From your primary research, you can collect qualitative data through questionnaires and surveys, that will help you find the buying habits of your focus groups. You can also identify demographic information such as income level, age, occupation, and country of residence. This way, you can create a more specialized and focused approach to your marketing strategy.

4) Gather as much data as possible

When it comes t your market research, your best ally is the amount of data gathered. The more information you collect, the more valuable your results will be in order to create more accurate strategies and decisions. The data you have should be relevant, factual, and unbiased. You should be able to back up your research and make decisions based on accurate information. Apart from universities and institutions, you can also communicate with the Bureau of statistics of your country or State journals and commerce website.

5) Analyze your findings

You should focus your marketing efforts and marketing strategies based on the data you have collected. Your digital marketing efforts should be based on the potential customer profile you created in the third step and the industry outlook of the second step. By conducting a market analysis you should be able to identify your business’s internal and external environment along with financial information for your competition like cash flow cycle and profit margin in order to better assess your product’s ideal selling price and volume.

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