It’s never been easier to start a business. However, staying in business is a much more complicated matter. The ease of starting a business creates a much broader level of competition. During your market research you might find different business competing for each product you sell and new business that focus on a single item and spend all their time and focus on being the very best at just one thing. This increase in overall selection and more focused completion will make it more difficult for businesses of all sizes to retain customers who can change their suppliers with the click of a mouse.
It’s a battle of perception, focus, and marketing. Business owners who master these elements and provide a great customer experience will win the sale.
- Marketing and Customer Loyalty: Increased selection and competition is the challenge to market to potential customers effectively and retain your existing customers.
- Uncertainty: All of us, and especially business leaders find great discomfort in uncertainty.
The ever-running news cycle leaves everyone feeling a bit on edge. This causes business owners and executives to hunker down and customers to stop spending. You need to shut out the world ending news and get back to work.”
Understanding the Market for Informed Decision-making
Market research is the key to improving productivity, understanding market forces, internal business dynamics, and other key insights to inform your decision-making processes. The three main reasons for market research include:
- Minimize loss in your own business.
- Keep a watchful eye on competitors.
- Improve the success of marketing campaigns and sales efforts.
How Market Research Will Help You
Market research is invaluable, creating a firm footing upon which to build marketing and sales success, as well as drive innovation internally. It’s incredibly helpful for understanding specific target market, giving you a higher likelihood of success.
Here are some of the biggest wins you’ll experience:
- Market research creates new ideas, new procedures, and new ways to achieve sales targets. It’s a vital step to gather insights into your own business, your competitors, and even your clientele. Sophisticated marketing research process in the world largest corporations can gather a huge amount of data in this way.
- Detailed market research identifies key areas for growth, improvement, and expansion. Knowing what is needed, what your competitors are doing, and where your business may be falling short is key to growth.
- Detailed analysis of the market you operate in will allow you to take advantage of valuable opportunities that may have otherwise gone undetected.
- Identification of problematic areas within your business is made far easier through the marketing research process. The more insight that can be gathered about the market in which you operate, the greater your successes will become.
- The ability to plan your marketing and sales approach based on market research allows for far superior sales and prospecting abilities. Using this level of detail to inform your approach improves the likelihood of success.
When to Conduct Your Marketing Research Process
Market research is critical to success in business, and if usually used strategically at key moments. Before new products, ventures, and services are launched, it’s vital to conduct thorough market analysis to ensure that the launch is correctly positioned, communicated, and timed. After launch, market research helps to understand how the launch is going and in what areas the biggest successes can be found going forward. The more often thorough market research takes place, the more knowledge can be gathered, and more success can be achieved by using the resulting business action plan.
Most people think of market research as a part of the business action plan process, which it certainly is, but it is far broader than that. All business types can gain major wins using research techniques:
- Reliably establish targets for advertising, marketing and sales teams.
- Understand the marketing research process of getting your brand out there and making a name for yourself.
- Detect the optimal region to test and launch your new offering in, based on data points.
- Making better pricing decisions and improving market positioning.
- Coming to terms with changing client demographics.
- Identify triggers likely to bring more clients toward your company.
- Improving your team’s ability to sell to clients and build long-term relationships.
Market research is important to both new and established businesses of all sizes, whether launching new products or monitoring their performance relative to competitors. Businesses who are undergoing relocation, expansion, and other critical changes rely strongly on market research to create a business roadmap to success.
How to Conduct Market Research
Always remember that market research is designed to answer questions about your business, your competitors, and the foreseeable future of the market. There are a few steps you can follow to ensure you’re doing this properly:
- Opportunities: Find ways your business can grow, search for new tech developments, seek new potential markets, and more. Know what you’re hoping to achieve in reasonable detail and ask questions that can be found via market research.
- Market Size: You need to know how many people make up your target market, and what they respond to, to ensure you are approaching correctly.
- Right Now: How are your existing offerings performing in the marketplace? How can they be aligned to better serve clients? These and other such questions help to gauge your performance.
- Spying: Check out what the competition is doing and discover opportunities.
It’s important to understand the difference between primary and secondary market research:
- Primary research is all about defining the success of sales campaigns, the effectiveness of existing protocols, the practicality of currently used tools, and quality control metrics.
Secondary research is focused on collecting data that already exists in published works, development of strategies for benchmarking, and identifying potential market opportunities.
Two Big Market Research Wins from Big Business
Here are three key examples of incredible successes brought about by market research, from some of the world’s most successful corporations:
- McDonalds is a contender for biggest fast food chain in the world. Their market research has become refined down to four specific questions:
– Which products are selling really well right now?
– What are customers willing to pay?
– Which media sources are customers exposed to?
– Which restaurants are the most successful?
This approach has allowed management to focus on key areas of opportunity and identify areas for improvement on an ongoing basis. - The Lego Group makes use of constant market research and remains highly reactive to the data uncovered. When it was discovered that only 9% of their clients were girls, they set about an extensive 4-year study to ascertain what changes needed to be made to appeal to girls better. The end result is that Lego has been gaining more of a female following and growing an entire new product range to fit this opportunity. Using a focus group of 3,500 and insights from their digital marketing social media endeavors, they changed the future of the company for the better.
Market Analysis Is Critical – Take Assistance from an Expert
Market research is critical to success in business but can be disastrous when done badly. This is when the value of experienced professional market research analysts becomes truly apparent. Poorly conducted analysis wastes time, money, and can lead to invalid conclusions that damage decision making procedures.
Analysts have access to key resources such as focus groups, key interviewees, hard-hitting questionnaires, surveys, and more. They use these resources and tools to place businesses in the market based on the accumulated data. Making use of seasoned professionals saves time, money, resources, and shows the resulting data in such a way that multiple paths for growth can be identified.
Reach out to our expert team for assistance with your next market research project.
– Research Optimus
