How To Do Market Research

Before you launch any business venture, it's imperative to conduct a market research. In doing this, you are saving yourself and business from avoidable and unnecessary pitfalls.

Unless, you carry out a research, all other information you may have is as good as assumptions.

What then is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering information about your potential customers, target audience and industry.

This information helps you to prepare adequately before launching your business.

In carrying out market research, you determine the feasibility of the business before committing substantial resources to the venture.

Market research is used in determining the feasibility of a business venture and viability of a new product or service. This is done through research.

A business idea may appear feasible until you conduct a research.

How do you conduct market research?

It is important you understand how to carry out market research, so you can go about it the right way.

¶ Determine the purpose of the study :

This answers the question why this research? 

Before conducting a market research, you have to define the purpose of the research. Determining the purpose of your research gives you a guide on what you are to involve yourself in or not.

There are several reasons businesses may need to conduct market research. It could be to sample a new idea, to create opportunities, or reduce issues.

Ascertaining why you are conducting a market research is the very step to conducting a proper research.

¶ Define your target customers/ buyer Persona:

You will be running at a loose end, if you don't understand or specify particularly those you want to research on. Don't be generic by thinking all customers represent your research. Specify who these target customers or buyer personas are really.

Your buyer personas are a representation of your ideal customers.

It is after you've specified them that you then begin to identify the key characteristics of your target customers.

Characteristics such as Age, Gender, Location, Income size, Family size.

These information gathered about your target customers helps you in ascertaining if the business you want to launch is something that is quite acceptable by your defined buyer personas.

¶ Prepare research questions for your market research participants:

Don't ever conduct your market research without preparing ahead what questions you intend to ask. Preparing ahead helps you to exhaust all the questions you should ask, as you have spent time thinking through and also researching.

In asking your questions, leave your questions in an open ended form, so that you do not streamline your participants.

Your questioning could be offline, online survey, or phone interview.

However, familiarize yourself with the questions, so it won't appear you are reading verbatim from a paper, should in case you are doing a phone interview.

¶ Compare your Competition:

One of the reasons for carrying out market research is to ascertain the nature of the market you are about to enter. The comparison is necessary to determine who your competitors are and draw your analysis by comparing your business idea with theirs.

After you are done identifying your major competitors , proceed to research about their products, sales and marketing strategies.

Comparing your competitors helps you discover how your competitors works and how you can perform better than they are doing.

The need for you to run a competitive analysis cannot be overemphasized. As this helps you to identify your product/ service's unique proposition.

This is what makes your business different from your competition.

Also, you are able to leverage on where your competition is falling short.

¶ Analyze your findings/ summaries:

It is important that you analyze your findings from the research in line with your purpose of the research.

Summarize all you've got and put it into use.

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