Why Market Research could make or break your business

Oh, I should have thought this through!’ ‘Can’t figure why the market is not responding favourably to my product’ ‘Oh fish, why is the client drop rate so high after first use’ You would have heard these refrains extensively in your professional life. Well look no further, it has been commonly observed that many to be entrepreneurs while starting up or current business owners while introducing a product does so on instinct, or checking with known contacts or affiliates or better still the opportunity played up for them. It is something that 99% of the people refrain from doing so, when they embark on a new journey or a project.

It all weighs in between a poor planned person or a better planned person with Market research and data.

Market research is not for the faint hearted. Every human being faces same challenges and there is a constant battle inside their own mind, a part of them that nudges to do hard work and be ready for challenges and the other part asks them to find out shortcuts to achieve their goals fast. We believe that if all of us has better understanding of time and data we could take favourable decisions and marketing research is one such tool that help entrepreneurs in taking informed decisions.

The importance of marketing research:

Market research is an important step to succeed, no matter which business you are set out to do.

What is market research? 

Market research is studying and gathering information about your consumer needs and preference, getting to know your customer base better, what they like and dislikes.

This help in a conclusive decision or closing a deal in a much sure-footed manner. Best way to do market research in today’s age is the internet. Market researchers go to tool, to find analysis about their customers. A lot of information could be gathered about consumers and your competitors, helping you take wise and important decisions.

People are ready to give information.

What do they need from a brand? Their expectations from the brand?

Marketing research techniques aims to identify potential customer, better precision to reach customer and a whole set of other objectives. We will share 10 types of market research technique to identify potential customer

1. Analyze your competition:  if you do not have customer base, analyze your competitors and identify customer groups interested in your products or services.

2. Identify customer’s needs:  Group or segment customers based on needs, psychology and behavior, interest, habits, frequency of purchase of product or service.

3. Ask yourself some questions:  what is your consumer mindset? What online community are they part of? What does a member of online community consider to be important? What’s their language?  What their attitude about the subject, what is current level of information, some audience have a wide range of knowledge what are they suspicious about? What encourages them?  what do they love?  And what do they ultimately want?

4. Google key word research tool: Terms and phrases your target audience searches using various online tools available. This will help you align your offerings with what the discerning consumer wants.

5. Perform some experiments:  Another great way to know customers behavior. You could set up small samples and test the theory to get important data.

6. Do personal interviews: personal interviews, un-structured open-ended questions, they usually do not represent large amount of population, they give insights into customers. Ensure that the sample set is of adequate size

7. Online research: You could use Social Media responses by user groups to get information on your discerning user base.

8. Formal or written research: This research is done by using newspapers, magazines, journals. This research is good as opinions collated are on basis of formal data.

9. Ask a question to your audience: Polls and Surveys are excellent tools for research. Ask after customer made purchase, or even potential customer by email.

Market research is very important it helps to find target customer, getting customer reaction on product already sold by the company or before product launch.

At the outset we need to ascertain the addressable market, understand the demand matrix. How much demand is there for the idea? What could be the likely consumer pool, how can we price the offering, whether low, moderate or high price. You need to put your ideas in to this demand matrix.

1. High end means high price and few customers, think up Montblanc, Bentley, Rolls Royce, amazing companies with super products, but large no of people never buys them. 

2. Golden goose price is relatively high and number of customers are massive. Think about Apple iPhone, natural example, this is sweet spot pricing, gives as mass market feel,

3. Price is low but number of customers is massive, what kind company you can think about?  MacDonald’s, Star bucks, is perfect example.

4. Last category, you may love it but may not be profitable business. You want to do it, you have passion and knowledge and creditability but few are interested, like teaching salsa to youth, cake making business, you can’t charge them more here.

You need to find out demand, product fit, pricing, and marketing strategy and therefore you need to employ market research tools based on above matrix to derive market intelligence.

10 best commonly used market research tools, used widely by entrepreneurs across the globe

1. Google trends, by analyzing google search, phrase, word, searched as percentage of total search in your market, google trends has research features, easy to navigate and is totally free.

2. Statista, is one of the business tools that gives access to market research from data institutes and govt institutes researching various industries. It helps to understand nature of competition, relative size of industry and has some amazing feature, such as content and information design, ecommerce information your business needs. Basic plan of statista is free, for corporates its $700 pm.

3. Tableau public is free data visualization tool with built in BI and Big data backed. It provides market data with analysis and you get simple visual representation of complicated data with graphs and build dash board in a minute. Tableau can be linked with google sheets, and it all comes at zero cost.

4. Google analytics, well google analytics is not product to provide mark research entirely but give analysis of traffic on your website, main feature, reporting traffic, key word guidance, custom dash board etc. If you are small business, you can use free service, if you want extensive features, you can buy Google Analytics 360

5. Make my persona, this tool you can definitely offer more market insights. With Make my persona you can create easy personal ‘in form’ and layouts. It comes with question series and download documents options. This tool is free.

6. Google key word planer, is a fantastic tool and it carries out phrase and word match related to your business. Google key word planner, gives your new keywords, how you audience searches within the market and also gives monthly search details. It has column for new customers and is market research tool.

7. Ubersugget, is simple tool for market research on keywords and content. All you need to input is a phrase and it brings a long list of suggestion. It is free with a cap on number of searches in a day and its feature includes overview of domain, keyword idea, content suggestion etc ubersuggest is free to use.

8. Google alerts, is one of the best research tools, you will get email alerts real time on keywords, create links and easy to use, you can use this tool for free.

9. Pew research center is fairly decent research tool that has mass data base, they conduct demographic data, public information search etc. Its features are smooth user interface, and huge data base and the tool is free.

10. Quora and medium, is public interaction blog forum that gives you wonderful information about information searched, query asked by people around the global and this is absolutely free.