Do you know that 80 percent of businesses are passing through their worst phase right now due to the pandemic crisis going on around the world?
The sudden crash in business has made a lot of companies experience loss of revenue, customers, and employees.
There are 582 million entrepreneurs in the world today, and the 1 reason why businesses fail is lack of knowledge before investing into any business. This happens when entrepreneurs fail to look at the world situation before launching or going into a business.
Conducting in-depth market research could separate you from the millions of entrepreneurs who fail in their businesses
What is your market? Who are your buyers? What factors influence the purchasing decisions of your customers? Who gives them information on what to produce, how, where, and when? Can you predict their behaviour? What is trending In your industry now? What goods would they want in the future?
Market research is the process of determining the viability of a new service or product through research conducted directly with potential customers. Market research allows a company to discover the target market and get opinions and other feedback from consumers about their interest in the product or service.
Thorough market research protects you from investing in developing a product that no one is interested in. And hereby wasting valuable time and money.
It helps you understand business opportunities in your niche, design an ideal marketing strategy, understand competition, increase organization performance, and avoid unnecessary risks.
The importance of market research cannot be overemphasized. But it is necessary to know how to do it to get results.
However, market research could be quite expensive as top brands spend a lot to get consumers’ data. We have compiled some steps that you can follow to conduct market research for free.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Your business is meant to serve some people not everyone. The first thing you do is to identify those people.
Do not generalize. That could cause confusion along the business line. You want to narrow things down and understand who your audience really is.
The location, age range, income, interests, wants, and needs are some of the information you need to understand your target audience so you could create products that would meet their needs.
2. Research On People’s Opinion
Market research is not complete without sampling opinions. Even top brands do this. The more you understand your market needs, the easier it is to create suitable products. That is why getting opinions from people is very important.
• Meet individuals
You want to know what people feel about the quality of your products and services. You may not be the right person to judge here. The idea that looks great to you may not look that way to people and their opinion is very important.
That is why you need to get it. You might be surprised by the quality ideas you generate from engaging other individuals. Not only will you know their opinions on your brand, but you can also dig deep and ask important questions.
• Facebook Groups will help.
There are millions of groups on Facebook that discuss important subjects in different industries and niches for you to maximize.
Facebook groups serve as a focus group where people are eager to give opinions for free. You might have to attach some rewards or give some individuals on the group some products and request feedback.
Once the conversation starts, others would be encouraged to acquire more information about your brand and give their opinions as well.
• Add a survey to your website
Brand information can never be more than enough. The diversity of the ideas makes it even more important. Quite a lot of those who would give their opinions on your websites are those who have used your product. And when it comes to things like this, people are eager to give their opinions. Maximize their willingness.
3. Explorative Research
Exploratory research is “the preliminary research to clarify the exact nature of the problem to be solved.
A brand suffers this when there is a problem but they can’t pin-point what the exact problem is. For instance, if there is a sudden decline in sales, brands can employ this strategy to know what caused it.
Is there a new competitor in the market? Did the main competitor adopt a new sales strategy? Is there any change in the quality of the products? These are some kinds of questions that exploitative research answers. You can use approaches like qualitative research, focus groups, case studies, and more to achieve your aim.
4. Specific Research
Explorative research is always followed by specific research. Having identified the problem(s), the next step is to devise a solution.
The broad list of problems must have been reduced to a smaller, more accurate one which is quite easier to handle. Now, information is gathered for a single purpose. To solve- not identify or presumed problems.
5. Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis is very important because it helps you understand the competition in your market and industry. It makes it easy for you know identify what’s already working in their industry,
It also helps you see the loopholes in your competitors’ approach, giving you an edge over them. This makes it easy for you to distinguish yourself from others in the industry and build your audience.
It also helps with your pricing research. You know what your competitors produce and how much they charge for each product. You also have an idea of what your potential customers are willing to pay for your services.
6. Use SWOT
Every business has its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Your strength could be your innovation In the industry or the quality of your services; while your weakness could be your competitors’ strength if you haven’t gotten to that level.
Opportunities are the unexplored territories in your industry. The emerging technology, the constant change, and other positive factors that have not been fully explored. While your threats are the direct opposite of your opportunities.
You can leverage your own network to get accurate information on this. Talk to people in your circle, your friends, and LinkedIn connections they might help get valuable information on analyzing your SWOT.
You can also get opinions from your workers and partners. Every opinion matters.
7. Extract Information
There is no point in gathering data only to discard them or not being able to extract valuable information from it. You need to extract crucial information from the data collected. That is the essence of market research
CONCLUSION
Business is a game of relevance and it is really competitive. Knowing the challenges, wants, and needs of your customers are of utmost importance to win this game.
Your business growth is determined by the level of satisfaction that your customers experience, that is why you need thorough market research to not only survive but also thrive.