How To Conduct Market Research: A Comprehensive Guide
How to Conduct Market Research?
Market research is a vital tool in any business. It is the technique through which you stay updated about the ongoing market trends and tastes and preferences of your customers. To be a successful entrepreneur, you must have a promising marketing strategy that attracts sales. You will hardly have any idea about your customers without staunch research.
Before I get ahead and list the best ways to conduct market research, let’s have a look at the reasons behind its vitality.
Why is Market Research Significant?
Without thorough research, you simply cannot get a hold of your customer. The focus should be on turning one-time-purchasers to permanent clients and this is where marketing research helps you.
Improving User Experience
Customers will keep your business taking off with high colors. You should look for ways to engage them that drive better traffic to your business. With market research, you get to know about their experiences and make amendments as necessary to meet up their expectations.
Planning the Right Strategy
Strong market research helps provide you with information about what the customer is thinking and why they are thinking that way. You get an idea about their expectations, preferences, and price they are willing to spend on a particular product or service. Having a clear conception of these pointers, helps you strategize accordingly.
Coming out of ‘Guess Work’
An alarming side in business is people often tend to get away with bad ideas resulting from mere guesses or assumptions! That’s so not done! Complete market research helps you get the right insight about the purchasers, and you don’t end up making a disastrous decision. Rather with the aid of the available data, you make marketing plans and execute the same.
These are just a few pointers among tons of significance for marketing research. Read on to know how to conduct market research.
Methods of Market Research?
The market research methods aren’t limited to a few ways. But here we will include the most common and comprehensive ones. The methods might vary for each business type. A skincare business will have different goals as compared to a digital marketing firm. Again, a design firm will aim for something different than a Saas company. So the methods are goal-based and depend on the type of data you want to gather from the customers.
Surveys
Surveys are a qualitative research method that the respondent undertakes to answer a short series of questions. The questions can be either open-ended or closed-ended or so. Surveys seek answers via direct questionnaires or emails and Google forms. Undoubtedly, surveys are the most common technique in market research.
Surveys are an inexpensive and comprehensive market research method that helps you with lots of meaningful data in a short time. Moreover, the data is easy to analyze and you get to plan accordingly.
Direct Interviews
Direct one-to-one communication with your target customer via interviews is the best technique in market research. You have the chance of in-depth research and get further insights from the respondent’s expression as well! Video conferencing is a great option if there’s a problem with the face-to-face meeting. Irrespective of the conducting mode, interviews are a significant tool to understand your potential customers in the best possible way.
After having a direct conversation with the customer, you have a transparent idea about his experience with your product or service.
Focus Groups
Focus groups constitute a group of selective people who fit the firm’s target market. The conversation is the responsibility of an expert moderator here. He carries out discussions related to the product, user experience, and expectations, marketing techniques to gather better insight. This research method is a bit expensive and might not suit newbies. A minor mistake can lead to major errors. There are scopes of dominance bias i.e., a stubborn participant trying to influence the group, and moderator style bias where different moderators will develop dissimilar results from the same study. There are a lot of ways through which the focus group data can get messy.
Observation
Observation is a critical market research tool that helps you gain a convincing insight into the customer’s taste and preferences. During an observation session, the researcher takes minute notes of the customer as she gets busy with the particular product of your company or the competitors. The observation policy is not only inexpensive but allows you to analyze the customer behavior in a natural setting, free of any influencers. However, observation can’t take you inside the customer’s brain and let you see how they are thinking. In this regard, direct interviews and surveys stand out to be the finest market research methods.
How to Conduct Market Research?
Now that you know the significance and methods of market research, let’s take a look at how to conduct successful market research.
1: Defining the Problem
Market research without a research objective is like running an airplane without a pilot. Make your subject of research clear in the beginning so the researcher knows what answers he exactly is looking for. The questions need to be straightforward to understand. Before the research, the researcher can conduct a demo with a small group to understand if the questions are comprehensive to understand and if those will serve the purpose of the research objective. The research objective needs to be clear and crisp. The organization must know, “why are we conducting this research?”
2: Defining the Sample
A representative sample is a must to carry out market research. It is nothing but a small group of people reflecting as perfectly as possible, a bigger group. There are scopes of error if the sample isn’t representative. If researchers desire to have a representative sample of 200 employees, the number of men and women should be similar. Despite not guaranteeing accuracy, the sample size is crucial.
3: Conducting Data Collection
A data collection tool is a need of the hour while gathering data from the surveys or any other research process. There will be scenarios where people give an incomplete answer to a survey or don’t answer it at all. Errors are likely to develop in such cases. With the data collection tool, the gathering will be easier preventing any major mistakes.
4: Evaluating the Results
All the steps have connections among themselves. A mistake in anyone will end up ruining the market research. After a nice execution of the steps above, you will need to analyze the data accurately. Dive into the information gathered, and try figuring out what to plan next? How to make the next move? Do your study well to understand if there are further areas of consideration.
5: Preparing the Research Report
Now, as you are done with the research and minute scrutiny of the results, it’s time to make the research report. The report should be clear, concise, and engaging other than being in the questionnaire format. The report should sound more like storytelling. Start answering the primary questions like what led to conduct the research, how many people took the survey, and the array of responses.
6: Final Move
Market research is over. Data collection, analysis, and research report preparation are over. Now it is the time to make a move! Here comes the time to modify the marketing plans and develop better strategies. You know the customer responses, have an idea regarding their expectations and the ongoing trends in the market. It’s time to take the right decision to surprise your customers with something innovative and brilliant!
To Sum Up
That’s all folks for this blog. I hope I could make the process of market research clear. To thrive with your business and keep it going amidst hard competition efficient market research is something you have to go for. We will be exploring more topics on market research in the upcoming blog.
Original Source: https://www.fynzo.com/blog/how-to-conduct-market-research/
