What is Market Research?
Market research is a process of collecting, analyzing, and explaining information. The information about the target market, consumers.
With a big idea, what is the best way to determine how potential customers will react to your product?
By conducting market research, you can decide whether your product fits the target market.
Before launching any product, you should conduct research. We will see how to conduct market research and why it is important.
How to Get Started:
Market Research
This is the process of gathering information about the customers and the market. Market research includes interviews, data analysis, surveys, and focus groups. The purpose of market research is to understand your customers and how your product fits their requirements and how it is better than your competitors.
There are two types of research you can conduct
- Primary research
- Secondary Research
- Primary research requires data to understand the market segment and the customers and improve your product to fulfill customer needs.
- Secondary research is conducted using data that you will not collect. Industry reports and databases can be used to gain insights into the market segment and industry.
Why is Market Research Important
Whenever you launch a product in the market, it is better to do market research to confirm or ensure that your product or service will be acceptable. And feedback from people will be invaluable and will improve your product value. Performing market research can also help you to determine the price strategy for your product. It can also improve the features which will improve the product quality. If your product is promising then investors will pay attention to the product that has done good market research. If your product is promising that it will fulfill the market needs your start-up will be worthy.
How to do market research for a start-up
1. From hypotheses
What are all questions you are supposed to answer for What is market research? Using their questions, you can predict to do hypothesis. This can guide you to select a subject, researching questions and designs. For example, you can ask the question how much people are willing to pay for my new product? If my product contains all the current features then the customer will pay $500 for it. You can test multiple hypotheses but try to select less so the research stays focused.
Select the type of research needed for the hypothesis
When you formed a hypothesis select which type of research to do. Place your start-up in the broader market and start with secondary research. This can be done using the same data and can see how much of the market can be owned by your start-up and how are your competitors as compared to your product.
If your hypothesis needs primary research you have to decide which data collection method you need. This includes survey pools and one-to-one interviews. In the primary research, you focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty, and Realtime product usability.
Identify Target Demographics and recruit Subjects
First, you need to understand your demographic and gather information. Determine the type of product which will benefit the people. If you do primary research you have to recruit people. This can be done in various ways.
- Word of mouth: The simple but not reliable way is word of mouth. Ask people you know to refer other people to be the research subject, then confirm that they fit your target.
- Promoting on social media: this platform permits you to show an ad to people who fall in certain interests this allows you to address large crowed.
- Hiring a third-party market research company: the company that researches on your behalf is called the third-party company. The research on your behalf. It also provides demographic data such as age that enables you to select a subset of your demographic. In addition, you can offer compensation such as money, meal, or gift cards.
Conduct the Research: once you are conformed to the type of research to test your hypothesis, do your research. Choose someone who is not familiar with your hypothesis to reduce biased results. Ask a question based on your hypotheses for example if you are texting your existing customer you can ask “when you first bought the product what were the challenges with it”? If you are trying to examine your brand, the audience should consist of potential customers who are not aware of your brand then present them with a list of competitors and your name too, and ask them to rank the brands. Once you have collected data, ensure it is organized securely so you can protect the subjects’ identities.
Gather insights and Determine action items: after you have organized your data, some of the data will be qualitative rather than quantitative. You can make it quantitative by detecting patterns. For example, while assembling 15 to 20 people will find your product overwhelmed. If the majority of users in your target reported feeling overwhelmed while assembling your next action item include
Creating different versions to test with other groups
Researching instruction manual best practices
Each round of market research will tell you about your product experience with users.
Market Research as an ongoing effort
While it is useful to conduct market research before launching your product, you should also revisit and form new ones over and over. If you conduct market research with every version of your product, you can improve it and ensure continues to fit the target customer’s needs.
