Market Research has lived a healthy and robust life, and it does not look like it desires to retire any time soon. Market Research has lived with us for decades. However, formal Market Research was introduced to the open market in the early 1920s by Germany, and the concept was conceptualized in the USA during the golden age of radio as the agencies understood the importance of demographics.
The importance of Market Research grew more prominent as the sponsors developed a pattern to analyze show viewership and bid for slots accordingly.
How to Conduct Market Research for your organization?
What is the purpose of Market Research?
What information is required to conduct Market Research?
How to collect the data required for primary Market Research?
How to collect data for secondary information?
How can you use Google Trends for your Market Research?
What is Market Research?
Market Research is a well-vetted process of examining and interpreting a market's condition by analyzing the available information about a product or service processed in that market. Market research comprehends the past, present, and future of a product or service, studying market potential customers' behavior.
How to Conduct Market Research for your organization?
1. Know your customers: -
Understanding customer behavior is like learning to swim in Mariana Trench; before you go to such extremes, it is vital that you study and understand your actual customer profile. Before you start penning down your observations and findings, it is critical for you to sit down and construct your average buyer persona. The buyer persona plays an essential role in keeping your market research on the right track.
While constructing a persona, you must note down all the elements of their personality right from their age to their family size.
Once building your ideal persona is done, using the derived information; contact and communicate with groups carrying the same persona. Build multiple sample groups with diversity in their spending habits and purchase history. Also, remember to offer incentives to all your participants so they take the research seriously and the outcomes are as accurate as possible.
2. Construct foundation questions for all your research participants: -
To get maximum results out of your time and resources, you must absorb each and every statement made during that conversation; for the discussion to follow a particular track, it is vital that you create a rough guidebook for your sessions.
Always remember to maintain a yes-no question block, so you get an ideal answer for all your research-based queries. Open-ended questions produce an absolutely contrary result as most solutions end up being vague and watering down the outcome's quality.
To manage your time correctly, divide your overall question-answer session into four detailed segments as mentioned below: -
§ Awareness: You can utilize this segment to familiarize the sample group with your solutions and products.
§ Examination: In this model, make sure that you get all the tracks covered on how the potential client could stumble around your product and what factors could help in rating your product higher over your competitors
§ Choice/Opinion: During this segment, you can find solutions to various questions that float around the closing stages where a decision is to be made post satisfactory answers to these questions.
§ Closing: This segment of the session is reserved for analysis and feedback, allow your group to ask you questions about your product or service. You can utilize this time period to know what buying process will sit perfectly with the end-users and how you could offer something different from your competitors.
3. Study and mention your competitors in your research: -
In this open market, it is never about pitting one company against the other. Companies hire specialists to run each departmental operation, and sometimes these divisions in themselves could be a direct challenger to your brand or service even though that might not be the area of focus for that organization.
One of the best examples of such a scenario is Apple, Apple, as an organization is known for its devices and accessories. However, Apple music in itself puts up a fight against Spotify, YouTube Music, etc.
Search engines are a boon when you try to identify and connect with your competitors; you can match your content and keywords to evaluate which organizations operate under the same domain parallelly. While discovering your client's detailed accounts, you can try searching for more generalized terminologies around your operational environment.
For gathering more information, you can also resort to downloading free reports from Gartner and Pew research to build a strong baseline for your study.
4. Rehash your decisions: -
Once you are done with your primary research and have gathered comprehensive data from social media and search engine results, you might feel overwhelmed with the amount of data you have at your disposal, now is the part where you need to arrange and organize the information available with you to transform it into vital data.
What is the purpose of Market Research?
Market Research helps determine the brio of a particular product or service through an in-depth study of potential customers by direct surveys. Market Research also helps the company explore its market space and discover its target market. Feedback obtained by market researchers helps organizations implement or rollback changes made in their product or service.
What information is required to conduct Market Research?
Conducting Market Research is a tedious process. You can generally divide this process into two segments, the Primary Information and the Secondary Information. Primary information is the data directly collected by people or organizations in charge of conducting the research; this type of data is generally investigative or unambiguous.
Market Research surrounding primary information is generally unstructured and provides ample space and opportunity for open-end questions; these open-end questions offer a perfect base to build your research around. Investigative data helps identify the pain points so those can be focused on and addressed to deliver an effective and efficient solution.
Secondary information deals with complex and highly scrutinized data; this data is gathered, analyzed, and approved by external factors. These data elements can be government declared census reports, trade market transfer reports, or agency-specific operational reports. These data elements help provide stability and global integrity to your Market Research.
How to collect the data required for primary Market Research?
Most basic and certainly the most effective method to gather reliable data is by conducting One-on-One interviews. You can basically take to the streets to question individuals about the brand, product, or market you need. Many organizations outsource this task to survey agencies, as this is their niche and have a hold of a good network of foot soldiers. One-on-One interviews were one of the go-to methodologies in the early era.
The methodology that sits perfectly with the current time-span is the idea to connect over the mobile phone. Connecting over the phone enables you to multitask while collecting data and organizing the answers to your pain points. This concept eliminates unnecessary meetups catering perfectly to the current pandemic environment. Connecting over phone calls instead of face-to-face meetups helped the market research module progress a lot.
One of the most cost-efficient and practical methodologies is to collect market data through online research. With more than two-thirds of the world population spending time online, most market researchers have transformed their data collection module to online only. Market researchers have stuck to the age-old formula of survey but tweaked it a little to fit current metrics of digital interaction. Therefore, the companies no longer have to seek people actively or try cold calling them. Instead, individuals volunteer to participate in the surveys and make their voices heard and opinions registered.
Forencis Research is an organization that has successfully implemented the online research methodology and produced accurate and reliable market research reports.
How to collect data for secondary information?
When you are trying to gather any information, public sources should always be your first go-to option. These documents are openly accessible and available in abundance. Government statistics websites are one of the most accurate and updated sources of information. Some examples of pre-mentioned websites are USA Gov. Statistics, US Gov. open data, and UK Government data and statistics.
While the data available on the public domain is in abundance, it might not always answer all your queries; you can always rely on commercial sources to deliver the results for such circumstances. Such resources can generally be obtained from research agencies such as Pew and Gartner, as the information is derived from in-depth research, it costs a few bucks to download them and get redistribution rights.
How can you use Google Trends for your Market Research?
Google Trends can be a useful tool when you are trying to find the ideal keyword for your research. However, it can be even more effective when you consider the array of things it can help you achieve. Google Trends is a magical beast as it is a service designed by Google, which is absolutely free to use that helps you gather vital information about everything floating around in the market.
To use Google Trends, you don't need to be an expert or be in possession of some magical formula; you just need to visit the website, select the region, and booom! You have the list of most popular searches in that geographical region. You can further drill down the data by sorting it to fit various elements ranging from selecting your country, dedicating a timeframe, analyzing a particular category, or defining a search type.
You can also use Google Trends to compare the popularity and gain insights of a particular product or service; by utilizing this feature, you can compare popularity search between you and your competitors or between two of your indirect competitors. You can even use the reverse mechanism by searching for your target market keyword to discover where the strongest seed for that keyword are; once you find out the seeds, you have your target market and a good idea of what and where people are searching for a related keyword on YouTube.
Google Trends isn't just a topic that will help you discover insights on your target keyword; it also loops you in on the insights that you won't find elsewhere. On top of that, Google Trends helps you analyze Regional interest, peak buying patterns, and customers' buying habits.
All-in-All, conducting research can be a very hectic task and require a heavy physical and financial investment. If you desire to receive a well-customized report for your target market, you can check the Market Research reports on the Forencis Research website.
If this topic interests you, and you would like to know more about conducting a Market Research or gaining insights on how B2B Market Research works, stay connected as the article for B2B Market Research will be up next week.