Before staring a
business, understanding your customers, markets, competitors and other aspects
are important. You may have great ideas, but it must meet with the demands of
the consumers. For ensuring the strategies are viable, a market research must be conducted to identify the opportunities,
target audience, and other information.
5 Things a Market Analysis Must Inform You
To leverage a
product/service, learning about what is there or what would be in store for
future that every small to large businesses must be aware about. Here are some
characteristics a marketing analysis should convey.
1.
Who: You must know who are customers, their gender, age,
lifestyle choices, and income bracket. Get details about audience size,
behavior, purchasing patterns, sector etc. Also know about the industry, the
key players, and competitive landscape.
2.
What: All the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the
products or services must be known. What products the consumers prefer or buy
the most? What are the annual or monthly sales of competitors? What is the
production size, import export ratio? What is the amount of investment and
assets required?
3.
When: Duration of business activity is the most important. You
should understand the best points of running a trade relating to time, season,
occasion etc. or the moment to make maximum profits. The market research reports will allow you to get all the plans in
place to customize the brand. Where:
4.
Where: The location of customers should be understood. Are
consumer preferring a retail physical location or purchase the
services/products over the internet? Where is the sales coming from? Where is
the business not working out?
5.
Why: Just launching a company, service, product is not enough.
It must have an element of unique selling proposition, and cater to consumer
need; otherwise there would be no possible progress. You have to employ
accurate industry analysis to find
out why certain competitors are doing well than others, and how you can too
drive the market.
Steps of Conducting an Effective Market Research
There are
several sources from where you can get trustworthy business information. If you
do not have an in-house to team to perform the analysis, then hire a
professional market research company.
Most of these firms are expert in gathering knowledge for the best of client
requirements. Look for a budget-friendly agency that serves the following
services at least.
1.
Primary and Secondary Data: The agency must use both primacy and
secondary data to evaluate your business possibilities. Industry experts, trade
exhibitions, published materials, previous researches on similar initiative,
raw surveys or interviews on consumers or probable customers must be performed.
2.
Reliable Sample Surveys: The sample size of people must be those
willing to utilize your product/service or those using the same of competitors.
A sample size must be decided and followed by face-to-face or online
interviews, feedback sessions, free trials to the service in question to derive
market research and analysis.
3.
Quantitative & Qualitative Research: A quantitative research data will give
figures and numbers required to support a business motive. For e.g. percentage
count of the consumers providing positive or negative feedback, number of
people interested in product, or innovation. The qualitative data will inform
about the experience of customers, their behavior and preferences.
4.
Competitors Watch: The market
research company should also offer complete details of competitor profiles
and their activities. This information will assist you to evaluate what is
syncing in with customers needs and demands, and the progressive development
plants adopted.
5.
Advice on Marketing Strategies: After putting together information, you
can use the services of analysts’ team to strategize a business development
plan. Utilize insights and summaries from the industry analysis to formulate and execute promotional, marketing,
and sales efforts.
