All businesses require accurate, efficient, timely, and reliable business research work to be successful. A business plan without great market research would make you miss some fruitful opportunities. Gathering industry information will make the business process smooth and famous.
Pre working can save your business idea from many financial losses, wrong planning, risks, and bad decision making. Market Research gives awareness about strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities of the business idea.
The market research process helps in understanding why a consumer would want to buy your products and services. Understanding & learning about customer’s preferences and demand make business idea flourish.
Even many popular brands conduct market research every year to improve their performance like Coco-Cola, Gillett, Apple, and Nestle, etc. There are many financial and business sites writing business topics. Subscription to such sites or exploring their finding of the specific companies would surely add a plus in your existing research.
You might have planned to conduct market research but didn’t know the few necessary steps included in it? Then, let’s look at how you should conduct market research for a business idea:
Estimate your Business Research Cost
Whether you have planned to start a small start-up or want to begin a new multi-million dollar business; you should estimate a budget for market research. Before starting market research, firstly allocate suitable money to it.
Determine what type of survey you need for your business idea and what you can conduct within available resources? How much money will be required to collect basic information on the industry? You may require a budget for top-level reports, full market reports, and product detail market reports.
Conduct Primary & Secondary Business Research
In conducting business idea both primary and secondary research plays a significant role for owners. Primary research is the firsthand collection of data through phone interviews, focus groups, observations, questionnaires, and online surveys.
Secondary research involves taking help from prior published researches like online articles, magazines, historical records, and statistical databases. It is a fruitful way to get to know about your target market consumers liking and disliking and what your competitors are already been doing in the market.
It will not only help you to design your starting steps but it would also be beneficial during all the processes of your businesses. This researches will be the spine of your business. All major decisions will be based upon these.
Examine Direct & Indirect Competitors
Understanding market competitors provide favorable information about your business idea. Make a list of both direct & indirect competitors. Recognize what percentages of brands are successful in the same business plan or goods you want to sell. Examine companies that are selling products/services in the same geographical areas.
Determine companies that are relatively new in your business idea. Search for e-commerce competitors to be compatible with an online platform as well. Either their efforts are on paid advertisements or on organic traffic.
You better know the product cost. Add other costing in existing and analyze what are the price ranges competitors are offering to consumers. Take a close look at their other marketing and promotion strategies before making your marketing plan.
Once made, you can simply start implementing your strategies and observe the sales graphs. It would provide you insights into how effectively all departments are working.
Understand Customer Buying Behaviors
In a market research process focusing on consumer purchasing behaviors brings a lot of valuable information about the business design. Understanding consumer’s pre-purchase behaviors, purchase decisions, needs, wants, favorite purchases, and post-purchase behaviors are the basic and the most important element of business research.
Did you ever notice why do you buy things in a store which you didn’t plan to buy? Actually they are placed everywhere in stores, salesgirl introduces you to the same product you already know. Actually, marketers take advantage of your impulsive buying behavior.
Let’s assume; your product fall in the FMCGs category, this impulsive sales strategy will surely boost your sales.
Always recognize what influences consumers to buy products? Observe their spending habits. Do more efforts on traditional strategies if they buy offline. But, if they buy online – you must set up your site and start implementing digital strategies. Starting an eCommerce store is very easy with
Determine what are the products are services they love to purchase frequently. Know the buying behavior of consumer’s age, gender, income, occupation, and major challenges of the geographic region you want to sell the business. If your business is online, you can know all these by applying analytics, like google analytics.
Increase Public Participation in Market Survey
Engaging people in market research help in getting the more valid and accurate information you want to collect. In a digital world, people have an immense interest in social media surveys. Make compelling questionnaires so that respondents get bored.
Take a short time of people and provide them with clear and honest information about why you are conducting market reach. Make fun activities to collect data. Providing people with incentives, using gamification techniques, and sharing business research findings with the audience enhances the response rate.
Conclude the Business Research Findings
Conducting business research will take time and budget too. Estimating finding can be more fruitful if take expert service. A business research expert helps in understanding whether the market survey has fulfilled your business idea requirements.
Always note down what you have gained from the market research. Use this information to make a long term business plan with backup security. Learn new ideas and methods to conduct business. Conclude all the findings which would help you to implement the procedures and to improve the business plan.
Here’s an idea. You can see a great downfall in local and international businesses after COVID-19 Pandemic, did you notice that many businesses started producing sanitizers and face masks. A few will get success but others won’t be able to recover their setup cost because they started for a short time period without any proper research about how long it is going to be or what is a demand-supply curve.
Perform Pilot Testing of Business Idea
A pilot testing that is also known as a controlled experiment helps in implementing the research findings on small sample space. This pilot testing will tell the future opportunities of your business.
Sample testing on a few numbers of people to check the customer’s response facilitates the business owners to determine the strength and weaknesses of their brand.
Concluding Remarks
In a nutshell, market research is mandatory to build strong roots in your business. Market research is highly important for starting any new business. As said before, many existing businesses keep doing research to find more opportunities in their existing business. Trends do change with time. It is possible that your product which is highly sold today; won’t be able to generate sales in the future – if not modified with requirements of the future.
