December 7, 2023

What is Market Research?

Published By

Cornel Bursuc
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Software
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Running or starting a business can be challenging. In this article, you will understand market research, how it can help you make better decisions for your business, and how to start your first research in just a few minutes.

Market research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information about a market, a product or service to be offered for sale in that market, and about the past, present and potential customers for the product or service.

Research the characteristics, spending habits, location, and needs of your business’s target market, the industry, and the competitors you face.

The primary purpose of conducting market research is to understand or examine the market associated with a particular product or service to decide how the audience will react to a product or service. The information obtained from market research can be used to tailor marketing/ advertising activities or determine consumers’ feature priorities/service requirements (if any).

 

Why is Market Research important?

Conducting research is one of the best ways to increase customer satisfaction and expand business. Market research is an essential tool during all product development phases: from inception until the sunsetting of a product.

Here are the reasons why market research is essential and should be considered in any business:

  • Validate business ideas: before investing in creating a new product, you can understand if people have a level of interest in it.
  • Customer segmentation: helps you understand who your customers are and what they need and want so you can design products or services that best suit them.
  • Increase new product launch success: find the product price attractive for your customers, product name, logo, and slogans that your customers will love.
  • Improve marketing campaigns: by testing ads and messaging, and designing the perfect product package for your online or offline products.
  • Identify issues with your products and/or brand: what do your customers think about your products? What is missing? Do they trust your brand?
  • Build a powerful brand: understand how your brand is perceived by your customers, and strategize accordingly.
  • Identify profitable markets: increase sales by understanding your competitor’s advantages and new opportunities in new market segments. 

How to run your first research

  1. Define the research objective: why are we running the research? What are the questions that you want answered?
  2. Consider the profile of the people you want to understand. This is also called defining your audience or target audience in the research industry. A target audience is determined based on demographic and behavioral questions. For example, you want to test the efficiency of a product package for a grocery-type product. In that case, you want to target the people doing grocery shopping, whether online or offline.
  3. Collect answers from your target audience. While multiple ways exist to collect responses, an online DIY market research platform is the easiest and most cost-aware solution. Make Opinion is the leading AI-guided research platform; you can find out more about Make Opinion at makeopinion.com
  4. Analyze results
  5. Take decisions based on results gathered.

 

Market Research is critical to building a strategy for well-established companies, small businesses, and entrepreneurs alike.

Keep an eye on this blog; you will get simple-to-grasp, no-nonsense, applicable information about market research.