INTRODUCTION:
If you are planning on growing your business or venturing into new markets or niches, then you need to learn deeply about your customers, your competitors, and your industry. Market research provides valuable insight to help you minimize risks, identify current opportunities and future problems in your industry and identify new sales growth areas to reach your current customers or develop an entirely new customer base.
In this post, we will share 5 Simple Strategies to do Quality Market Research
Use Data Already Provided
Mining data that has already been quantified is probably the easiest way to gather additional information about your industry. This is called secondary research data that your National and Local government offer; it can provide a wealth of data and information about customers, demographics, industries and economic conditions that can aid in conducting quality market research. These sources provide valuable information about your clients and competitors.
Learn From Your Customers
Using a tool like Survey Monkey, interactive Focus Groups, Your Social Media Base or Simple Questions and Answer techniques can help uncover a ton of your customers experience with your product. Nothing is freer or more valuable than a conversation, and great dialogue is how you develop great creative ideas. If you need more insight about this, just read any of Plato’s dialogues.
You can get a great sense of which direction to pursue in future Market Research or your product and service development. Building an ongoing message-testing program can take some time, but it’s worth the time because of how much data it provides and how inexpensive it is.
Using Analytics On Your Webpage For Beta Testing
Are you redoing a web page or a website re-launch?
Ongoing Market Research into what’s working and what’s not can help you raise the overall productivity of your website. You can get a lot of information about your site performance from embedding google analytics and other analytics software into your site, to help you determine which pages are being visited more frequently and which pages are converting.
Be Invested Into Your Industry
Let other industry leaders help pave the way. Many marketing managers and directors of marketing and advertising are nervous to ask advice from other companies in their industry, don’t be; most successful businesses and people enjoy helping others out along their journey to releasing a new product or service that can help an industry.
Your industry trade association, trade shows, and association publications can offer a wealth of information such as market statistics, lists of members, and books and reference materials.
Talking to others in your industry can be one of the most valuable ways of gaining informal data about a region or customer base. Also, if this group of people has been in the industry longer than you, they will know more about potential pitfalls and where to invest your money more wisely.
Know Your Community
In the Atlanta Area, we try to get all of our clients involved into their local chamber of commerce.
Your local chamber of commerce or business development agency can supply useful information. They are usually free of charge, including assistance with site selection, demographic reports, and directories of local businesses. They may also offer seminars on more specific marketing techniques and related topics that can help you do more in depth research.
Need A More Personal Approach?
If you need more in-depth Market Research Strategies, or you just want another set of eyes to analyze your current research strategy, please contact us for a no fee consultation, we have been helping business owners and marketing directors for 40 years.