Market Research : What You Need to Know

People wish for their product to be a success or for their strategy to work well. But, wishing alone is not enough. There are reasons why companies like Unilever and McDonald's become big. For every decision that they make, they always do market research. If you want to avoid financial disaster or secure your business future, check out this article about Market Research. 

Market Research : What is Market Research?

Most people think that market research is only useful for product launching, while in fact, it is not limited to that aspect. Basically, market research can provide various information about your customers, target markets, and how your prospective buyers would react to any of your marketing strategies. It can be used to prepare for your product or service launch, new campaign, product packaging, and many more. 

If you have heard about this before, there are four P’s of Marketing, that is Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Market research only focuses on 1 P’s – Place. The focus is on your target customers, clients, and marketplace.  

Market Research : How to do Market Research?

1. What is Your Market Research Objective?

   When creating market research, it is important to fully understand what you would use the data for. It is the main foundation of your research and can determine whether your research would be useful or meaningless. 
   
   In creating the research market objective, use the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-based) framework. 

   - Specific : don’t give only a rough idea of your purposes. Clearly state your objective which can be understood by your team. 

   - Measurable : how will your know that your target has been achieved? Use numbers, grades, or similar variables to objectively define your goals. 

   - Achievable : while being positive is important, set a goal that is possible to be achieved with your current resources and capabilities. 

   - Relevant : are your objectives aligned with your vision and mission? 

   - Time-based : design a timeline for each market research process. 

2. Define Buyer Persona

   Who are your ideal customers? Some key characteristics that you should include are age, gender, and location. Depending on your objective, you can also put other characteristics like job, income, hobby, and others. 

3. Find The Best Participants

   When conducting research, the quality of your sample can determine whether your research would be a success or not. The main question is, how to find the most suitable participants for your market research? 

   By using the buyer persona as the base, select people who have recently interacted with your brands. It can be those who made recent purchases, cancel their purchases, actively comment on your social media, etc. 

4. Prepare the Questions

   Whether you use survey, discussion, or interview methods, prepare a list of questions that can get the most out of information. If you are using discussion or interview research methods, open-ended questions can be a good way to gain honest and in-depth information. 

5. Organize and Analyze Data

   As collecting big numbers of data can be quite overwhelming, you can organize the data and eliminate any data that seems irrelevant. 

    

Market Research : Types of Market Research

Basically, there are two types of market research : 

1. Primary Market Research

   Comprehensive research where the business collects data directly from the sample or asks a third party to conduct the research. Using primary market research, your data would be original and can be easily tweaked as you need to gather more information. 

2. Secondary Market Research

   This method is relatively easier as you only need to gather various information from the published sources like media, books, website pages, educational institutions, etc. The downside, the available data may not be updated and suitable for your objectives. 

How to do Market Research in the Most Efficient Way

When doing market research, you will wish to get useful data in a short time. Try these 3 tips to successfully nail your market research!

1. Learn about Your Target

   For the first step, it is important to understand your target audiences. What’s their language? Are they more comfortable with verbal or written communication, formal or informal language, and other things? When you can connect well with the target customers, you can get honest answers that would be beneficial for your research. 

2. Position Yourself as a Customer

   Have you ever bought your own product or service? By doing this, you can have a better understanding of your business, customer journey as well as your brand’s strengths and weaknesses.

3. Dig into Your Customers

   When collecting information from your customers, make sure that you truly get inside your customer’s head. Don’t be pleased with lip service or superficial answers. Accept criticism and feedback with an open mind as it can help your company to progress and become better.  

Marketing Research : What is Marketing Research?

The terms “Marketing Research” and “Market Research” are often used interchangeably when two of them have a different meaning. Market research focuses on 1 P’s when marketing research covers all 4 P’s of marketing, from the new product research, pricing, distribution channels to advertising. 

How to do Marketing Research?

Determine Your Type of Research

There is various type of marketing research. To decide which research that you should use, you can define your research objective first. After that, you can choose between customer research, advertising research, product research, distribution research, sales research, or environmental research. 

1. Collect Information

   Similar to market research, you can use various methods to collect comprehensive data from the target sample.

2. Organize, Analyze Data and Make Decision

   Based on the data that you have gathered, you can now confidently decide on any marketing activities. 

   Both market research and marketing research is really important to determine whether your product or strategy will be a success or not. While it is not easy to conduct end-to-end market research, the result would be worth it. 

   If you don’t have time or experience to carry out market research, Deka Insight can provide personalized market research to fulfill your needs.