Market research is an integral part of your business launch. The key to the success of your business is to understand the demand for your products and services. Knowing customers’ needs and offering them their requirements in a profitable manner will make your business grow and help you beat the competition.
Types of Market Research
Market research can be of two sorts: Primary and Secondary. Primary Research is the process of collecting insights directly from the source. While the process was a bit time-consuming and expensive previously, the recent emergence of online access and polls made it fast and cheaper.
On the other hand, secondary research deals with resources those are publicly available and free and thus, are inexpensive and fast-to-avail in nature. Information is received here mostly from search engines and websites. However, the information from secondary sources is normally broad-based. It often fails to highlight the critical angle of your requirements. Sometimes it also has authenticity issues.
Why Market Research is Necessary
There are certain steps involved in the whole market research story. It is extremely necessary before the business launch while the need for research on a continuous basis is also required during the process of business expansion. Let’s delve a little deeper:
Knowing Market Before Launch Helps You Take Informed Decisions
Market Research helps firms realize prospective customers’ opinion on the sheer need of the products and services as well as their views on pricing and after-sale services. The very research can be done by making a database of likely customers, reaching them out online with a tailor-made questionnaire and gathering their feedback. This mainly falls under the category primary market research.
Knowing Prospective Customers’ Profile
If most of the initial responses come across as positive and you have successfully set your business, you need to have the profile of prospective customers on a continuous basis, especially in the initial days, to keep your business going. If the potential market is new or underserved, a thorough research in this regard will help a firm build effective clientele and also help the company structure proper marketing and pricing campaigns on their end.
Knowing Your Competitors
A research on the business success of the existing companies in a particular field help the new entrant understand the remaining scope in the market it is planning to enter. Such competitor analysis will help you improve your own business strategy and also even help you to grab a market share from them. Such research can be done by screening the existing players, studying their customer experience on social media, analyzing their unique selling propositions and pricing structure. All this information will help you tweak your strategies and win over the long term.
Need for Post-Launch Market Research
After setting up a business, you need to have a full-proof post-launch action plan to keep the momentum going. The post-launch plan should take care of strategies to keep your customers attached to you through at least social media. After-sale services like solving customer complaints should also be taken care of. If the business itself is too busy to undertake such responsibilities, a market research or digital marketing company can be assigned to perform such duties.
Knowing Future Trends: A Must-Have for New & Existing Businesses
Both set of companies, new and existing, need to know the future trends and growth projections of the market they want to be/are currently operating in. This will help them set business goals and structure their expansion and marketing plans, which in turn will lead them to a commercial success.
Both primary and secondary market research, in this regard, remain effective. Not only the target market, but also a macro research involving information about government data and policies as well as economic projections will help your business take right decisions about future expansion plans.
https://www.inc.com/shane-barker/4-things-you-need-to-do-before-you-launch-a-new-product.html