When diving into a new business or introducing a new product in the market, it is very important for business owners to understand the market at that point of time. Only when you know about the market that you want to target, you can devise the right strategies for your business. That’s what Market Research and Survey helps you do. It lets you truly know the working of the market, what the market needs, what’s the profile of your potential customers, what might work, what might not, etc. So, this post will let you know all about Market Research & Survey and how to use it for your business’s advantage.
Table of Contents
What is Market Research & Survey?
Market Research basically means analyzing the target market. It helps identify the different segments of buyers. It also identifies the characteristics, social strata, personality type and economic status of this segment of buyers. Doing this helps businesses know what is the price range which their customers can afford, what all features should the product include to satisfy a particular personality type of the target segment. It tries to predict the probability of success of any product or service if offered in a particular place or amongst a particular segment. Market Research can also reveal important information about the competitors and the effect of their strategies in the market.
Why do you need Market Research & Survey?
It might turn deadly to devise your marketing strategies based on guesses. You should have solid data and facts that tell you about the needs and wants, spending capacity, interests and personalities, etc. of your target customer base. When you know your customers, you can bring out the right pricing plan to fulfil their needs.
People are always resistant to change. They like to stick to their old habits. Studies have shown that people generally stick to a brand or go to the same retailer for a long time. That is why it would be difficult to make them your loyal customers if you are entering as a new brand. In such cases, you need to offer something extraordinary that might catch their attention and fulfil their needs and wants. Your pricing should be justified according to the customers.
Doing extensive and careful Market Research makes you prepared to enter a new market and give quite a decent competition to the existing brands. You need to understand what’s wrong with the existing brands, what more things do customers need, etc. to fill those gaps with your brand.
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Types of Market Research
There are primarily 2 types of Market Research – Primary and Secondary.
Primary Market Research – In this type, you acquire the data directly by doing one-on-one interaction with the customers, through surveys or interviews, etc.
Secondary Market Research – In this type, you acquire the data through third-party sources, like already done surveys, educational institutes, public information sources by the Government, etc.
Let us tell you the specific types of Market Research which are usually done for different purposes:
1. Market Segmentation
Market Segmentation divides a large market into sub-groups and identifies these sub-groups on the basis of interests and/or personalities. Further strategies are then devised based on these divisions to target specific groups. This is because we need different strategies for different types of sub-groups.
2. Demographic Surveys
These surveys help us know the age, gender, marital status, economic status of the target customer base. This lets businesses analyze the spending capacity of the people, what are their prime expectations from the product and why so, etc.
3. Product/Concept Testing
This testing predicts how the introduction of a new product/concept will perform in the market. Whether the customers will accept the product or not. Whether the pricing will be affordable or not. What problems the customers might face. Doing this is essential because it might reduce the risk of product failure.
4. Focus Group Testing
This involves selecting some individuals who are experts in the field or are highly interested in the field to which the product belongs. They are made to test the product and share their honest feedback. The good things about the product, the bad features of the products, the overall experience, the expectations, etc. This process is insightful as these individuals often look at the details of the products. But one should be careful while doing a focus group testing. If one does not select the right set of individuals, the results that come up might not be very reliable and may even be biased. This is also because the no. of people chosen is quite less. But if the people chosen are experts, the results can be quite astonishing and accurate.
5. Brand Awareness Survey
These kind of surveys help us understand the customers’ perspectives towards the brand. It helps us know how well they know the brand and resonate with the brand’s ideologies. It is important to know whether the brand is able to communicate its ideologies and visions to the people so that people connect with it. Only when they connect with the brand in some form, the brand name will be instilled in their minds and they will be in touch with the brand’s recent launches. This makes it more likely for them to buy the products.
6. Interviews
To move a step ahead of the quantitative analysis of the product sales and perception, interviews are conducted to obtain a qualitative analysis. This helps us know whether a customer likes a product or not, and a step more than this, i.e. to also know why they do or don’t like a particular product. This type of information gathering is very important because it helps us understand the reasons why a product is being disliked. By knowing this information, we can change our product strategies for better sales and for satisfying the customer expectations.
7. Customer Observation
To truly know how a customer feels and interacts when with a product, the best way is to see them interact live. This is called customer observation and can be of two types – covert and overt. What this means is that, you observe a person use the product in front of you. This will let you see what problems they face and how are their problems being solved by the product. Overt observation means that you take the person’s consent to observe them while they’re interacting with the product. You can even film them with consent to record their behavior and analyse later. Covert observation, on the other hand means, that you are discretely observing how people interact with your product. For example – you just go to a store and see how people are choosing your product or your competitor’s product. Whether your product is able to grab the customer’s attention amidst other products. Covert observations can provide the most genuine information.
8. Advertising Testing
The aim of this testing is to improve the ad performance. It analyses how customers respond to different ads. We collect data regarding which are the ads that created a huge buzz and which ones had negligent reactions. We also look into why certain ads performed better than the others and try to understand the customer psychology. This will help us devise better advertising strategies in the future.
Apart from these types of surveys, there are more types like pricing research, satisfaction and loyalty analysis, etc. Using these surveys, one can get a good picture of what exactly the market needs. One can also know what are the expectations from any particular brand/product.
We have known the different kinds of research we can do. With the advent of technology, there are a lot of tools available online to help us do effective Market Research & Survey.
Let us list out the Top 5 Online Market Research Tools
1. Google Research Tools
Google has access to a humongous amount of consumer data. That’s why, using its tools can provide a lot of essential analytics regarding anything.
The most important tool is Google Keywords which lets us know the frequently searched terms. This can give us a clear idea about the trending products.
Rising Retail Categories is another tool by Google which helps us know which retail categories are on the rise according to Google Search. It helps us get a clear picture of which retail sectors are booming and in high demand.
Market Finder by Google helps identify international business opportunities using market insights.
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2. Tableau
Tableau helps anyone to see and understand their data. We can connect to any database and create visualizations to better demonstrate the data. The visualizations make it easier to understand.
3. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey helps us create surveys to gather crucial information from the customers and later analyze those data. Measure brand awareness, test concepts and obtain demographic information about your customer base.
4. Loop11
Loop11 is a very interesting tool that lets you test prototypes, live websites and analyze the user’s response to these products. It is basically a user-experience testing platform that allows users to test how usable the websites are.
5. Statista
It specializes in market and consumer data and provides current market figures and forecasts for the most important consumer goods. This might prove very beneficial for businesses.
So, here were our top picks of online tools that can help you conduct market research effectively. But nothing can ever match a specialized Market Research by experts. We, at Sampark Infoways, conduct surveys that give useful insights about the target market. Contact Us so that we may help you with Market Research and Survey and make your business grow.
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