Market Research

Is about learning about your;

 customers

 competitors

 industry

starting a new business

updating or writing a marketing plan

measuring the success of a marketing plan

 

How To Make a Marketing Plan

To have a successful business, you need to know about your customers, your competitors, and your industry.

Market research is about asking the right questions, in the right way, to the right people. This will guides your business and helps you keep track of what your customers want and how much they are willing to pay for it.

When you do market research, you can use your findings in two ways:

Start a new business and write your marketing plan.

Measure the success of your current marketing plan.

Market research involves asking the right questions, in the right way, to the right people.

 

These are the 5 steps to make a research to your market:

 

1- Define Your Research Objective

What you need to do for the first step in the market research process is to define your research goals. Ask to yourself:

What is the key information you want your research ?

 What do you want to know about your customers or your market ?

By defining your research goals, you will be able to keep your research focused and effective.

 

For instance, you may want to introduce a new product or service. Your research process will be to evaluate whether the market will accept your new product or service and how much they will be willing to pay for it.

 

2- Develop Your Research Questions

After you find an objective you need to ask list of questions for your market, customers and competitors. E.g; 

What are the market’s key demographics for the, how will the entrance affect the market and customers, does the region has a stable economy ?

Who are your target customers and their behaviors, where they are located, the ideal customer for your business ?

What are the profiles of a competitors, their main strengths and weakness ?

 

3- Collect Your Data

Data collection has 2 types related with questions:

 In depth interviews

 Survey and questionaries

 

Research Types

Some of them are;

Polling by phone

Questionaries by mail

 Online surveys

Private interviews

You may also use simple ‘yes or no’ survey on phone, meeting or mail. There are also easier way to survey like:

SurveyMonkey

GoogleDocs

 

4- Evaluate Your Results

The findings you have must be interpreted and organized, what you discovered ? Look what you can improve. Tips for data organization:

Make the major trends clear, use lists, diagrams and maps to organize data.

Use a SWOT analyses to find the strengths, weakness etc of your organization. This will make it easy to make a conclusion for your business plan.

 

5- Make Decisions and Come to a Conclusion

When you found some conclusions ask:

What does it mean for your business the findings you discovered ?

What you are going to do ? 

 

Make sure you checked every detail of your business and check all:

Be sure there are no gaps in your data

Check the major trends or problems in industry or market

Examine every strength, weakness, threats and opportunities. 

Decide for your tactics with your research that will be done by 7 marketing steps