How to do market research: A guide and template

Market research is a vital component in coming up with innovative and creative solutions to problems being faced by the target audience. Market research tells us what an ideal customer is looking for and the places they are looking for it. This information also helps in drafting a strategic plan that aims not only at solving the problems of the target customer but also to come up with revolutionary products/services.

The 7 Benefits Of Conducting Market Research

Significantly minimizes the risks involved with making investments: Just by spending a small part of the budget on market analysis, a company can assess if the solution is practically sound and will attract desired/expected return on investment. This stage also involves testing and checking the proposed solution.

Helps in discovering strengths and weaknesses: During the stage of market research, the organization can come across gaps that might not have been identified during the initial stages of planning and implementation. These gaps are sudden and a reaction to the product/services. While models can estimate the probable responses, only through adequate market research can the strengths and weaknesses be identified in real-time.

It allows strategic planning: Knowing what your ideal clientele is looking for adds direction to planning and execution. By knowing what they want from the solution you are offering, they are more likely to invest in it. Market research backs strategic planning by introducing potential touchpoints of customer interactions and how the organization can better what they are offering in terms of services and products.

Helps in staying relevant: Trends keep changing every month, and these changing trends also have an impact on customer behavior. By understanding how trends are evolving on a regular basis to get to the target audience, you can also craft your strategies such that it is in sync with current trends and scatter to what your target audience desires at the moment. This is also a great marketing strategy, as knowing the pattern of information consumption enhances how the brand is putting itself out for consumption.

Helps in staying ahead of what's already happening: By continuously indulging in market research, the brand can say ahead of the competition by already planning and executing marketing. This also allows the brand to experiment with innovative ideas and planning they are looking to work with, leaving less room for error when the final product or the service goes live for audience consumption.

Offers revenue forecasts: Market research can help in identifying whether a service or a product will perform well in the market. This is especially important from an investment point of you since knowing that the product or the service but not be able to fetch the expected return of investment, get easier to decide whether it is worthy of launching the product/service or if it is best to revamp the existing planning to come up with a more revenue-generating product or service model.

Helps in setting realistic goals: market research gives a clear idea about what is working right now in the market, the problems with existing models, and what type of solution the target audience is looking for. Through such a kind of research, an organization can plan well ahead in time about the type of solution that they are looking to launch and how it will be able to solve problems that even the current solutions are not able to resolve fully. This way, an organization can set realistic goals about what needs to be done, how to achieve it, and what the parameters are to fathom the workability of the plan in question.

A Comprehensive Market Research Guide & Template

Based on the most successful practices in the market, we present you with a detailed Market Research guide and template that can help businesses of any scale conduct Market Research seamlessly and without any hassles whatsoever.

The following presents a detailed Market Research guide and template that would help your business extensively. The template can be summarized as follows:

✓ Designate the research problem

✓ Create a research strategy

✓ Gather relevant data

✓ Perform a detailed data analysis and generate insights

Designate the research problem

At the outset, you need to be absolutely sure of what your core research revolves around. This way, you will be able to judiciously decide upon the right research methodologies, tools, and assets to ensure that you possess a complete and detailed understanding of your research area. In addition, designating your research problem lets you effectively narrow down your focus and work on the next steps ahead in devising a concrete research plan.

Create a research strategy

Once you have gained a thorough understanding of your research objectives, you will then have to create a workable research strategy that will pave the way forward for more insights. This involves the development of a proper analysis of customer behavior, trends, demographics, and preferences. Accordingly, you should be able to generate a strategy that takes all-important customer parameters into account.

Gather relevant data

Now, you need to collect relevant data subsets that can help you make decisions for your business. The collection of data can be categorized twofold:

●      Qualitative data can be collected through polls, surveys, interviews, and something like Google Forms.

●      Quantitative data can be collected from analytics tools and spreadsheets.

By forming a decisive interpretation of all the collected data, you can apply the information to your decision-making process.

Perform a detailed data analysis and generate insights

By analyzing your data in detail, you can find the answers to your research problem(s) and help convert those answers into super-effective business strategies. You can get this done by meticulously organizing the collected data.

For qualitative data, you can go through all of the data and categorize them into subsets such as customer needs, pain points, feedback, queries, suggestions, etc. For quantitative data, you can evaluate all of the data and obtain important statistics.

Once you have organized and interpreted all the data, you can review them in accordance with your initial market research goals.

Once your data is organized, review your initial research goals. Ultimately, you will be able to gain appreciable insights into your market research results and adjust your strategies if the need arises.