In recent times, consumers have had more power in their hands. They have the power to research your product before making a purchase.
Keeping this in mind, startups need to come up with a marketing strategy that complements how consumers research products before buying them. For building the right marketing strategy, startups need to conduct extensive market research.
Some startups choose to do research on their own, and some choose to go with the professionals for the best business startup consulting services that provide a great start over, commendable results, and a stable scalable strategy when asked for customized startup marketing services.
Market research primarily involves having a deep understanding of your prospective customers, target market, and customers’' behavior.
If you're new to market research, don't worry. This is the step-by-step guide you can use to conduct market research.
1. Create a Buyer/Marketing Persona
Before you start targeting them, you need to understand your target audience. Hence, we use buyer personas. The buyer persona is a made-up, generalized representation of your ideal customer. This helps visualize the target audience, streamlines your communication, and informs your strategy. Here, the main idea is to use the buyer persona as a guideline for how to effectively reach and learn about the real target audience.
2. Figure Out The Right Persona Group To Engage With
After creating the buyers’ personas, use them to figure out which group to use for market research. The persona group should be a representative sample of your target customers. The right persona group can help you understand your target customer's buying habits. Also, the group should contain people who made a purchase recently or purposefully didn't make a purchase.
3. Be Ready With Research Questions For Your Research Participants
Now that you have found the right persona group to engage with, next you need to find questions to ask them. It's always a good idea to have research questions for your market research participants beforehand.
This will save you a lot of time in the long run. The right questions would be the ones that are open-ended. Consider it the golden rule of market research to never ask questions whose answers end with YES or NO. This golden rule is used by several top startup marketing service providers, which is a good enough reason to use this rule effectively.
4. Know Your Top Competitors
Along with researching your target audience, you need to research your top competitors.
Your competitors would be companies who sell similar services or products as you. Sometimes, it's a division of a company against whom you're competing with. For instance, Microsoft sells Windows operating systems, phones, laptops, etc. But their gaming division, X Box, directly competes with other gaming consoles like PlayStation, Nintendo, etc.
To learn about the competitors whose products or services match yours, identify the industry you're pursuing. Find an industry term you relate to, and use it to compile a list of companies that also belong in the same industry.
5. Sum Up Your Findings
Now that you have your findings, it's time to summarize those findings in a presentable way. This step is needed to explain your findings in a way that can be understood by all.
Several software are available that can be used to make reports.
Conclusion
Market research is crucial before even beginning to develop your product. It can help you identify whether there is demand for your product and allow you to make changes to your idea at an early stage.
Doing research is important, but communicating your research is even more important. After all, what's the point of doing research if people can't make sense of it? If you find doing market research overwhelming, then you could choose to go with a business/startup consulting service provider that can do market research for you.
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