What is Market Research?
Data defined as information or knowledge converts into a more useful or comprehensible form of reasoning or calculation. Such a gathering of data across sources for product and business is called market research. It links producers, customers, and end-users to marketers to identify and define marketing opportunities
It could be for customer demands, product value, competitor research, or so on! There are world-class tools available for successful market research, which will make the data task easy and convenient for you.
Why is Market Research Important?
Market research lays the foundation for a robust data collection. It opens a broad spectrum of knowledge which, when merged with human intelligence, is capable of producing actionable insights.
Moreover, it gives you the liberty to slice and dice data as per your business requirements. Market research data can be experiments, surveys, or observations and looks best when presented in various forms. The following points explain the benefits of market research:-
- Identify problems and opportunities in the market for new products and services, seeking information on market share, customer satisfaction levels, sales performances, etc. It helps in problem-solving and keep you up with the competitor.
- Markets are going global with a vast increase in customer base across geographies. Hence, keeping a tab on market performance and competitor strategies can be a challenging task. In this case, market research gets you the current data, which helps in the proper forecast of the plan.
- Marketing has become customer-centric. However, large-scale production needs intermediaries for mass distribution. Due to the prevalence of multi-channels of delivery, there is an information gap. Marketing research helps in collecting information on consumers from structured distribution research and helps in making marketing customer-oriented.
- In an era of micro- rather than mass-marketing, communication plays a vital role. Marketing research uses promotional research to study media mix, advertising effectiveness, and integrated communication tools. Research on such aspects will help in promoting a company’s product in the market effectively.
Data is the foundation for business/product success. It helps company owners to make a decision. Market Research provides comprehensive data of competitor research, product value, understanding customer demands, the latest trends in the market, financial, and economic costs. There are some points listed here to know why is market research is essential.
- Better understanding of customer requirements
- How competitors getting successful
- Business opportunity and risk level
- Product Demand before launching
- Collecting data to improve your business growth
What Steps Are Involved in Market Research
These are the five steps involved in market research, the process applied for all types for market research surveys such as product research, consumer research, and education survey. Let’s review the best practices in the five-step marketing research process:
- Define the Problem and Opportunity: Every market research starts to define the problem. For collecting data and analysis on anything, you have to clear with the thought that you are looking.
- Evolve Your Marketing Research Plan: The second step is to make a plan for your research and methods. Here you need to design a survey, making questionnaires, and distribute the survey.
- Gather Data and Information: After completing the second step, you will get the responses in the form of data that need to analyze.
- Analyze the Data: Now, you get the data that you are looking for, it’s time to analyze the data. Here you will filter the actual information that will help you to implement.
- Put into Action: The final and vital step. The data which you gathered and filtered put into the action.
Tools for Market Research
We are talking about market research than for the entire process; we require a tool that helps us to perform a market research survey. Everybody has a different purpose for market research. There are many market research tools for different purposes. I’m listing some useful market research tools for various purposes.
- Google Trends is a real-time search tool that keeps you updated with the on-going trends in the world.
- SoGoSurvey is a tool known for surveys, and this is one of the trusted online market research tools.
- Social Mention is like a social media search engine that will help you to know what is trending on social media.
- Google Keyword Tool is one of the best and accurate tool for keyword research.
Wrap-Up
Market Research is a process that helps organizations, individuals, and service providers to gather information and decision making. Market research help in minimizing any investment risk, identify threats and opportunities, discover your strength and competitor weakness.
research graphic -DepositPhotos
