Market Research Analysis– How to get started
Market Research Analysis – How to get started
Bringing your brainchild to real-world is both exciting and challenging. However, with proper guidance and preparation, you can overcome most of the challenges and make your business idea a reality.
Many individuals assume that people in the “real world” are willing to buy whatever products they introduce. However, the opposite is usually true. Instead of believing the world is ready to purchase whatever you offer, you should, in fact, be attempting to identify the exact niche you want to approach. We call this, Market Research.
Market Research, in one form or another, should be an essential task that is started before any development and should continue through the entire life cycle of your business.
In the initial stages of your offering, external analysis and feedback become exceptionally important as it can offer you a realistic understanding of the existence of a market in the first place. To get some initial feedback we can look at your digital marketing campaigns for help. You can test different messages to see which get traction or send out a survey to collect opinions.
As your company matures it is wise to identify Strategic customers or partners and have them give you feedback on the features and direction of your offering as well.
Here are 7 Tips to help you start your market research.
Examine the current macro market conditions
Macro market research refers to the relatively larger societal forces that can influence your specific market environment. To analyze macro-environment, you may need to stay updated on concepts such as analyst market studies, reports, market news, etc.
PEST Analysis
This is the abbreviation that refers to the process of identifying aspects like Political, Economic, Social and Technological influences of the environment that relates to your offering.
Your specific market analysis and research
This is the process of collecting highly relevant aspects in terms of dimension, the trends of the niche of your market and the users. In this case, you should have a good understanding of the market simply by defining the target segments’ age, geographical location, gender and a brief idea about niche’s size.
Competitive environment research
This is the important process of analyzing a sample of competitors that represents your niche. With a close analysis of the successful strategies they deploy on the field currently, you can learn a lot. Through this, you will learn the number of competitors, price range, market saturation, etc.
Examine your internal SWOT
In this section, you need to consider the ability of your organization to connect and serve potential customers. To accomplish this you may need to conduct an internal SWOT analysis of your team and marketing maturity. This approach will help you assess your critical Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Strengths are considered to be the success factors of your business and weaknesses can hinder the success of your company.
In the case of a startup with only a few clients, it may be hard to identify true “Strengths” but it is ok to lean forward a bit here and think about what you will look like in a year or so. Also, do not be afraid to compare your future self against your competitors.
Make sure to also include your suppliers, intermediates and any actors close to the company that can affect your ability to serve your customers in your total market research approach.
Analyze your digital marketing (2 Parts)
Additionally, do not forget to include your digital marketing capabilities, in particular, both web and social media channels as they are exceptionally important in order to have a realistic idea about the online presence of your business.
1 Conduct a Web Audit
A web audit includes aspects like SEO, design of the site, usability and the architecture of the site. To perform an analysis, you will have to use tools such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, Woorank, Metricspot, SEOmoz, etc.
2 Social Media Audit
During a social media audit, you will have to pay special attention to different aspects of various social media channels.
- The visits and comments on Blogs
- Likes, reacts, outreach and people talking about Facebook posts
- Retweets, Tweets, and favorites of Twitter – to name a few.
