Marcus Richards
Companies spend a lot on marketing and it is one of the best ways to get new customers and grow sales. Among the most important parts of marketing itself is market research. This involves finding out a ton of information about your target market, so you can better learn their wants and needs.
There is more data out there than ever before, and it is incredibly important to know as much about your customers or target as possible. The more information you have, the better you can make important decisions.
Unfortunately, market research isn’t always the easiest thing to do. With that in mind, let’s look at a couple of great tips for conducting the best market research possible.
Truly Define Who Your Buyer Is
The first step to any successful market research strategy is actually defining your market. Before you learn their wants, needs, preferences and buying decisions, you need to know who you are actually trying to market to.
A great way to do this is to use marketing personas. This is essentially a generalized look at your ideal customer and who you see buying your products and services. You should look at and consider a variety of things such as location, age, gender, socioeconomic status, other interests, and struggles they might experience.
This can be a very helpful guideline to use, before actually reaching out to any potential buyers. Defining your buyer ahead of time will ensure you are marketing to the correct people and can actually help you identify who your target should be. Knowing who your ideal buyer is will also ensure your marketing content and messaging are for the right people.
Don’t Forget About Offline Market Research
Offline market research
One of the biggest hassles of market research is actually getting people to participate. Recruiting people can take a while, and there are no guarantees that many people will participate even if they are reached out to. While many companies solely do their market research online nowadays, doing it offline still holds a ton of value.
Setting up a self-serve kiosk in public retail points provides an optimal way to collect valuable market research data from thousands of potential customers. A great offline survey software can make setting up these kiosks simple and straightforward. This can come off less pushy than an email, as the customer can simply walk on by if they don’t want to participate.
Of course, be sure to offer individuals some sort of benefit or value if they participate in your research. This could be a discount, a special deal or potentially even provide them something for free. Many customers may even think more highly of your company simply by seeing these types of kiosks, as they show you are receptive to feedback and listening to your customers.
Take Time to Prepare Your Questions
Your market research efforts are only as good as the questions that you prepare. Whether you go for the public kiosk route, a phone interview or an online questionnaire, you will need some high-quality questions. You should ask a variety of different questions about their background, their problems that need solving, how they discovered you as a potential solution and things of that nature.
It is a good idea to leave these questions as open as possible, to get as much potential information as possible. If you ask bad questions or very simple yes-or-no ones, you won’t get much more than some basic information, which likely won’t be that beneficial to you in the end.
In conclusion, the information in this article will be able to take your market research to the next level. Tick off all of our suggestions and watch your business flourish based on solid information you’ve gathered.
