DO YOU KNOW YOUR MARKET?
Market research is a vital tool in understanding the overall placement of your business in that market. Market research covers everything from whether there is actually a market for your product, how your customers would perceive the product,how they make their purchasing decisions and what your competition is doing.
In other words, market research gives you a full picture of the battleground your business is either in or about to enter.
As new business owners, we found it a real struggle to get our heads around how to conduct market research. We had visions of agencies, marketing consultants, the whole nine yards.
We also had zero budget and really didn’t know where to start at all including what questions to ask!
Market Research On A Shoestring
Eoin and I sat down and reviewed what we could do on market research with our limited funds.
Firstly, we had to define our market i.e. who were we selling to? This may sound obvious, but it actually was trickier than we thought it was going to be to get it right.
The next step was to identify what we needed to know a.k.a. does this business idea have any merit?
- Was there are market?
- What was that market willing to pay?
- What were the barriers to entry?
- What were the competition doing?
- How do our potential customers make their purchasing decisions?
- What did our potential customers think about managing their business on line?
- …..
We then identified who we knew in relevant businesses and setup some 1:1 sessions with them to ask their opinions and guidance. The approach was casual and non-directive to understand their take on the market area, their issues etc. This led to gaining really useful information and it fed directly into both the product design and the marketing material that we will be using.
We also realised that Twitter and Google could give us vast amounts of market research if we looked in the right places. Twitter you ask? Yes, what are people saying about you market – just put in key word searches and it’s amazing what you’ll find out. People are talking about your subject all the time (or the competition).
We created an on-line survey and pushed it out to everyone we knew who would have contacts in our potential market. We asked them to push it out further and while we started with 50 people, 136 had filled it in within a week. Encouragement to fill in the survey was supported by a prize – amazing how much of a difference this made to getting it done quickly.
And that was it. We were amazed at the information we received back – very little was redundant and it cost us about 200 Euro’s in the odd lunch, on-line survey and the prize.
Market research should be a continuous process. It doesn’t have to be hugely expensive, but it will define the direction you take in your business.
Do you have any other ways of conducting market research in a cost effective way?
Photo : Worldislandinfo.com
Tags: budget, business management, market research, marketing, Small Business, start-up
