It’s a truly exciting time in the world economy right now. Every day, thousands of new aspiring businessmen and women launch a website, file for corporate status, and brainstorm their ideas for winning products and services that will outperform the marketplace and set a new standard in their industry. Starting a business is a great adventure, but it’s also one that takes extreme time, patience, will, and caution.
While it’s both exciting and scary, starting a business actually doesn’t have to be so tough. Today, even the smallest startup can reach clients around the world through a killer website and a good social media strategy. That takes down the barrier to enter the business niche and enables millions to be successful with their business ideas. In fact, your small town bakery shop could quickly grow into a state-wide, country-wide, or even world-wide phenomenon with the right tools and techniques. But, before you ever spend a dime on that winning business idea, you need to do something called market research. I read many great articles on Entrepreneur about market research and one of them says that "Many business owners neglect this crucial step in product development for the sole reason that they don't want to hear any negative feedback".
What is Market research & why do I need it?
The world offers many opportunities for aspiring business owners, but that also means there’s a lot of competition. You might think that your unique idea is going to sell, sell, sell, but in reality, it might not be that unique at all. To determine if anyone else has the same idea of you and how they used it, you need to do background research on other businesses that are most closely described as “competitors” to your product or service, as well as research of customers needs and wishes for better launch of your idea, product or service.
Following this, once you have fine-tuned your idea, you need to begin doing market research to see if it will even succeed. This isn’t a surefire way to know if your business is going to be in the black or not by the end of its first run, but it’s the best way to weed out a bad idea before you have the chance to waste your time and money with it.
Market research can help you before you ever even get into business by helping you figure out:
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Who is your ideal customer going to be?
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What are customers needs considering the idea, product or service of your competitors?
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How can you create more advanced product or service than your competitor?
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What other products are on the market and who are your competitors?
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What could you do better than your competitors?
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What price point could you sell your product at?
This research phase might seem daunting and time-consuming, but the amount of time and money it will save you later on is going to be very worth it. Doing this research will also put you in a better starting position on the market as you’ll already have a huge amount of background information on your competitors and their marketing strategies. With that in mind, rather than taking the expensive route of learning through “trial and error”, you can skip many costly mistakes altogether.
How to make a market research?
Market research involves exploring new informations provided by your potential users, as well as research of existing informations. This includes your competitors ideas, products and services. According to that, market research is divided on Primary market research and Secondary market research. These methods can help you to get valuable informations to successfully realize your idea, product or service.
Primary market research
Primary market research is exploring new informations, potential customer, identifying your target audience, researching the needs of your potential customers. Important first three questions which we mentioned at the beginning of the article. The best method in primary market research is through surveys. For this method you can engage market research companies, but with greater presence and offer of online survey tools, you can explore the market yourself, cheaper and simpler, to get real results and information which can help you to successfully launch your idea.
Secondary market research
The other three questions belong to secondary market research. Exploring existing ideas and your competitors can show you what your potential customers already have on the market. This is just as important as primary market research. Secondary market research includes competitors offers, public sources, commercial sources and educational institutions.
Conclusion
While it’s both exciting and scary, starting a business actually doesn’t have to be so tough. Once you have fine-tuned your idea, you need to begin doing market research to see if it will even succeed. Doing research will put you in a better starting position on the market as you’ll already have a huge amount of background information. Primary market research can help you find out your potential customers needs, and secondary market research will show you existing market. Those infos combined will help you create idea, product or service that can be successful from the beginning.
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Quotation:
Entrepreneur. (n.d.). Conducting Market Research. Retrieved January 3, 2018 from the Entrepreneur website: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/217388