Market research provides insights into your target market. Effective market research is mission-critical for a small business; when you’re new and testing out your business idea, expanding into a new market, planning to launch a service, or getting additional seed funding. As a small business, you have so many things that need attention and focus, make sure that market research isn’t taking the back seat. We took a look into how to do market research as a small business, and here’s our breakdown of conducting lean and effective market research for your small business.
The key steps to conducting market research include:
- Defining the problem and the reason for research; a well-defined research objective cuts to the chase and makes it easier to design questions. It should give a brief but satisfying description of the objectives and how you intend to meet them.
- Define the sample; define the audience of your research, how they will be involved and where you intend to find them. You can create focus groups based on different sampling methods.
- Gather your research and collect the data. You can use surveys customized for customers, competitors and apply them to the research. The data can be classified under qualitative research where it is more investigative or quantitative, which draws conclusions.
Conducting the research
1. Create buyer personas
This is a fictional descriptive profile created to reflect an ideal loyal customer. The buyer persona visualizes the ideal buyers’ age, gender, job title, family size, and income related to real-life customers. Buyer personas will define your customer’s interests, behaviors, pain points, and spending patterns to help you create content and messaging tailored to their needs. You can have more than one persona but ensure they are relevant to your campaign.
2. Competitor analysis
This part focuses on what your competitors are doing differently and what you can learn or adopt from them. It unpacks who your biggest competitors are and what makes them successful. With this research, you can identify ways to outperform them.
You can find local and online businesses directly competing with yours, comb through their website and other customer-focused marketing channels, and examine their customer experience and success rate compared to yours. This may include website traffic analytics, social media engagements, pricing models, and customer reviews. You can download their flyers and brochures, attend similar events, or even get into their email list. You can use tools like SEMrush to know the content that ranks higher in search engines to improve your high-value topics.
3. Customer feedback
When aquiring customer feedback, you have to use the feedback constructively. Start with talking to loyal customers and analyzing what is working or not working from their perspective. People who are already buying from you embody your ideal buyer persona and, by extension, your customer base.
- Take short, lean surveys
They help you collect feedback, and the responses give you insight into more significant issues impacting customer buying decisions. Survey Monkey is one platform to create follow-up surveys after customers make purchases.
Keep the survey short and simple; 5-10 multiple choice or short answer questions. You can also set up surveys aimed at people who did not buy and find out why they couldn’t or wouldn’t buy from you and what made them choose not to buy from you.
- Social Media
Top social media platforms connect you with your target market and help grow your brand presence online, drive traffic and even make sales.
Instagram; use interactive features like story stickers, question prompts, and quizzes. You can also use this to ask for their opinion of your products and services.
Reddit; Find a subreddit related to your industry and read users’ candid thoughts about their experience with products or services. The anonymity makes people willing to share what they wouldn’t normally divulge in person.
Facebook; hang out in groups related to your business and read through conversations. Chip in to discussions and offer answers to some questions. Start or join conversations while being careful not to come off as spammy.
4. Analytics
Surveys will tell you what customers want; analytics will tell you what they do and help you guide them to what they want. Set up tools to track customer behavior on your website and their engagement with emails and messages to show you what is working or isn’t.
Google Analytics is one powerful tool that can show you exactly how people engage with your website. You can use the reports to create more popular content, direct more traffic to high conversion pages and automate your marketing campaigns if needed.
Secondary research
Some of the resources you can use include;
- US census Bureaus’ State and Metropolitan Area Data Book, Census Product Update, County Business Patterns, breakdowns by geographical area, look to the Economic Census,
- USA.gov website; information and service that the federal government provides for the business community.
- Commerce Department’s Economic Indicators web page.
- D&B’s Regional Business Directories, D&B’s Regional Business Directories
- Online resources in the following sites; KnowThis.com’s, BizMiners.com, MarketResearch.com
- Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Consumer Expenditure Survey
- SBDCNet Business Snapshots:
- Paid or free websites and tools for market research
- Google Keywords Tools
- Questback
- KeySurvey
- BizStats
- FreeLunch
- Google Trends
- Soovle
- Think with Google Research
- Statista
- NielsenIQ
- Gartner
- Tableau Public
…and many more
5. Analyze the results and interpret findings
After gathering the data and results of your research, you need to interpret them. Analyze the data and how it relates to your original objective of the market research. This will help organize the data into actionable ideas for your business.
6. Compile a market research report
Raw unstructured data is practically useless. You have to put your findings and interpretations into a structured document that summarizes the data and highlights the key points. The report will include an executive summary of the research, buyer personas and why/how relevant they are, trends and analysis of competitors, customer feedback on products and services, and lastly, next steps and recommendations with possible strategies for your campaigns.
Growth
You can now apply the suggestions and findings to your marketing campaigns and spruce up your marketing channels and sales/conversion funnels. This could take a while as you refine your approach and improve your products or services. Keep at it as it’s going to take a bit of time to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Once you have the information start using it right away, make sure your marketing and sales teams are using the data to provide prospects and customers with what the data proves they want. Read How to Identify and Market to Your Target Audience for more on the subject.
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