Author: Divya Gouda
As a business owner, it’s important to avoid making assumptions about your customers, market, competitors, or systems. This can lead to wasted time, money, and effort. To make informed decisions that will boost your business growth and make the most of your resources, it’s always recommended to conduct thorough market research. Successful business growth depends on understanding your target customers and other important factors. Market research also plays a crucial role in developing and bringing products and services to the market and marketing them effectively to consumers.
Market research provides critical information about your business landscape. It can help you understand how your company is or will be perceived by your target customers, how to connect with them, and how you stack up against competitors, which helps with decision-making. Conducting market research before starting a business or launching a new product/service can help identify new opportunities, and potential customers, establish product viability, reduce risks, enhance profitability, gain a competitive edge, and understand existing customers.
There are different types of market research available, including primary research, where data is collected proactively from the target market, and secondary research, which uses previously collected and published data.
Qualitative research collects non-numerical data to understand opinions, beliefs, experiences, attitudes, and interactions, while quantitative research is captured through surveys and questionnaires to generate numerical data.
Market research helps businesses understand which products or services have demand in the market, identify issues in existing products/services, acknowledge factors important to the target market, and incorporate them in future products/services. Understanding customer demographics such as gender, age, income, occupation, and lifestyle can also help target customers more effectively and reduce the risk of poor product performance. Market research helps determine product viability, whether the market is ready for it, and its chances of success.
Reducing risk through market research helps increase profitability, identify low-risk, high-reward areas for expansion, and offer new services. It also helps businesses stay ahead of competitors by tracking their progress and developing strategies to outperform them. Understanding customers is complex, but monitoring their changing needs and preferences through market research can help businesses stay successful.
In conclusion, conducting thorough market research is critical to the success of any business. It provides valuable information that can inform decision-making and help businesses maximise their resources. By identifying new opportunities, and potential customers, reducing risk, gaining a competitive edge, and understanding existing customers, businesses can grow and thrive in a constantly evolving market.
References:
https://martech.health/articles/top-reasons-you-need-market-research-in-2023
https://www.thehartford.com/business-insurance/strategy/market-research/business-market-research
https://www.questionpro.com/blog/importance-of-market-research/
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/why-marketing-research-is-important-to-your-business-2296119
