Starting a business can be easy, but keeping it up and running is actually challenging. Simply put, transforming a startup into a successful venture is like an uphill battle. This battle can be avoided with market research because it introduces a budding business to actionable insights. These insights consist of vitals related to the target audience, competitors, market trends, and potential demand for your offerings.
Starting a business can be easy, but keeping it up and running is actually challenging. Simply put, transforming a startup into a successful venture is like an uphill battle. This battle can be avoided with market research because it introduces a budding business to actionable insights. These insights consist of vitals related to the target audience, competitors, market trends, and potential demand for your offerings.
However, startups are commercial entities with limited resources. It won’t be a budget-friendly alternative.
Step-by-step Process for Conducting Market Research for a Startup
For a new company, the market research process should be comprehensive and its all elements should be focused.
Step 1. Define Your Objectives
Before doing anything, the researcher must discover where he is heading. The comprehensibility of goals can help in achieving the end goal. Emphasizing these points can make it easier to determine research purposes, which can be the following:
- Understanding market demand for a new offering
- Understanding what customers expect and how they respond via calls or surveys
- Analysing market trends
- Auditing the competition
- Evolving pricing strategies
Step 2. Choose Between Primary and Secondary Research
Market research is typically of two types-primary and secondary research. To select the ideal one, crystal clear understanding of these researches is essential.
- Primary Research: It is typically about collecting first-hand data, which involves the direct sources of data. For this purpose, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and even direct observations are organised.
- Secondary Research: When the data is collected from already-researched sources like reports, government publications, and online databases, it is considered the secondary research.
Now that you know, these researches, in a nutshell, provide authentic industry or niche data to a company. Eventually, the analyst drives insights and discovers strategies resonating with the goal. A startup may need the contribution from both types of research.
Step 3. Identify Your Target Audience
Now that you have insights, let’s focus on finding the right target audience. This task can be simplified by understanding the buyer person. Digital marketers are habitual in creating it by understanding insights collected from web data. You can project it through the web journey or insights of your web visitors. Consider demographics like age, income, education, sex, geographic location, and even psychological factors. These all will form some patterns that indicate their interests and values.
Step 4. Choose research methods.
These are some methods that are commonly used by experienced researchers.
- Surveys: Online surveys are the best economical option to reach out to a wide range of audiences online. Platforms like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, etc. are mostly used to run and gather responses instantly.
- Interviews: Interviews represent direct communication with the target audience. This interaction reveals their true behaviour and preferences.
- Focus Groups: To collect data, a small group of target customers is called to reveal more detailed insights about offerings to introduce or improve.
- Observational Research: As it is based on observations, the real-life customers’ reactions are observed and recorded.
The above methods have their own upsides and downsides. Every startup looking for research must recall its limited budget.
Step 5. Analyse Competitors
Without understanding the competition, it won’t be feasible to transform into a profitable business. Simply put, a competitive analysis refers to determining your top competitors and how they attained the top position in the market. This can be analysed by exploring their offerings, marketing strategies, pricing models, and customer reviews. These questions can reveal everything about your competitors:
- What are the upsides and downsides of competitors?
- What marketing strategies are winning them edge?
- What is their unique selling proposition (USP)?
- Is there any scope for startups to leverage by addressing customers’ concerns?
In essence, you should know the SWOT analysis, which can summarise your findings and also determine opportunities to leverage.
Step 6. Use Market Research Tools
Manually, it would be a lengthy procedure to gather data for research. Investing in market research tools can minimize hassles and increase the speed of collecting and analysing data. These tools can eliminate the possibility of investing in primary research resources, which are pricey.
- Google Analytics: It is commonly used by renowned digital marketers to catch insights into website traffic, customer behaviour, and preferences.
- SEMrush or Ahrefs: These tools can reveal the most intricate insights of online customers, which might be adding cutting edge to competitors.
- Social Media Listening Tools (e.g., Hootsuite, Buzzsumo): These tools can help in tracking customer sentiment, trends, and competitor strategies on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
- Statista or IBISWorld: These are premium secondary research tools that enrich startups with valid industry reports and market trends.
Market Research Outsourcing for Startups
Conducting market research in-house is indeed not a feasible option, especially for startups. They might not have sufficient time, resources, or expertise. To overcome this condition, market research outsourcing can be a wise decision. Outsourcing allows you to emphasise core operations. Simultaneously, the outsourcer manages the complexities involved in market research. Besides, it brings a lot of advantages, which are given below:
Benefits of Market Research Outsourcing
- Cost-Efficiency: Hiring a market research company may require capital investment. But over time, it proves a true time and money saviour because you don’t have to spend on in-house resources, their training, and overheads.
- Expertise: Outsourcing companies hire market research specialists. They employ the latest tools to automatically gather and analyse niche data. A startup may not be able to hire expert researchers because of heavy costing involved.
- Unbiased Insights: Unlike in-house workforce-driven insights, external resources offer unbiased insights. These are free from internal interventions and, hence, present genuine perspectives.
- Scalability: A market research company can scale up or down its resources and efforts according to the client’s requirements. So, it will be a value-for-money option.
Use Research to Inform Strategy
The ultimate goal of market research is to provide support in evolving innovative business strategies. Its findings can prove a milestone in refining or redesigning your product development, marketing plans, pricing strategies, and overall business model.
Conclusion
Market research is a vital concept that can eliminate fictitious decisions. A startup can learn about its audience, competitors, market condition, scope, and many other important aspects. These insights help in making wise decisions that help in optimising resources and maximising output and efficiency.