Market research is the process of evaluating how well your marketing efforts are working. Specifically, does your marketing get the attention and interest of prospects? Are you converting enough of those prospects into clients?
The more specific you can be about the identity of your customer, the better you can address their needs. Ask yourself, “Who am I targeting with this product?” and “What do they want?” Look at your current customers. What’s the average age? Gender? Education level? Personality? Lifestyle? Hobby? Occupation? Marriage status? Values?[3] X Research source It is also important to know where your customers are coming from. Sources include search engines, social media, backlinks, referral traffic, and subscriber lists.
For example, based on customer surveys and your industry knowledge, you uncover a customer problem. In this case, customers are losing time working or studying when their cell phone dies. If they forget their charger, they may lose hours of productivity.
For example, to solve the problem of dying cell phones, you create a phone charger built into a backpack. Your customers use backpacks to store computers and other work or school items. As a result, the worker or student can always charge their phone.
Over time, more customers buy your backpack and like using the built-in phone charger. These clients also believe that your product is different and better than competing products. You are building brand equity with your customers. To find out more about brand equity, see how to build brand equity.
You continually add blog posts, articles and other content to your website. Adding content drives traffic to your site. Your content also keeps a percentage of your audience coming back for new content. Your site offers an opt-in button for readers to subscribe to additional content that is emailed to them. This group gets a weekly email from you with new content links. You have an attractive home page that includes a picture of someone using your backpack phone charger. The site allows the user to easily navigate to your content page and to web pages with product information. You provide an e-commerce option for customers. Clients can buy your product online and receive their backpack in just 2-3 business days. This should also include information about the sales channels used, like online, bricks & mortar, types of retailers, etc. Analyze how well your product is doing in each of these channels.
Note your market share compared to competitors and market share trends. Are you gaining market share, losing it, or holding your own? For more on market share, see how to calculate market share. Keeping a close eye on your ROI is essential in order to stay abreast of how much you’re spending on marketing versus your return on that investment. Comparing what you’re spending on marketing versus your return on that investment is paramount to a good report.
Your report should include such items as definition of the market size, competitors and their marketing size, as well as estimates of market share. You can use the market report to make changes to your marketing process. These changes can help you get more business from the time and money you spend on marketing.
The summary should include specific, numeric details from the rest of your report. These details should be condensed into bullet points and made prominent on the report. [8] X Research source
For example, if your backpack charging company had plans to expand into purse chargers or another similar product line, include these plans in your summary. This should also include the sales channels being used by your business, as well as competitors and their sales channels. Are you different? Why? If not, do you have a competitive advantage that can be exploited in your marketing and sales efforts?
For example, you could be examining how well advertisements for your backpack are reaching college students, as they would be a likely audience for your product. If your ads are primarily reaching adults, who don’t generally carry backpacks, this would be an issue to raise in your evaluation.
For example, if only 1 in 20 of your site’s visitors actually buy one of your backpacks, you may want to reconsider the design of your websites, the ease of purchase, or the price of your product.
You should also consider the fact that other competitors will arise if you are successful. Significant returns attract more competition, so if you don’t have direct competitors now, rest assured that you will in the future. Have a plan in place to sustain your competitive advantage in spite of new entrants to the market. For example, perhaps you perceive that college students may be carrying backpacks less often as they switch to an all-digital education. You could remark on how this will hurt your business and explain how you will respond to it.
To get the most out of your focus group, carefully plan the exact series of questions you want to ask. Your marketing report should include the questions you ask and why those questions are important to you. In your survey or focus group, ask people how they first heard about your product. If you’re the backpack company, you might determine that most customers find you when they read a blog post or article that is posted to your site. Document the results of both your surveys and your focus groups. Your report should provide both questions and responses. Give the reader the percentage of each type of response. For example, maybe 40% of respondents first learned about the backpack company by finding a blog post or article that was posted on the website. Your qualitative research (survey and focus group questions) may be 5 to 10 pages of your report. The responses to those questions will also be 5 to 10 pages of material.
Evaluate the extent to which your customers view your product as different and better than the competition. If they don’t see a difference, dig into their responses and find out why. Say, for example, that most clients see you backpack and built-in phone charger as about the same as a competitor’s product. In fact, your phone charger includes a reinforced case that makes your charger much more durable. Decide on some conclusions. You conclude, for example, that your website needs to emphasize that your phone charger case is much more durable than the competition. You decide to make changes to your website and your other marketing communication pieces. After a period of time, you can assess these changes to see how they have impacted your market share. Perform more market research to evaluate the impact of your changes.
