By: Muhammad Arif – Account Manager of Fortune PR
Conducting a market research can be expensive and time-consuming, but considering the benefits that you will get after, you should not cut back on it.
The purpose of market research is to provide relevant data to help solve marketing challenges that a business will most likely face. For products and services already available, market research can tell companies whether they are meeting their customers’ needs and expectations. Overall, here are the 3 very useful information from a market research that will benefit your brand and your company:
- Market information
Market research done in the right way can keep you well-informed on the pricing of different commodities in the market, as well as the supply and demand situation. You can also understand the social, technical, and legal aspects of markets. Market research also gives you information to plan your marketing strategies. Other information you will gain are related to customer’s demographic and psychographic, client habits, current and potential customers, competitors, and whether or not your product will be marketable year-round or only on certain occasions.
- Market segmentation and habits
Market research can help you analyze your brand’s market segmentation. Market segmentation is the process of dividing the market or population into subgroups with similar motivations. It is widely used for segmenting on geographic differences, personality differences, demographic differences, technographic differences, use of product differences, psychographic differences and gender differences. For B2B segmentation, firmographic is commonly used.
Based on Investopedia[1], as an extension of market research, market segmentation seeks to identify targeted groups of consumers for the purpose of tailoring products and branding in a way that is attractive and in line with customer’s buying habit. The objective of market segmentation is to minimize risk to the company by determining which products have the best chances for gaining a share of a given target market, and determining the best way to deliver the products to the market according to the customer’s habits. This allows the company to increase its overall efficiency by focusing its limited resources on efforts that produce the best return on investment.
- Market pipeline
Market research can help plan your brand’s market pipeline, which according to Business.com[2] serves as a powerful tool to help businesses understand their customers better, how to segment customers into more high-performing groups, and how to identify the sales approaches that achieve the best results.
- Market competition
Market research also helps expanding your view to see beyond head-to-head competitors, and to explore share of wallet competition or indirect competition, which offers similar product or services with value or price similar to your product or service.
- Market trend
Market trends are the upward or downward movement of a market over time. Qualtrics[3] stated that market research focuses on understanding the customer, the company, and the competition. Using market research that generates market trend, can help you understand and respond to what customers want from their products.
It is important to understand and evaluate every probable factor when conducting a market research. Another important aspect to think about is whether the market is ready for the product or not. Also, consider if launching the products requires the process of educating your potential consumers so they will be able to use the product in the end.
[1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketsegmentation.asp
[2] https://www.business.com/articles/pipeline-marketing-a-powerful-tool-for-realizing-funnel-potential/
[3] http://cloudfront.qualtrics.com/q1/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/BasicMarketingResearch.pdf
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