Research Your Market
Posted by admin | Under Market Research Sunday Nov 1, 2009
Like traditional forms of marketing, to market your online business, you need to assess its potential. It doesn’t have to cost a lot, nor does it have to be a complex process. It might be using a focus group, which is simply getting a survey of opinions about your product or service offerings from a cross section of your consumers. You can conduct such a survey either by mail or by telephone.
Using the telephone can be more challenging because some people feel that this is an intrusion on their privacy and they may not be willing to respond. By mail, the recipient can choose to answer your survey questions at their convenience. Providing a prepaid postage envelope further encourages the respondent to mail in their survey. Some savvy marketers offer an incentive of some kind for returning the survey.
Other techniques include analyzing demographics, such as age, sex, income level, educational level, population growth and so on. You can get groups of people together and use brainstorming techniques to determine market potential, or you can conduct one-to-one interviews with qualified prospects in your market.
No matter what methods you use, your purpose should be to gather enough data to determine who your customers are. You need to be able to identify their needs and expectation. Then you can decide if there is a demand for your product or service. If you are satisfied that a demand exists, you will want to find out what competition you have out there. Market research should provide answers to the following questions:
Who are your potential customers?
Why do they need your product or service?
Where are they located…city or country?
Do your target customers have the buying power to purchase your product or service?
How much are people willing to pay for your products?
Can you offer competitive pricing?
What about quality? Is your quality as good as or better than the competition?
Yes, market research can be costly and time consuming. Your questions can build in bias that may distort your results. However, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. If you aren’t getting the results you expect or want, then perhaps you must consider that your business idea is off base. Perhaps there isn’t a market for your product or service. But, don’t be discouraged. Go back and modify your original plan.
The benefits of market research include:
Determining who you customers are
Finding out what they want
Determining how to reach your potential customers
Determining which is the best way to communicate with your potential customers
Assessing different marketing strategies
Using market research strategies is a means to finding out how viable your business idea is and if there is a market for it. It focuses and organizes marketing information so that you can reduce your business risks and identify opportunities for profit making. With good Market Research data you are in a better position to make sound business decisions.
Tibo Gordon
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/research-your-market-91831.html
What are the market research methodologies that are utilized within your organization (or that could be utiliz
What are the market research methodologies that are utilized within your organization (or that could be utilized)? How is this information used to make decisions and impact outcomes?
I work for an online market research company. We specialize in providing sample and programming services to other research companies. Internet-based research is experiencing tremendous growth because the methodology allows researchers to execute swiftly and cost-effectively compared with telephone, mail, focus groups and intercept studies though these other methodologies have some advantages.
The key advantages/disadvantages of telephone, focus groups and intercept studies are that the interviewer can probe for more complete answers and encourage the respondent to continue and finish the survey. On the other hand, the interviewer introduces a degree of bias which can affect the results of your research.
The key advantage of mail surveys is that one can send incentives, product samples and/or detailed written material with the survey. The key disadvantages of this methodology are that it can take a very long time to complete the survey (get people to return it), the costs of mailing are quite high and many people discard surveys as junk mail before reading them.
With all methods where the respondent knows you have personal information about them (e.g., their address, phone number, etc.) you will be limited in the amount of personal information you can collect.
In terms of how market research is used to make decision, most often, the data are used to test concepts prior to development of new products, to test marketing campaigns and to predict acceptance. The bottom line is just that to positively impact the bottom line and reduce risk.
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