Whether you are just starting your business, planning to grow, expand into a new market or launch a new product or service, market research is absolutely essential. A great idea doesn’t instantly equate to success; in your day to day life you don’t blindly make decisions without any information about what you are doing, so why would you when it comes to business? Carrying out market research gives you a wealth of valuable knowledge to help you steer your business in the right direction.
Strategy Development
Carrying out market research is the best way to acquire all of the important information that you need to know about the demographic that you are choosing to target. It helps you to understand your operational region, and learn about the customers and employable workforce that is available to you in that area.
All of the knowledge gained will help you to shape your strategies. For example, you can find out what marketing strategies work well in your area of business and the region that you operate in, such as discovering that social media is a big player in marketing in developed regions.
Planning Ahead
From a thorough analysis, you will be able to locate or predict any obstacles for your business venture that you may come up against in the future. Being able to know about these potential hurdles that you will need to deal with in the future is incredibly valuable, as you will be able to create plans and decide what you will do to overcome any problems should they arise. This will allow you to eliminate some trial and error that you may have faced otherwise.
Competitor Analysis
Analyzing your closest competitors is very beneficial for your business. Gaining as much information about your competition and knowing them inside out is advantageous for a few reasons. An analysis should allow you to compare websites, products, and services that are offered and how that company markets themselves to give you insight on how they are performing.
The reasoning behind conducting competitor analysis is not so you can just simply copy what they are doing. If you copied them you wouldn’t be unique, so what would stop customers from going to your competitor if you aren’t offering anything different? To a customer, it would make no difference because you would be—in their eyes—the same.
Competitor analysis should be used to understand your competition, to find out what they might be doing differently that is setting them apart from you, and to see if they are, in fact, doing anything better than you, so that you know that you should be looking to improve in that area.
Success and Growth Evaluation
Conducting an initial market research survey and competitor analysis is important when you first set up your business, expanded into a new sector, or launched a new product/service. It will give you key data that you can use to evaluate the growth and success of your business so far. All of the data that is gathered from a research analysis can be used to compare your performance over time and measure how much you have grown over that period, ultimately showing your success. You can also compare yourself to your competitors using this data, you will be able to find out how much you have grown compared to your competitors over the same period of time.
Read more about market research at Circle Research
Author: Natalie Coe is a Marketing Executive at Prospect Research. She covers online and offline marketing campaigns across all sectors of Prospect Research. One day she can be creating a new direct mail campaign for the education team and the next day researching construction companies within a 50-mile radius of her company’s office.
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/prosres
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/natalie-coe-a8249056
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