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Market research is an essential part of launching any product or service. The procedure allows understanding how your particular project can potentially be demanded (and whether it’ll be viable at all) and forming a clear image of your optimal target audience. Let’s go a little bit more in-depth, though, and find out more about how to conduct market research for a new product in a nutshell.
What is market research?
Market research includes a number of successive events dedicated to gathering info about the market and consumers. As a whole, they help to develop the most proper business strategy based on a thorough analysis of the active marketing environment. Otherwise, skipping this prep stage, you may risk wasting loads of money, time, and effort in vain (while a product or service you were planning to sell is under risk to, eventually, be completely uninteresting to your potential TA upon release).
Reasons to do market research
As a matter of fact, there are at least three crucial factors that clearly demonstrate the importance of market research for a new product, analyzing which you can quite precisely predict some share of the future fate of your product in the field.
- Market data. The consistent elements of market data are prices, set by suppliers operating in the researched market, as well as the need and demand statistics for a certain product or service. It’s noticeable, that such information is gathered mainly from independent sources (also, a really efficient solution to handle this part are that analyze and sort out huge volumes of data with high rapidness and preciseness).
- Market segmentation. Segmentation of the market is the subdivision of it into separate groups of people by demographics and other principally important common features. The general segmentation parameters are such attributes as geographical location, gender, social status, age group, etc.
- Market tendencies. Another type of important data extracted during the market research – is potential tendencies in the growth and reduction of the studies market. You’ll probably need some insider expert data to complete this stage, as well as the existing statistics (if the market was already researched by somebody else). If a certain market is new in nature, you can get sufficiently precise results by segmenting your possible TA and analyzing how stable these segments are in their formation.
Types of market research
Now, a few words about the major types of market research activities (five in total).
- Surveys. Surveys is a type of market research based on a pre-composed form. The range of selection is crucial here: the more options and lines there are to fill, the more precise result you will get.
- Focus groups. A focus group is, basically, a collective of people having a discussion. There’s a moderator that manages the questions passed during the discussion. This method is especially effective in brainstorming the reasons for certain customer behavior and studying individual consumer motives.
- Personal interviews. An individual interview with a representative of a potential target audience concerning a set of explicit questions is very efficient. Personal interviews help figure out some consistent questions really in-depth, without any rush or communicative limitations.
- Observation. Observing target audience representatives in their usual consumer environment (e.g., store surveillance) can also help in defining some motives of certain customers during shopping.
- Experiments and field trials. This market research method helps to check marketing hypotheses in the field, by experimenting with various trade offers, etc.
How to do product market research
We’ll provide a bunch of tips on how to do market research for a new product for you to know what to be prepared for in the long run when it comes to preparing your business project to launch.
- Define market. Market research starts with the market definition. You need to simply identify your target audience (i.e., come to a distinct realization of who will most likely see some use in your product or service).
- Define buyer profile. At this point, try to compose an utterly close portrait of your potential customer. With such a portrait in hand, you’ll be able to go further in the analysis using the dedicated analytical tools (e.g., Facebook’s Pixel).
- Conduct keyword research. Which sentences and phrases do your potential customers enter most commonly and frequently to find what they need? Google has a very neat tool called ‘Keyword planner’. Use it to get results fast.
- Devise unique value proposition. The time comes when it’s time to distinguish what is so unique and original about your product that would make it stand out among competitors; what exactly you can offer your TA? The unique feature you come up with will be your ultimate distinction in the field of players.
- Determine your marketing strategy. Once you’ve worked through the uniqueness, a marketing strategy should be formed. It will probably be different for each segment of the market – keep this in mind.
- Test your product. Before launching anything, test your product with the involvement of real consumers. Otherwise, you may risk releasing an absolutely unprofitable, unviable solution, which users can simply disregard due to expensiveness, inaccessibility, or some other negative factor.
- Realize marketing campaign. One of the most efficient, exciting, but at the same time challenging stages is a marketing campaign. You shouldn’t risk too much here (considering the amount of financial resources usually involved), it’s better to cooperate with advertising experts and influencers.
- Monitor your product lifecycle. Once your product or service is first introduced to the market, it’s time to start thinking which stage of its production/shipping/selling can or should be optimized. Any excessive consumption of work or time resources may provoke big financial losses, which would such a lot if you’re planning further scaling.
Tips to avoid mistakes
Finally, for some tips that will help you avoid some common mistakes while conducting market research for a new product.
- Don’t limit your studies to small groups of people. In the context of market research, small groups of people, in most cases, mean inaccurate (=obsolete) results. So try to cover as many research objects as possible (there are a ton of tools for that today – online surveys, physical polling, etc.).
- Don’t rush the process. Consumer decision-making and motivation tendencies are often affected by the season or economic fluctuations of the country. If you analyze the behavior of your TA during the long term, the collected data will most precisely reflect the real situation on the market.
- Don’t neglect the profiled experts. The last piece of advice, if there are no professional, experienced marketers in your team, don’t try to handle their responsibilities yourself or some other differently, competent team member. Let the profiled experts handle your new product market research. They know and understand all of the market nuances and read customer psychology better.
Conclusion
As you can understand from the article, market research before launching a new product or service is a type of warranty that a certain product or service will, eventually, be unique and stand out among competitor solutions; demanded by the target audience. If you want professionals to fully realize your concept, we’ll do it! We can gather highly-qualified experts that would in the shortest terms and with the most reasonable budget fulfill any of your tasks.