Top 10 Reasons why every Businesses must do Market Research

Whenever you’re launching a new product, or trying to improvise the standard of your ongoing service, or when you’re contemplating to take steps to surpass your competitors, Market Research becomes a critical part in successfully doing so. It provides you with all the necessary data that is required in making crucial business decisions. In this article, we will try to elaborate on ten reasons behind doing thorough Market Research before starting a business venture.

1. To Spot Business Opportunities Easily

After doing a thorough Market Research, you will see for yourself that you have gathered enough knowledge regarding the target audience to whom you want to cater to. Secondly, you will also get an idea as to where you can reach them or in other words how you can create your marketing channels. And thirdly, it will give you a clear idea about what exactly your targeted customers are interested in. Once you’ve defined all these, you’ll be able to smoothly spot the business opportunities from these data. For instance:

• Develop partnership programs with other businesses. Getting to know about who exactly your customers are through their demographics, by carrying out a thorough Market Research, can help you to decide on other small businesses that will serve them well. To provide your customers with such a package, you can approach these small businesses to start a joint venture together that’ll otherwise be mutually beneficial.
• Generate profitable order upgradation. When you get a clear picture about the other products and services that your customers intend to buy through Market Research, it helps you to generate add-ons, bundle products. It ups your sells and actually increases the average value of each order.
• Plan on new locations to sell to. When you can demarcate the exact geographical areas, through Market Research, as to where most of your target customers reside, allows you to plan compelling target campaigns that perfectly suits the necessities and culture of that particular area.

2. Lowers the Business Risks

According to a Market Research done by Bureau of Labor Statistics, it has been seen that about half of the business ventures with employees don’t survive past the fifth year. To make sure that your business survives this initial phase and continues longer, you’ve to ensure that you got a steady flow of sales and customers. To do that, you need thorough Market Research. Doing regular Market Research will be your ideal weapon to check in with your present customers and the future potential customers to make sure that you’re still meeting their needs and will meet them in the future as well. Lets’ see how you can use this survey results: 

• Thoroughly Check New Designs and Products Before Launching. Before changing your business criteria dramatically, first do a Market Research to test it on a small scale on your targeted audience. It is to find out if the change that you are planning is welcoming to them or not. Check and ask them whether they like the new design and whether they would likely buy the new design versus the old one. This will nullify the risk factors and give you a scope to revamp.
• Survey on why customers are dissatisfied. Ideally, the small businesses should get customers that come back time and again. When they don’t do so, you should immediately conduct a thorough survey on the customers or set up a target group to do Market Research on why you’re sales are not getting repeated.
• Obtain deeper insights about the problem areas. When suddenly your most popular product encounters a huge drop in sales for say three successive months, you should immediately do Market Research to find out why, and how to fix it to get back your profits. Carry out a survey on your most trusted customers about the product and try to find out where the problem is. You’ll never know unless you ask.

3. Design Promotional Materials of Relevance

With thorough Market Research, you’ll get a clear understanding about what text or images you can put on your fliers, website, or social media accounts. Since you already know what your target customers have expressed regarding their wants, necessities, and dislikes about your, product, you’ll know exactly what and how to address when you begin marketing material designing.

Here are some more ways to create full proof marketing materials for your targeted audience easily:

• Through the Market Research, you will come to know whether your customers use your products and services as a necessity or take it as a luxury item. This will help you immensely in designing the labels, brochures, and website of your product and service that perfectly matches this perception.
• Through Market Research, you can identify the age group of your targeted customers, the type of language that you should use in your promotional materials and campaigns. 

4. Gives Realistic Targets to your business

When you become armed with all the vital information regarding your targeted customers and existing customers through Market Research, you can use this data to set goals that are achievable and realistic for you. You can also see continuous improvement as well as business growth by applying this data tactfully.

Market Research helps to understand customer demands, detect business opportunities more and more, design the perfect marketing campaign, lessen the losses, and keeps track on the competition. It also allows enterprises to segregate their objectives while going hand in hand with the popular trends. It also gives them the advantage to reach out to their targeted audience accurately and fast.

In any business, early detection of problematic areas is extremely crucial to see ample growth. Powerful Market Research not only helps to predict accurately the pitfalls that may occur, but also a lot of revenue too. Market Research process itself is designed to reduce the risk involved in any venture. It also makes the marketing strategy cost worthy for your business. 

5. Exactly Pinpoints On Advertising Areas

Budget crunch is one problem that startups often face initially. Because of this reason, your marketing budget should be well planned so that optimized you get the best outcomes in terms of revenue generation. Good Market Research can help to make sure that you’re fully reaching out to your targeted audience via the most popular channels where they most likely will see your message. Here are some of the budgetary plannings that Market Research can help you with: 

• Advertisement buying on social media. When your Market Research projects that your targeted audience devotes most of their time on Instagram and almost never on Twitter, then you should redirect most of your social media advertisement budgeting for Instagram and forget about Twitter completely.
• Exact placement of flyers and posters. Market Research provides you with the data regarding the physical spaces where your targeted customers spend their leisure time. This will give you an exact idea as to where you should place your advertisements. Like if your targeted audience is university students, then place the ads on their campus, in their bulletin boards or outside local restaurants where they frequent the most.
• Ad targeting. Through Market Research, precisely target the online ads on social media and pay-per-click ads. This implies that you can target your audience not only through demographic data, but also depending on their online behaviors, lifestyle, and interests. If you really know your customers, you’ll definitely be able to enhance the targeting potential manifold.

6. Stay ahead of your competitors

Successful businesses know their customers thoroughly and that’s why they are so successful to win more and more of them. You can topple over all your competitors if you excel in knowing customers’ needs and you aim zeal to fulfill those needs. By doing this, you can always get a chance to standout from your competitors. Come, let’s discuss about the ways by which you can use Market Research to outsell your competitors:

• Address the discontent of customers. Enquire deeply about the reasons behind the frustrations and resentment about your competitors’ products. You can read about their product reviews which will help you to improve on your products and ready them for those audiences who are ready to switchover brands.
• Discover the segment of underserved customers. Market Research reveals the segments of the market that was deprived from your service so long. This will provide you with a new set of customers to cater to.
• Detect unaddressed customer needs. While doing market research, you might unknowingly stumble over some issues that might have been paining your customers for quite some time now. Also, these issues may be related to the pain points or desires about your competitors’ marketing materials that has been left unaddressed so far. You can bank on these data and include these areas in your own marketing plan and see if the outcome results in an increase in sales.

7. Set Sensible Goals for Your Business

Business goals are most commonly related to growth in sales or in customers. But without ample Market Research, you will never be able to determine if your set goals are achievable or not. And the ways and means by which you can achieve them in the first place.

For instance, you may have targeted to double your sales figures by the end of the next quarter, but how will you probably know if this goal is reachable or not? As per Market Research, it may so happen that the size of your targeted market is more than twice the size of your current customer base. If you don’t know the current size of your potential market, your goals will be arbitrary.

With Market Research only you’ll be able to decide on the specific directions that you want to take your customer base to. It will guide you as to how you want to grow your customer base, is it via a new untapped market segment or if there is still room for growth from your existing target audience?

8. Makes Decision Making Simple

The necessity and value of Market Research is clearly felt when tough business decisions are made. Taking the route of arbitrary decision making as a business owner is quite foolish. You should always refer to your Market Research report while taking the simplest of decisions. Although not all decisions can be solved through Market Research, but still many of them can be, like:

• Deciding on areas of investment like advertising or marketing budget.
• Find out whether there’s demand for the new product that you have made
• Whether you should begin a new outlet in a new location
• Decide on the products that should be discontinued and the ones that needs improvement.
• Pricing of all your offers
• Know in detail about your competitors, and their ways of approach to the market.
• If your customers are moving away towards your competitors, that’s because they’ve done better Market Research than you have which have kept them ahead in the game. And how you need to follow the same path if you want to lead in the game.

Market Research helps to make a perfect assessment of the market place so that both the key players and the rising ones can be made. Furthermore, it also helps you identify the weaknesses in your competitor’s way of dealing things. You can encash on these flaws of your competitors and utilize them in your favor to win over more and more customers. You can also come to know about the best performer in the competition. This will give you the ability to bring more and more creativity in your thinking process while modeling new strategies. As you gather more and more information about your competitors, it will play a pivotal role in the success of your business.

9. Product testing before launch

Testing is something which is adds to your learning process everyday as what works and what does not before jumping into the world of business. The water should always be tested before making every business decision and not after you have exposed yourself to your target audiences. Do a comprehensive Market Research to test your idea or product. It will save you from unnecessary expenses and most importantly, from launching a substandard product to the marketplace.

No one can ever be 100% sure that his or her product will instantly be liked and used by your potential customers.

10. You will never become obsolete in business

According to Charles Darwin, species who can sustain change in the best possible way are the ones who will survive in the end and not the ones who are the strongest. We will never know whether Darwin did some vital Market Research in his free time before coming to such conclusion or not. But, his words are so much relevant and important in today’s world. It is still echoing today in every possibly way and have become all the more important in today’s innovative era in the history of mankind. When you undertake extensive Market Research, then only can you actually find out about the right path that you should be taking whenever you are marketing a new product or service. Market Research surely always resonate the right message from your clients which is precious for any business.