Tips for Doing Your Own Market Research Project

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Written By Adeyemi Adetilewa

An experience gap is a costly mistake which is why you need to learn the tips for doing your own market research project.

The executive is faced daily with the need to make the right decision that influences the brand, product production, and customer retention. There should be harmony between what the target audience needs versus what your business offers them as a solution to achieve all the above.

The big question lies in how do you know what your consumers desire to have. Doing your own market research is how you bridge that gap for a profit, of course. 

What is Market Research?

Market research is a data collection activity to help your organization understand your target audiences’ preferences, purchase behavior, and needs.

The organization uses the response from the market to produce solutions around the answers. Such decisions affect the nature of products made or the packaging by understanding what features the consumer is attracted to during purchasing. 

Also, the research project should inform you on what practices have given your competitors an upper hand; you, therefore, learn from them and implement the lessons into your way of doing things to widen your customer base and for customer retention. The main goal of market research is to learn what tickles the customers, predict their behavior, create those solutions, and deliver them to your target audience.

What is Market Research?So in your research, make sure you pay much attention to: 

  • Your competitors: how they interact with their market.
  • The customer: Understand the consumer, the purchaser, and the influencer. Tapping into the influencers’ power means a broader reach for your products.
  • The company; study your promotion methods, sales, pricing, product design, and customer service.

While hiring a research company is an option, doing your own market research project offers more value for your business’s short-term and long-term goals. The process is also less costly. Had you gone the research company way, here are questions you would have to answer:

  • What are the customers buying habits, stumbling blocks, and purchase triggers
  • What specific item are the consumers looking for in my category?
  • How healthy is your brand?
  • What product feature matters most to the market?
  • How ready is the product for launching?
  • Have you optimized your pricing and packaging plans?
  • Who is your customer, and how best to prioritize and segment them?

Reliable market research applies both the quantitative and qualitative techniques of data collection.

Why Do Your Own Market Research Project?

Gone are the days when gut feels led the decision-making process in a company. In today’s world, even the top brands have invested heavily in research. They rely on such data to develop marketing strategies.

The markets evolve daily, and findings from past studies may not apply to the current situation; to find your decisions on such responses is a grave mistake.

Make your findings objective by using the tips for doing your own market research projects. Insight-driven decisions will help you prioritize the needs of the market. And you can only get the insights by carrying out your own market research.

Research partners can step into your project to help find the best respondents, field the survey, and do data analysis to make sense of the results. Please don’t shy away should you need their expertise.

The reason why you should do your market research is to avoid repeating mistakes. Assume you choose to act on your previous results to launch a new product today; the customers might have changed how they feel towards your services or products.

Your communication and branding might be different from before. If your efforts in the launch do not match customers’ needs, the actions will be a big waste. Why waste so many resources when you can do your research project for better turnover? 

Characteristics of a Good Market Research Project

Characteristics of a Good Market Research ProjectThe outcomes measure the quality of good research. For scientifically valuable data, statistics and sampling may be your best bet. The two techniques will help with predicting consumer behavior.

A good market research project must be: 

  • Explicit, in matters interaction and relationships
  • objective; that is without bias
  • Communicate to the team players the problems at hand and their solutions
  • Thought-provoking and attract changes through improvement.

Your research project is not complete until you can measure how successful you were after implementing the insights within your organization. This success is measured by how well you have met your business goal.

Every department within your business should be able to make something positive out of these research findings. A little education on the needs of your target audience will go a long way to help your team create and implement customer attraction and retention strategies.

When To Do Market Research Projects

 Stick with me, and you’ll learn some of the areas you can use market research project tips:

1. Product development, research, and testing form the basis for product development. Interacting with a group of your customers will inform you about what they like and dislike, the changes they want to see in your communication, and everything else you bother to ask.

You will therefore be presenting them with an irresistible solution should you work on their response.

2. Brand tracking: You’ll never understand how the market perceives your brand unless you do your market research. With such feedback, you can easily optimize your brand.

3. Customer profiling and segmentation: Buyer profiling involves understanding their pain points, motivation, and needs and then optimizing your marketing communication, products, and services to make sure you speak with the right audience at the right time and through the right channel.

4. Studying Your Competitor; looking at your competitor’s website and using their product is not enough studies.

You will want to perform your market research to learn how the customers perceive them, how they rate their products, any loopholes in their communication and practices, and the most attractive feature about their services or products. Act on the responses to beat your competitor.

5. Testing ADs, functional communication, and advertising cater to the needs of the target audience. It is therefore reasonable to pretest aunty advertisements before they go live. 

Market Research Techniques

Market research can be categorized as primary and secondary.

Primary Research: This is the type of research that you conduct by yourself. It can either be qualitative or quantitative. You assemble the raw data by different methods such as interviews, focus groups, surveys, and data analysis.

Primary research can also be explorative or specific. Exploratory allows room for explanation and description of the responses, while in Specific research, the researcher seeks definite answers.

Doing your own market research project or what we call primary research has the following advantages:

  • You collect fresh, unaltered data
  • It gives you a current perspective that qualifies your hypothesis
  • primary research is laser targeted to your exact needs  

Methods used in primary research:

  •  Interviews
  • Surveys
  • Focus groups
  • Observation
  • Surveys
  • Questionnaires 
  • Polls

Guide on Doing Your Research

Good Market Research Project Tips That Will Help You [2022]

  • Develop research topic
  •  Draft a hypothesis to guide you in your research process.
  • Select the most influential research methods 
  • Create a plan for carrying out your study: the project should state the following;
  • Your target audience for the research
  • The time needed to complete the study
  • Proposed sample size
  • Determine methods of data collection and analysis
  • Carry out your research
  • If after implementing your research you find the need for more insights, further your studies through secondary research.

Bottom line 

You need tips for doing your research if you want to collect feedback directly from your target customer.

Apart from reliable quality data, primary research is inexpensive, provides an in-depth understanding of the market environment, and caters to your business’s short and long-term goals.

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