Tips for Conducting Market Research

Creating a marketing plan that will effectively capture your target audience’s attention requires learning exactly what these users wants, needs, and what their interests are. Having knowledge about the consumers that you are trying to attract will help you come up with effective marketing strategies. Market research allows you to acquire information about your intended audience.

There are two types of market research that your firm can use to collect data: primary and secondary research.

Primary Research

Primary research is done by directly seeking out information about your audience and their behaviors. You can do this through surveys, customer interviews, and focus groups.

Primary research can either be conducted through explorative research or specific research.

Exploratory research focuses on identifying broad issues that a company can take on. This is typically the first step taken when beginning to conduct research. One way to do this is through asking general questions either through surveys or through interviews.

Specific research goes more in-depth in finding ways to address the problems that a company has chosen to focus on. This is where your firm can identify more precise courses of action to take. This can be achieved by taking a small portion of your audience and asking them specific questions about their wants and needs.

Secondary Research

Secondary research consists of looking at and analyzing already-existing research. This includes statistics and data that you already have about your firm, as well as public records.

There are three types of secondary research that you can pull information from:

Public Sources

These are free and easy to get your hands on. Government data is a commonly used source of public records that can provide a lot of useful data.

Commercial Sources

These sources are usually made up of facts and figures collected by research companies and typically cost money to access.

Internal Sources

Internal sources are areas of information that your firm has already collected. Past trends can help you determine what might appeal to your clients clients currently.

Create Buyer Personas

The first step in conducting market research is identifying your specific audience. You need to know who you are looking at in order to track their behavior. The best way to do this is through creating a marketing persona, a description of a hypothetical user that you are attempting to reach. It is important to look at information such as:

• Location;
• Age;
• Income;
• Responsibilities;
• Education;
• Employment; and
• Marital status.

You may find that you can come up with multiple personas. These give you a starting point to go off of when you start researching your audience. Keep these personas in mind when implementing your marketing strategies.

Come Up With Research Questions

You will also want to identify what research questions to ask before interviewing potential customers. Always make sure to ask open-ended questions. You don’t want the way you phrase a question in such a way that it will influence the answers people give. Additionally, avoid yes or no questions, as these will not provide you with any valuable insight.

Conducting market research gives you valuable insight about how to market your firm in a way that will get your intended audience’s attention. Allow Performance First Marketing to assist you in searching for and analyzing this data. Our team of marketing experts is knowledgeable in how to go about researching the marketing trends that are relevant to your firm. Call us at (818) 949-2618 or contact us online to learn more about the services we offer.