Did you know, customers depend entirely on research before purchasing your products or services? They do this entirely without involving any of your sales team as they would rather ask for testimonials from friends or opt for online reviews. Having this in your mind now, you need to ask yourself if you have embraced a marketing strategy that underscores these methods of customer market research. To fully understand your customers, you have to know what influences their purchase decisions, your target market, and their behavior too. Here, we have discussed in detail what it entails and how you can conduct it to better your business.

What Is Market Research?

This is a procedure that entails the gathering of information about your business’s target audience, and customers. This information then helps in discerning how successful your product or service will when you get it to the market.

Why Do It?

Doing this market research not only allows you to meet and know your buyers but helps you understand their pain points, desired solutions, and their problems altogether. Understanding all these aspects will in turn help you mold your service or product to meet all their needs. Under this process, there are two distinctions common that you can do for your business to excel. These are the primary and secondary research. Below we have highlighted these distinctions and explained what they entail.

Primary Research

This is where you seek first-hand information about your customers and the market. It helps you fully understand who they are and what they are looking for in products or services. Under primary research there are two branches under it, these are specific and explanatory primary researches.

Specific primary research often comes in after you have conducted the explanatory primary research. It focuses on the aspects and opportunities that your business has identified as the most important issues to address. Here you can choose some members from your target audience and ask them some critical questions on how you can improve and solve a certain problem.

Explanatory primary research comes in as the first step before conducting the specific primary research. It does not fully focus on the notable customer trends but concentrates more on the tackling of potential issues present in the market. It usually involves conducting surveys and open-ended interviews with numbers in small groups.

Secondary Research

This entails all the data that you have collected so far in the primary market research approach. This data includes trend reports, related industry content, sales data, and market statistics. This proves to be very useful for you as you fully get a good know how on the state your target market is in. here you can get to analyze what your competitors are doing, implementing, and what your audience look for in products and services. There are different branches under secondary research; these are public sources, commercial sources, and internal sources.

Commercial sources entail the use of research agencies to compile the necessary information you are looking for. This will cost you quite a handsome amount of funds. Public sources are your most accessible and mostly free method of conducting your market research. The most common type of this source is the government statistics which are readily available and offer helpful information. Internal sources entail the information that your organization has at its disposal. This information shows you what your potential is looking for.

How Do You Do It?

As we have seen above, conducting thorough market research is crucial to your business in the generation of sales. Several organizations can help you with this, one is NetBase Quid. It utilizes social media analysis tools to gather limitless data quickly and easily. This data shows you what the target audience is addressing about the products and services in your line in social media channels. This proves to be a very useful source of information as your organization gets the right first-hand information.