As they say, the customer is king. As such, every business must satisfy
the needs of its customers and one of the most effective ways to do so is to conduct
extensive market research. By definition, market research refers to a
comprehensive study that helps businesses understand the buying behaviors of
their customers.
In general, market research considers personal factors, cultural factors, societal factors, and other factors that influence why consumers buy a particular product or service. Whether the data is received directly from the customers or via studies done by other organizations, market research can go a long in helping a business achieve its goals.
To conduct market research that can help you understand your customers,
here are the things you should do:
1. Define the persona of your buyers
Foremost, you need to learn about who your
costumers are by defining their persona. Simply put, your buyer persona is the
overall representation of your consumers. Although the representation is
generalized, it can assist you determine how you can communicate with your customers
as well as learn about the things they want and like.
The basic features of your buyer persona include
the age, location, gender, income, job tiles, family size, and challenges of your
customers.
2. Engage a portion of your buyers
It is worthwhile to note that it is almost
impossible to engage all existing or potential consumers. Therefore, you should
consider identifying a portion of these customers and look for a way to engage
them. You should determine a representative portion of your audience to learn
more about their buying culture, challenges, and characteristics.
What are the ways through which you can engage your
customers?
·
Phone interviews with the consumers
·
Focus group discussions
·
Online surveys
Each of these methods has its advantages and
disadvantages, so you should understand them before proceeding to use them to
engage your customers. Make sure you recruit as many consumers as possible for
the interviews.
3. Learn more about the satisfaction of your consumers
During the engagement, ask questions about the
satisfaction of your customers. Ask open-ended questions that can make the
customers offer lengthy responses. Also,
don’t shy away from asking for suggestions from your customers to find out if
there is anything they have to say about your business.
4. Create relevant data from customer analytics
Every action that your customers take can provide
important data that can help you understand how you can satisfy them. From
clicking or commenting on your social media pages to navigating your web pages
and lots more, you can learn a lot about your customers in different ways.
Gather the information you have and use them for
customer analytics. To generate useful data, you should use tools such as
Inspectlet and Google Analytics.
5. Understand your main competitors
Your market research is not complete until you have
learned more about your primary competitors. Basically, your primary competitors
are the companies that offer similar products or services to what you offer.
By understanding your main competitors, you will be
able to know how they assist their customers; hence, adopt some important
methods that they use. Also, this can help you to find areas where they are
lagging and take advantage of such areas to draw more customers to your
business.
6. Create a summary of all your findings
The findings from your consumers and main
competitors should be summarized. Typically, the summary should contain:
·
The goals of your research
·
Participants in the study
·
Executive summary
·
Factors that influence the buying behavior of your customers
·
Action plan
Finally, you have to create a plan for how you want to engage your customers.
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