7 Ways Market Research Benefits Your Business

Market research is often overlooked, but it’s the only way to know for sure what is best for your business. Here are 7 ways market research benefits you:

1. Competitive Edge

Understanding your competitors is an important facet of market research. If what they’re doing is working, you want to know why. If it isn’t, you’ll want to avoid making those same mistakes. On top of that, you can find dissatisfied customers who have had a bad experience with a different business and then learn from that mistake without making it on your own.

It also gives you the information you need to highlight your differentiators—the special sauce that gives your business an edge. Ensuring that what makes your business unique is communicated will draw customers to you.

2. Test Your Product Prior to Launch

Before pouring your hard-earned savings into your idea, startup or new product/service, you’ll want to make sure that it’s going to succeed. Market research allows you to find out if there’s a need for your product or service, and to create buyer personas before launch. Aligning your new product or service with the correct audience is THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP when it comes to marketing and sales.

You’ll also be able to find opportunities for add-ons and upgrades. What feature is your product or service missing? Can you either bundle it into your standard price or offer it as an additional item? There’s even a chance you might be able to create a mutually beneficial partnership with another company if your goals are aligned.

3. Set Realistic Financial or Sales Goals

It’s easy to come up with goals like, “I want to double our sales from this year,” or “I want to expand to two more locations,” but do you know if they’re actually achievable? Researching what the market looks like gives you the best picture of what success will really look like.

Make sure your goals are specific enough that you can find data to support their plausibility and realistic enough that you can tackle them thoughtfully. After all, if you find out that your city is uninterested in your product, but the next town over is begging for it, you might take a different approach than you would have without conducting any market research.

4. Identify Problems

As you grow into a bigger, different company, you may find yourself dealing with new problems. Whether that’s managing a more extensive website or supplying customer service to more people, you need to anticipate that change.

With market research, you can anticipate challenges before they happen. If you learn of complaints or failures you can make an effort to correct those mistakes. The same is true of branding errors: a great product that doesn’t fit your brand may come across as dishonest or pandering. You’ll only know if you put in the work to uncover how your audience will feel.

5. Hone Your Message

A common mistake, especially among younger business owners, is trying to do too much, too quickly. All the ideas you want to implement may be fantastic, but make sure to research to see if they’re actually being sought.

The features and benefits of your company should be clear and designed to directly solve your customers’ problems. Buzzwords, vague statements, and phrases that don’t really mean anything will make it more difficult for people to trust your brand. Be specific, be concise, and tell them that your company is the one they should choose. Your message needs to align with your buyer persona.

6. Identify your target audience and market size

Make sure your sample size is representative of the audience you are targeting. You need to test the demographic you will sell to. This means there should be enough respondents in the research sample that reflect, as accurately as possible, the larger target audience population.

And in order to create your ideal buyer personas, you’ll need to understand who your target audience is, what they need and how you solve their problems with your products and services. Understanding their pain points, challenges and problems and how your problems solve these is the best way to ensure you’ll have success.

7. Measure & report your results

If you want to scale your business and continue to innovate your products and services, then you’ll need consistent methods put in place to measure your success. Marketers refer to this as ROI and accountants refer to this as revenue—but the real questions are how do you measure your customer satisfaction rates (both quantitatively and qualitatively)? Are you meeting your customer’s needs, are you surpassing their expectations, and how can you provide better services to meet those needs or address additional challenges?

If you can find a way to measure those questions, you’ll have data that you can use to further innovate your business. You can also flip it around and innovate how your business operates to better serve your customers and save costs, but I find it helps to start with the customer.

The more information you can gather about your customers, the more you can innovate and scale your business. Apple didn’t stop with a computer. Telsa didn’t stop with a car. Your business needs to measure success to innovate, scale and build.

Find out how I can help you with market research here or book in for a free consultation below.