Startup Insights: Exploring the 6 Essential Market Research Methods

All success on the business path is aimed at their target customers. Customer satisfaction determines the success or failure of every business strategy. And the first step for that is the market research process. Here are effective market research tips for those new to business.

1. Start with those around you

Utilize your existing relationships to kickstart the market research process. They could be friends, family members, or neighbors – potentially long-term customers.

From them, you can branch out into their surrounding relationships, envisioning a tree-like model. Starting with these simple steps can save you a lot of research costs.

2. Observe consumer behavior

Many spend a significant amount on hiring surveyors or designing survey models to gather customer opinions. While effective, another efficient method is observation. In sectors like clothing or food, you can simply observe customers’ attitudes, speculate on their hidden needs, and understand what discomfort they are experiencing and what they desire.

However, this requires market research experience for the observer.

3. Select a target group for market research

For effective market research, you need to choose a specific customer group, limiting the research scope while obtaining good results. This target group is the customer segment you are aiming for, the group that will consume your product. The more specific and detailed your research group is, the easier it is to exploit information.

The research target depends on the purposes you want to achieve. Build effective information to get the best customer target.

Are you looking to research multi-channel business markets? Explore effective multi-channel sales experiences to plan your business most accurately.

4. Set up the questionnaire

What information do you need?

What aspects do you need to explore?

What questions are customers interested in?

What research methods are fast and effective?….

Have a list of questions to optimize information search; this also helps you limit the scope of market research while still achieving desired results.

Ensure that the questions you pose are concise but provide sufficient required information. Customers do not appreciate complexity.

And within that information mountain, set a desired goal to summarize the surveys conducted.

5. Market research with information technology

This is suitable for those with some knowledge of information technology. You can create a survey on google, then insert your link on forums or Facebook fan pages, on your personal page. It saves time for both respondents and yourself. You can also use various applications that allow you to place surveys.

Market surveys are crucial, providing input for your business process. But not everyone is willing to spend money on research. The above suggestions hope to provide you with the most useful information for your search.

6. Market research through investigation and surveys

This is a common market research method, applied frequently because it can investigate demand, survey the opinions of many subjects simultaneously. With this method, you can implement in various ways.

Survey sheets

Before conducting a survey, you need to make a list of open questions, true/false questions, or select related answer choices to the issue you need to know, then distribute them to customers to gather their opinions. Usually, surveys are distributed in crowded places such as schools, playgrounds, bus stations, etc.

The feedback rate of this method is quite high, and you can collect a lot of opinions at once. However, the costs are not low, from preparing the list of questions to hiring people to distribute the survey. An important note is that the questions must be concise, understandable, practical, circling around the core, and the number of questions on a survey sheet should not be too many.

Telephone survey

This method used to be popular, helping you save a considerable amount of money. However, many people now complain about advertising services via phone, feeling annoyed. Therefore, its effectiveness is not high. Sometimes, you might make more than a dozen calls, but the person who listens to you may only be one.

Survey via letters

It is also a remote survey method like the telephone, but with sending letters, you can target more subjects, and sometimes it is even cheaper. However, the effectiveness it brings is not high. The rate of people reading the letter and giving feedback is very low, less than 10%. Although it is less effective, this method is still applied by many small businesses.

Online survey

Comparing coverage and cost-effectiveness, none of the above methods can be compared to online surveys. Creating a questionnaire, distributing them to users has never been easier thanks to the unlimited connectivity in both space and time of the virtual network. However, the effectiveness it brings is not highly appreciated, as the information on the virtual network is not reliable and is easily influenced.

Depending on the ability of the business, the product, and the market, you can choose different market research methods. Hope that this article will be helpful to you.

Cre: Sapo