As a small business owner, you would be wanting new customers, make your business unique, and entering new markets. For all of this, you need to conduct Market research. Market Research for small business is a bit dense without proper guidance. Because you can find an array of strategies and techniques that may be hard for a small budget. 

What we can do is find some affordable technique/tactics to do Market research. By doing so. It will help you plan your business accordingly.

If we google Market research for Small business, it will provide you with a list of techniques but at first, isn’t it important to know what exactly is Market Research for small business is.

Market Research for Small Bussiness

What is Market Research for Small Business?

Market Research is basically researching, gathering info and feedback from both customers and potential customers for determining the viability of a new or existing product.

As a business owner, we need to make and take crucial decisions. So it’s better to make these decisions after knowing everything better than guessing. As someone wise once said that ‘Knowledge is power, which is cent per cent true. Your current and potential customer feedback, what they like, what they expect are all valuable info i.e. valuable knowledge. This will, in turn, give you the power to make decisions that would be best for you and your business.

The research should not just limit to your customers, opinions and feedback from everyone related to your business is crucial for your business.

You can conduct market research in your house, office or by any third party who is into market research. Many of us can’t afford third parties to do market research for us. Large companies can afford such researches and campaigns. So what we did is, we will help you to do Market Research in the most cost and time-effective way.

Why should you conduct Market Research for your business?

So, we have seen what is the main purpose of Market research. But you might be thinking that “Why should you conduct Market Research” is a reasonable question. Here are a few reasons some successful businesses conduct Market Research for:

• To understand more about the existing customers

Understanding your customers is one of the tough and important aspects you shouldn’t omit. If you understand your customers and provide them with that, you are successful in your business.

• To find new potential customers

We might have a decent amount of customers and it would be always better to have more customers. More customers mean better business and consistency in business which is good for you.

• To understand and test new markets

Expanding your business and taking risks is not everyone’s cup of tea. So to reduce your business risk while entering a new market it is better to know about it more. For this, we need to conduct Market research.

• To identify and make use of vast undiscovered opportunities

Without any research, we can’t know if there is any room for improvement or any opportunities for promotion or better pricing.

• Make wise decisions on existing/new products or the business.

Decision making is a tough thing to do when it matters to your business future. This is where your Market Research info will help you with market conditions, customer feedback, and everything for you to make better decisions.

• For better competitor analysis (understanding your competitors)

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Not that your competitors are your enemies but keeping them close and analysing them would help you with growing your business with innovation and creativity, which will help your business become unique.

Conducting better research will help us understand who we are targeting and what are we up against so that we can better market ourselves and our products. Understand what all achievements or outcomes we can get through Digital Marketing.

How to perform an effective Market Research for Small Business

Source: Freepik

Conducting market research for small business is all that we want. We dont want to make blind decisions and limit your business from expanding and entering new markets. Before doing Market research you need to do a few things like:

• Inform your employees
• Appoint someone to lead the research
• Figure out your budget
• Always be specific about the next step

Market Research is a vast topic, we cant go through all of that. Therefore we can start from a small section where the Market research process is divided into two and the best methods to obtain research info.

So Market Research can be divided into two parts:

• Primary Market Research

Primary research is the first part of Market research where we obtain data/info from customers, potential customers, the public, and from everyone related to your business. Our aim here is to get the most important data that is not available anywhere, not even on the internet. For this, we can use various methods to obtain information from everyone. This data will help you make decisions, identify opportunities and more. These are a few of the best methods to collect info from customers, potential customers, and everyone related: 

• • Questionnaires
    

    We all know what a questionnaire is and we have a couple of many questions to ask our customers. This is the best time to ask them and know in order to make our business better and successful in the long run. Prepare a couple of questions and add them to an online free questionnaire maker and also choose the best optimum medium to showcase it.

  • Surveys
    

    Surveys are a cool way to know the customer or anyone related to your business. It is easy to make them and to bring them into action. Currently, it is a trend for online classes, what they do is prepare a survey sheet using google and forward it to their students for recording their feedback.

• • Forums
    

    Forums are the best place to see and read what people are talking about a particular product/service. There is no better place than forums to do it. From forums, you can see people talking about the issues/problems they face with certain products/services as well as the good things too. This can help you understand what the public is expecting from brands. Thereby searching forum can help you know the public more.

• • Observations
    

    There is much meaning to observation, but here what we mean is to observe your competitors, keep them close as said above. Know what they doing, how they post on social media, how they react to negative comments, and how they handle situations. This can help you to evolve your business according to what you think is best for the business.

• • Call Interviews

    Call interviews can help you gather both quantitative and qualitative data from your customers. You can use the statistical data to understand the pattern of your business and the suggestion & feedback of customers to better understand your customers. You can conduct in-depth interviews to better understanding them.

• Secondary Market Research

Secondary research involves gathering all the data that are already available. You can access them through Government sites, public sources, educational institutions, and commercial institutions. This will help you retrieve customer data and the market data as a whole. But there is an issue with such data, they are not always updated therefore the info/data might be old. This will lead to faulty decisions and market overview. SO be extremely careful with the data.

With the help of all the data you can conduct analysis and with this, you can start your Market Research. Use your research to get into your customers head.

Conclusion

We hope that with the help of this article you have understood what, why, and hows of Market Research for Small business.

Key Takeaways

To perform effective Market Research follow these methods to collect data, they are:

• Primary Research
  1. Questionnaires
  2. Surveys
  3. Forums
  4. Observations
  5. Call Interviews
• Secondary Research
  Data from:
  Public Sources
  Educational Institutions
  etc.

Thank You and We hope that you and your loved ones are doing good.