The Importance of Market Research for Business Growth

To garner positive relationships with your customers and foster growth, you must understand the customer base that you’re working with. Who are your customers? What age, gender, ethnicity are they? What kind of jobs do they do? What preferences do they have in regards to your market niche? Market research allows a better understanding of these factors, and thus a better, more personalized experience for your customers.

Understand The People You’re Selling To

Is there a market for your product? Who will buy it? These are legitimate questions every business should ask themselves when creating products and services. If there’s no market for your products, they won’t sell. If there’s over-saturation in your market, you need to do something to set yourself apart from your competitors.

Factors such as a customer’s age,  gender, and geographical location play a part in what and how they buy. A 16-year-old boy isn’t necessarily going to purchase the same products as a 43-year-old woman.

Getting to know your customer can be as easy as sending out a consumer survey after their purchase or using a consumer survey service to poll en masse. Google and SurveyMonkey offer some examples of polling services but often fall short of their alternatives. Pollfish, for example,  is a great survey alternative for the surveymonkey audience.

Market research identifies these trends in your customer base and maps out new demographics for you to sell to. When you understand the customer, it’s much easier to sell them a product they will use.

Market Research Can Predict Changes and Keep You In Business

The market is always changing. Emerging technology, business practices, manufacturing techniques, and more keep the market ever evolving. It’s important, and in fact essential, for your business to not only be aware of these changes but to also be able to adapt to them.

Market research on past trends in the market can help you predict what may happen down the line, and allow preparations before the change comes. This can put you one step ahead of your competitors and keep you in business for years to come.

Expansion To New Markets

Your business may have started out small, but that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Undoubtedly you want to grow your business, your customer base, and of course your income. Market research provides opportunities for such growth by researching the market and discovering new demand and selling opportunities.

Figure out what customers want, what they wish they had, and what they don’t have right now. You can exploit these gaps in the market by providing the products or services your customers are looking for, creating a niche for yourself and putting some distance between you and your competitors.

Information On Your Competition

How does your competition approach the market? Who do they market to? How do they market? These are all questions you should be asking as a business, and researching. Every company that fills space in your market is taking customers from you in one way or another, making it crucial that you understand how they operate and what marketing strategies they’re using.

Research can find weak points in your competition’s approach to the market, allowing you to exploit the weakness and drive customers towards your brand. Additionally, you will be able to predict how your competitors will react to changes in the marketplace, giving you an advantage.

Identify Problems In Your Approach

In addition to identifying weaknesses in your competition’s approach to the market, market research can also help identify some of your own. Awareness is huge in business; if you don’t see the problem, it can grow until it’s out of control.

Lower Risk and Maximize Income

When you understand your market and the customers within it, you can make better decisions with your available capital. Market research can tell you whether or not your new product will be accepted and purchased by your customer base. It can tell you why customers who left don’t come back, what made them leave in the first place, and what would make them want to revisit your brand.

If you’ve had a huge drop in sales for any number of weeks or months, some market research can identify what’s causing the drop-off, so you can address it quickly and efficiently. It will help you learn which products and services perform the best, so you can market those items in an effective way and drive income up while driving risk down.

Lets You Know Where To Advertise

Knowing where to advertise is just as important as knowing how to advertise. If the majority of your customer base interacts with your brand via a phone app, a television advertisement probably isn’t appropriate. Optimizing your ads to high traffic areas can save your business money and time, and ensure maximum effectiveness for your marketing.

There is such a thing as bad marketing, and the last thing any business wants is an irrelevant ad campaign that no one paid attention to. The reputation and finances of the business both suffer in that situation. Keep your ads relevant, simple, and in the right places. Where do your customers frequent? Are they on their phones or in brick and mortar stores more often?

The Conclusion

Market research is an essential part of a business. Without it, you’re shooting in the dark hoping to hit the target. It costs money, yes, but in the long run, the benefits of good market research seriously outweigh the cost of it. Stay up to date and in the know with your customers, and you’ll find that it’s much easier to get them to purchase what you’re offering.