developing market research

One item you must undertake is market research to develop a thriving business.

Even if you have an established business, trends change. People start to want different things out of a product or service or your competitiors may have caught up and over taken you.

So what is market research? A market is simply a group of customers. This may be grouped by one of the features you are offering the market place or simply by price (although people don’t buy on price alone).

You may start off by tackling the entire market place first so that you can then segment your market into smaller elements knowing that you don’t want everything - and by doing this you won’t make any assumptions as to change in requirements - then you can decide which niches you are going to target.

And target niches. Don’t target everyone. There are hardly any successful companies that target everyone - even Tescos has ruled out some niches!

So how do you get the market research?

Some research has probably already been undertaken and you might be lucky and find some on the internet. Search for your niche and add additional words like “profit, market growth, market size or customers” and see what comes up.

If you need to undertake your own research then plan carefully.

Don’t develop too many questions because people will get bored after about 20 questions and not give you decent answers - just answers to get rid of you!

Run your questionnaire past friends and family so they can pick holes in it. Then take your questionnaire to wherever you think your potential customers may be.

Good luck with developing your own marketing research.