5 Tips for a Market Study

June 15, 2010 · Posted in Business Education

When you are about to start a business, launching a new product or open your local public, provided it is common that fill you with doubt and uncertainty as to whether your venture will succeed.

Doubt and insecurity are often bad company, but there are smart ways to ensure your business carried downwind and knowing your market.

Today I share 5 tips to make a market study in a practical, simple and with very little investment that will help you take steps safer.

What is market research?

It can be summarized as a method or a series of techniques that allow you to discover, visualize and analyze the business potential you will have with your business or product.

A market study effectively can reveal important aspects you should consider in your business plan and that at first sight sometimes do not quite consider.

Why should a market study?

For many reasons. Suppose you want to sell tires for bicycles. Where is your market? Who are your customers? Will provide a venue for heavy transport trucks? Do anything to offer housewives? o Maybe a store would open near a highway where it is dangerous to travel by bike? Of course not! Of course, this approach is obvious, but aims to illustrate the importance of effectively locate and identify what and where your potential market.

The reason why many businesses fail is because they have a bad product or because the business itself is bad. Many businesses simply because they began badly ends badly. Make a market survey may be more simple and affordable than you think and do is a job well worth it:

1. Make a personal tour through the area. The first council recommended to start a travel market research is the area where you plan to personally locate your business. On this tour seeks to identify: businesses similar to yours that already exist on the perimeter or businesses that offer complementary services. Analyze your location and your schedule. Look how many people attend and try to guess if their clients are satisfied or dissatisfied. In short, a tour of the area will reveal important information and ideas for your project that may not have considered.
2. Make polls. Prepare a survey that allows you to detect and measure the demand for your product or service in the area where are you going to locate you. The survey should be short, concise and questions should be raised so as to reveal the interest of the people. Remember that people’s time is important so that your survey should be no more than about 10 to 15 questions can be answered in a couple of minutes (maximum). It is also recommended that you avoid embarrassing questions, embarrassing or ask your data private respondents, which could result in a rejection with consequent negative effects. Select a reasonable sample that allows you to measure public opinion significantly.
3. Use an undercover customer. You can talk to a friend, partner or associate to help you do the research work presented in a disguised form in the premises of your competitors like a customer. The objective of this research is to: prices of services or products, service hours, customer service quality, value-added aspects, product quality and other important element that you should know before launching your own business. This type of strategy provides excellent results and is usually called Mystery Shopping.
4. Make calls for information. Another interesting way to gather information is by calling your competitors. With one call you can get much important information as we have mentioned and in addition you will measure the level of effectiveness of its sales consultants. Remember that the quality of your sales force is very important for success in promoting a product.
5. Analyzes their advertising resources. Search and apply all advertising material related to products and services offered by your potential competitors, newspaper ads, brochures, catalogs, website and if you can analyze the presentation of their products.

Overall basic market research like this will help you find a lot of information that will be useful to determine if your business strategy is suitable or if you need to make some important adjustments. Additionally, you will determine with greater impact demand and possible acceptance of your business or product.

And the best, as you can see is that you need not invest a large amount of resources to conduct your own market research. Any suggestions or personal experience you can contribute?

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