Doubt and insecurity are often bad company, but there are smart ways to ensure that your business blows with the wind and that is by knowing your market.
Today I share you 5 tips for doing a market study in a practical, simple way and with very little investment that will help you take safer steps.
What is a market study ?
It can be summarized as a method or a series of techniques that allow you to discover, visualize and analyze the commercial potential that you will have with your business or product.
A market study Done effectively, it can reveal important aspects that you should consider in your business plan and that at first glance sometimes you cannot consider them.
Why is a market study convenient?
For many reasons. Let’s say you want to sell bicycle tires. Where is your market? Who are your clients? Would you offer them at a heavy duty truck lot? Would you offer them to housewives? o Maybe you would open a place near a highway where it is dangerous to travel by bicycle? Of course not!! Of course, this approach is very obvious, but it is intended to illustrate the importance of effectively locating and identifying which and where your potential market.
The reason why many businesses fail It is not because they have a bad product or because the business itself is bad. Many businesses simply end badly because they started badly. Doing a market study can be simpler and cheaper than you think and doing it is a job that is well worth it:
- Take a personal tour of the area. The first recommended tip to start a market study is to personally visit the area where you plan to locate your business. Preferably go with someone else you trust who knows the purpose of your tour to help you visualize important details. In this tour it seeks to identify: businesses similar to yours that already exist in the perimeter or businesses that offer complementary services. Analyze their location and their hours. Observe how many people attend and try to intuit if your customers look happy or dissatisfied. In short, a tour of the area will reveal very important information and ideas for your project that you may not have considered.
- Take opinion polls. Prepare a survey that allows you to detect and measure the demand for your product or service in the area where you plan to locate. The survey should be short, concise, and the questions should be posed in a way that reveals people’s interest. Remember that people’s time is important so your survey should not have more than 10 to 15 questions that can be answered in a couple of minutes (maximum). It is also recommended that you avoid compromising, embarrassing questions or asking your respondents for private data, which could cause a rejection with the consequent negative effect. Select a reasonable sample that allows you to measure opinion in a meaningful way.
- Use an undercover client. You can talk to a friend, associate or collaborator who can help you carry out the investigative work by appearing covertly in the premises of your competition as if they were a client. The objective of this research will be to determine: prices of services or products, service hours, quality of customer service, value-added aspects, product quality and any other important element that you should know before launching your own venture. This type of strategy offers excellent results and is often called Mistery Shopping.
- Make calls to request information. Another interesting way to gather information is by making calls to your competitors. With a call you can obtain a lot of important information like the one we have mentioned and additionally you will be able to measure the level of effectiveness of your sales consultants. Remember that the quality of your sales force is very important for success in the promoting a product.
- Analyze your advertising resources. Search and request all advertising material related to the products and services offered by your potential competitors: newspaper advertisements, brochures, catalogs, website and if possible analyze the presentation of their products.
In general terms a basic market study as this will allow you to find a large amount of information that will be very useful to determine if your commercial strategy is suitable or if you need to make some important adjustments. Additionally, it will allow you to determine with greater impact the demand and possible acceptance of your business or product.
And the best thing, as you can see, is that you don’t need to invest a large amount of resources to carry out your own market study. Any suggestions or personal experience you can contribute?
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