12 Ways to Use Market Research for Your Business

Because Guessing Is Bad Strategy

Market research is the best way to ensure the longevity of your business. Many small business owners often overlook market research — to their detriment. Market research is an essential and ongoing component of all successful businesses. Here are twelve ways to use market research for your business.

1. Discover Your Target Market – Many people make products or decide to sell services, and then try to find a market for them. However, the truth is that you should first find the market you want to work with, then create products for it. But, even if you skipped that, you can now find your target audience so that you can get your marketing materials right.

2. Get to Know Your Potential Customers – Don’t just rely on web research—get out from behind your desk and get to know your potential customers. The market research that you conduct will allow you to get to know your potential customers better. When you know them better, you’ll be able to create customer personas that help with creating content and marketing which really gets results.

3. Develop New Products and/or Services – When you know what is going on in the marketplace you’ll get more ideas about products and services that your audience needs. You may also get new ideas from reading industry news or from what the competition is doing.

4. Refresh Your Marketing Efforts – Sometimes marketing becomes stale and even though your audience doesn’t change who they are, they do change how they feel about things. For example, what was acceptable marketing for companies in the 1960s isn’t acceptable today. You need to refresh your marketing so you can maintain good will as you keep your company’s offerings in front of your potential customers..

5. Determine Who Your Competitors Are – I’m consistently suprised when I ask business leaders who their competition is and they say, “We don’t have any.” Either you do and you don’t know it, or you’re in the wrong industry. Sure, no one offers exactly what you do the way you do it, but you do have competitors. And it’s important to identify your competitors so that you can keep an eye on them and what they are doing. Sign up for their lists and purchase some of their products. Don’t copy them, but do use them as a standard bearer so you can be better.

6. Educate Yourself to Become an Expert – The more information you learn about your industry and the market for your products and/or services, the closer you’ll become to being an expert. Reading as much as possible keeps you up-to-date and knowledgeable.

7. Confirm Your Ideas – It’s important that when you have an idea or assumption about anything to do with your business, you do the research to determine if it’s right. Sometimes anecdotal stories are wrong; sometimes a result is an outlier and not true most of the time. Only market research can help determine what is genuinely right and wrong.

8. Learn New Opinions – During the market research, you’ll also learn totally new ideas and opinions you never considered. You may find during your research that your new ideas/opinions are wrong or you may find out that they’re right. Before you make a potentially costly move, it’s always better to do the research.

9. Keep Up with New Technologies in Your Industry – Keeping up with market research will also help you learn about technology as it happens. Every day new technologies are being developed that can help you with your business. Without research, you won’t know about it. It’s easy to get trapped within your four walls and not realize what is happening.

10. Identify New Trends – As you’re doing your research, you’ll start to be able to identify new trends that are happening right now. These trends are things that you need to jump on because as fast as they come, they can change.

11. Avoid Marketing Snafus – Business owners who avoid market research are prone to making horrible marketing mistakes. They are at risk of believing their own biases. If you want a laugh and a cringe or two, see Ad Week’s list of advertising and marketing fails.

12. Track Your Own Brand – Many people don’t realize that during market research you’ll also be able to determine how you’re doing as a brand getting information out to the public. If you do not run into your own articles, interviews, blog posts and research while searching, then you need to start working harder.

The fact is, without market research your success is in jeopardy. Some business owners will achieve accidental success but it will be hard to keep up. If you plan for success by conducting market research for your business, you will be set up for success from day one. If you started already, it’s not too late to conduct market research to ensure that you achieve and maintain success.

Action step: write down a list of your competitors. What can you learn from them? What can you do differently to distinguish your company in the mind of your potential customers?