Speaking to your tribe. Market Research — an overview
“Customer Delight vs. Customer Satisfaction
Customer delight is the process of surpassing customers’ expectations to build a long term, positive experience around your product or service and brand. Customer satisfaction happens when you simply meet customers’ expectations.” (1)
Now that we have a better idea of who our clients are, we need to do some market research. What is Market Research? It is the means to meet your clients where they are. In a world that is increasingly going online and therefore creating huge opportunity that is not geographically bound to the area or country that your business is in, you need to know where to find that client that you identified in the various vision board exercises last week. So, as hubspot.com says when speaking of the importance of market research, “By understanding your buyer’s problems, pain points, and desired solutions, you can aptly craft your product or service to naturally appeal to them.”
Doing even a basic market research will give you some very important information about your identified customer, such as:
How large is your target market and what are their challenges?
What are their buying habits?
Where do they do their research before buying?
What influences their choices?
How much are they prepared to pay?
Who is your competition and what is trending in your market amongst your target market?
There are several ways to do market research and can be done in a variety of configurations to suit your needs. They are:
Interviews
Face to face research, in person or virtual is the first method, allowing for a natural flow of conversation and gathering of information.
Focus Groups
This is a focused exercise that pulls together a carefully selected group of people to test your product, watch a demo and provide feed back. This is a great way to check how accurate your vision board results where.
Product Service Use Research
This will tell you how and why your audience use your product or service. This type of market research also gives you an idea of the product or service’s suitability for your target audience.
Buyer Persona Research
This is basically narrowing down how to approach your clients based on research. You will find a number of different personae in your ideal client base. For example age, education, Age, Gender, Location, Job title, Family size, Income, Major challenges. IMPORTANTLY, developing personae groups allows you to create focused messaging directed at specific members of your target audience.
Market Segmentation Research
Allows you to categorize your target audience into groups based on different defining characteristics allowing you to properly plan to meet their needs by understanding their challenges and expectations.
Pricing Research
Understanding the restraints around pricing. Knowing what your clients expectations and affordability constraints are. Taking into account the pricing of your competitors — remembering that being the cheapest in NOT where you want to aim. This aligns with competitive analysis which is valuable because it gives you an understanding of what is doing well in your industry, what is trending, and therefor what your potential customers are ready for. Competitive analysis also brings an understanding of what your competition are doing, and how to be better.
Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research
This research will help you discover the most-effective ways to keep clients coming back to you for follow up business. Loyalty rewards and superb customer service.
Brand Awareness Research
This one is for those who already have a business. Researching what people know about your brand and how they feel about it. It tells you about the associations your audience members make when they think about your business and what they believe you’re all about
Campaign Research
Looking at past campaigns and understanding the results. What worked and why. Being able to keep those lessons in mind for future campaigns.
Thanks again for reading, I hope my overview helps to demystify market research and to show that as daunting as it sounds, it needn’t be undoable.
I found these links very helpful and they will definitely enhance this basic description of market research.
Market Research Kit
Persona Templates
Really good overview of the process. Worth a read. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241080
