In a world of tremendous competition, never underestimate the power of market research.
It’s the only way you can keep up with the ever-changing market trends and consumer needs. A good pre-launch research about the market you’re about to enter allows you to weigh all the pros and cons. Once you understand the new market, you can build relevant business strategies to build and grow your brand.
Let’s dive deeper into the importance of good market research and how businesses can use it.
Importance Of Market Research When Expanding Your Business
Firstly, let’s discuss how market research can help you seamlessly expand into a new market!
Helps In Easily Finding Business Opportunities
Market research lets you recognise your target audience and the appropriate channels through which you can reach them.
Once you know this, you’ll be in a place to spot and grab business opportunities. How?
Through partnerships with other small businesses in the similar niche or by creating compelling targeted campaigns in specific geographical areas.
Lowers The Business Risks
To conquer a new territory and survive there, it is indispensable to eradicate all the hurdles in your way. Regular market research is a great way to check in with your current and potential customers. Before expanding, launching new designs or products or making any other significant changes in your business, you can test it on a small part of your audience. You can rely on their response and feedback to improve your product. This reduces risks, chances of failure and most importantly, gives you the much needed confidence to expand in a new market.
Helps To Build Relevant Marketing Material
If you know your market well, you will know what attracts your customers. Creating your marketing material based on your audience’s likes or dislikes is a smart move.
- Know which communication medium suits your customers the best. Will they make an effort to fill a survey or are they more of readers who would love going through your blog posts?
- Customers’ age range plays a crucial role when determining the communication medium. Well, the copy used when communicating with millennials will be quite different from the copy used for addressing retired baby boomers.
Know The Right Advertising Channels
Got a limited advertising budget? Ensure you make the most of it. Market research allows you to determine whether or not you are reaching your target audience through the right channels.
It helps you understand where your audience spends most of their time. For instance, if they’re spending plenty of time on Instagram and almost none on Twitter, you know exactly where and where not to direct your ad budget.
Moreover, you can run highly targeted ads based on your consumers’ interests, hobbies, and more on social media. How can you know all this about your consumers? The answer is market research.
Apart from social media, physical advertising at relevant places can be carried out by determining the best spaces to advertise only through market research. Are you targeting college students? Strategic targeting utilizing messaging and locations may be a great choice for you.
Beat Your Competitors
Know your customers well and there’s no way you cannot beat your competitors. How does market research help you in outselling your competition?
- You can target dissatisfied customers by going through reviews on your competitors’ products.
- You can target a whole neglected customer segment that might be interested to buy your product.
Better And Simpler Decision Making
Market research equips you with solid insights. With facts and figures in your hand, decision making becomes a lot more simpler and efficient.
Some of the decisions that can be solved through extensive market research are:
- how to price your products
- whether or not to open a new storefront in a new location
- which products to continue and discontinue
- where and how to spend your budget
- the demand of your product
Let’s Get Started!
The aim is to know your customers, their demographics, likes, concerns and needs. Once you have proper knowledge about the market, leverage it to grow and stand out from your competitors.
Depending on what you’re looking for, you may be able to do it yourself, but oftentimes it makes sense to hire an unbiased, experienced market research consulting firm.
Now that you know the importance of market research for expanding your business, when are you getting started?