What Is Market Research?

Market research is so crucial to a successful marketing strategy and business. After all, if you don’t know who your market is, what they want and what their motivations for buying are, how do you expect to make sales? There are many different types of market research methods and today we’ll look at some of our favourites.

But first, let’s look at some of the benefits of conducting market research. By researching your markets needs and wants, you can:

• Create products that your customers want
• Offer services they will use
• Predict how your business will grow
• Determining the viability of a product or service
• Forecast future sales
• And most importantly, provide them with the value they are worthy of getting

You can use market research to find out vital information on your current market, target market and your competitors. Determine what it is you wish to find out and use that to decide which type of market research would be good for your company.

So, if you want to understand customer satisfaction, a quick, easy to complete online survey would be perfect. Or if you want to know how you stack up against your competition, then a mystery shop is ideal.

Market research is either qualitative or quantitative, primary or secondary research.

Qualitative vs quantitative

Qualitative research is open ended. It is recorded in words and gives more in-depth insights into a topic. You can draw conclusions and find common themes by using this method to inform you about the market.

Quantitative research can be categorised and shown in numbers, a table or on a graph. Statistical analysis can be applied to this data to help you draw conclusions about your market.

As a rule of thumb, if you want to know a little about a lot, go quantitative, whereas if you want to know a lot about a little, qualitative will give you that.

Primary vs secondary research

Primary research is research that is carried out by yourself, and secondary research is research that has been carried out by somebody else.