As a business owner you want to have success with the product you’re selling or the service you’re offering, but to reach this goal you need to do some research first to determine the chance of being successful in what you do.
One of the mistakes that many people make is that they start to offer their product or service without knowing if there’s going to be a demand from the audience, and this can make your startup fail since nobody will want what you’re offering.
This is why it’s important to do the process of business research so you can start giving your startup the correct focus to get earnings.
Why is research helpful for your business?
Perhaps you haven’t considered evaluating your audience’s response regarding your product or service, but you should know that this is very harmful to your business since you’re not getting feedback, so you can’t know if you’re taking the right path or not.
By doing the proper research you’ll be able to define a strategy for your sales, or you can make a modification to your product to make it more suitable for your target audience, or offer another service that can have more demand.
All of this will take your business in the right direction, and by offering your customers what they want you’re surely going to have a successful business.If you don’t do research, you might not get the growth that you’re expecting in your business.
Researching for a business it’s good for a new company that is looking to analyze the consumer demand, as well as for a company that’s currently in operation that wants to select a better marketing approach, so it’s helpful for every phase of the business.
What methods can you use?
There are a variety of research methods that you can use to gather the necessary information to evaluate your business performance so you can make the right decisions regarding your business.
Data collection
One of the easiest ways of researching your business is gathering information about your customers, market, and even your competitors.
If you’re wishing to enter into a specific market sector then you should first examine all the relevant data so you can learn about it and get some insight. You can search for databases, reports, newsletters, or any other document that allows you to gather information.
With all this information you can make the proper analysis to make the business decision. For example, if you’re planning to expand your company by selling a product to another demographic group, you should research their response to similar products, and you can know this by consulting the right data.
Surveys
Surveys are highly effective for getting a response from your audience regarding your business, and the best part is that they’re inexpensive and popular, so you will get good feedback if you use this method.
The only thing you have to decide is the method you’re going to use to reach your audience with your surveys. There are several options, but you have to choose the one that fits better your business:
- Online surveys: Online surveys are great if you have an online business and you own a website, so you can just place a link that will take your visitors to answer some questions about your product, your services, your website, or any aspect that you want to evaluate.
- Social media surveys: if you have a social media account for your business, you can use the surveys available on Instagram or Twitter. These are more informal, but they are great for getting interaction with your customers and organic responses. If your business has active social media profiles you can take advantage of the very helpful survey tool.
- Personal surveys: If your business is in an office or the interactions with your clients is personal, you can consider making personal surveys that will only take a moment when they visit your facilities.
- Telephone surveys: Telephone surveys are not very popular nowadays since not many people tend to answer questions by phone, but they’re great to get more depth information.
- Mailed surveys: you can send surveys to your customers or potential clients by mail, but this method is hard to launch and administrate, besides, people don’t tend to answer mail surveys, so it might not be helpful.
You can choose any type of survey method, but keep in mind that you want to get a response from your audience, so you should know the right questions you need to ask them.
Interviews
One effective research method is the interview done to a focus group and although it takes much more time to organize and administer, it is a great way of getting a response about a specific topic of your business such as product image, brand, marketing, concepts, etc.
To carry out this method you have to select a focus group of about six to 12 participants and have a moderator that will ask a series of questions that are aimed to know their feedback regarding a specific subject.
You can also make personal interviews, and these are more effective since the participants won’t feel influenced by other members of the group.
Website analytics
If you have a website for your business you can analyze the traffic data to know your audience, their interests, the information that they find more relevant, and so on.
You can also use some tools that allow you to analyze the website traffic of your competition, and this could be very helpful to know what they’re not doing so you can start offering it.
This method is great for understanding your audience, and to see how they respond to the information that you share.
Case studies
With the case study, you can get valuable information about your product or service that you can’t get with another research method.
For this, you have to select members of your audience and ask them to try out a sample of your product for a time so they can give you their opinions and critics. This is great because it’s a total assessment of the product by your target audience, so you’ll know exactly their thoughts about your product.