How to study the market and why is it needed? (part 2)

5 steps to explore the market
1. Set the goal of market research. Do not just collect information, but decide (or rather, understand) what do you want to know? Why do you need this information? Then you will find exactly what you need.

2. Gather information. Use different sources – and communication with people, and the Internet, and magazines, and statistics of different organizations … everything you can get … Do not forget about wordstat! 🙂

3. Check the information. Sometimes information from different sources can be very different. Unfortunately, this happens and you have to spend extra time. But nothing can be done – it’s better than continuing to work, being in error.

4. Analyze the information. Analyze all the collected information – understand what this means for you and your business, and make the right decisions.

5. Draw conclusions and make the right decisions.

Let’s take a closer look at the last two points with an example. You studied the market and got some numbers, naturally. What to do with them? Suppose you understand from your market research that your products are in demand by 70% of young people aged 18-25. If you are satisfied with their solvency, i.e. If you sell not too expensive goods, then you decide to direct most of your marketing resources to work with this particular audience. Or vice versa, if you want to attract buyers of a more mature age category, then you are directing your attention to making the product more attractive to them.

Or another situation, more suitable for the existing business, but nonetheless. You have noticed in your business that about 70% of sales are made by regular customers, and that attracting new ones for some reason is difficult. Accordingly, based on your real situation, you decide to focus on regular customers or launch a more massive marketing campaign to attract new ones. Although it is necessary to keep the old in any way, we are only talking about the distribution of funds and resources.

And in both cases, the bottom line is one thing: in order to analyze the initial data, draw the right conclusions and make the right decision. Agree, this is more difficult to do if you do not have the same data obtained during market research. Therefore, I think the question “how to study the market” concerns every entrepreneur.

Everything we talked about is not so easy to do in practice, of course. But whoever is better prepared will win :-). However, I would like to warn at the same time: this does not mean that you have to do this for months. So you will never start a business. Being prepared is very good, but more importantly, getting started! Good luck!