Is Market Research Still Relevant Today?

It is an organized effort to gather information about target markets or customers. It’s a very important component of composing a business strategy.

Before commencing, there are a few important questions you should ask beforehand. These questions are important to identify the targeted customer audience. The Key Questions are:

• Who are the customers?
• What products should we provide for them?
• How strong is the market demand?
• Who are our competitors in the market?

 When asking these questions, it’s a good way to revert to basic marketing principle understandings. These questions connect with Product, Place and Promotion. Which are part of the 7Ps of Marketing.

Market Research is a collective effort of gathering information. However, there are different sectors that people do to obtain relevant data. Here are some ways that people can do it:

• Use Softwares (Example-  Feed It Back), you can easily collect customer feedback data.
• Researching Keywords for PPC, this way you are organically researching what’s popular at the moment.
• Google Analytics, you can identify User Behaviours
• Door Stepping, this is a third party method and uses the ideas of refferals.
• Social Media Posting, creating engagement with the public which then leads into decision making.
• Looking at Competiton.

After commencing your research, it’s useful to adapt your new data into your marketing strategies. Market Research is useful when your are creating your SWOT analysis, it’s useful to compare your findings and your current business ideas with other competitors.