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If you are starting a new business or a new product, or if you are a long time business owner – Market Research is essential for your success.

Launching a product to a new market – you need to know where that market is, and why they want your product. Only then can you effectively market to them.

Benefits of Market Research

For current business owners you can increase your communication with customers – The public can see you are taking an active part in finding out their needs and wants. Show them you are aiming to fulfill these needs and wants. They are more likely to remember you in future and buy from you again.

Both new businesses and established businesses can identify opportunities – By speaking with the public in regards to their wants and needs, you will find other areas that you had not thought of, that you could fulfill.

Minimize risk - By researching before you start your business, you can see if your product/service will sell. If it is obvious from the research that no one would buy your product/service, then you can change direction before you start, and thus save yourself a lot of time and money.

Measure your progress – By conducting Market Research at the start of your business, and then following this up again at a later point, you will be able to see from the responses how successful you are, and if you could afford to branch out into new areas.

Getting Started
Before starting Market Research, it is important to understand what you want out of this research. Do you want to know if your product will sell? Do you want to see how many other products are out there? Do you want to know if people are planning to continue buying this product/service, or if the market is moving in a new direction? There is nothing more annoying for potential customers to be harassed by people with no real reason in mind.
People are generally happy to help others. If you explain that you are trying to find out how people would react to a new product on the market, or simply if they would like it, most people would be more than happy to give you their opinion.

How to do it?
There are many different ways to conduct Market Research. If you are running an online business naturally you would use online resources. One of the best ways of doing market research is to create a survey and have people fill it in for you. A popular online survey website is Survey Monkey. You can create a free survey, and then forward the URL to people, which will take them to the website to allow them to participate in the survey.

There are many arguments as to whether you should request people to fill in the survey, or request people to fill in the survey and offer a free gift. You can offer a free e-book, article or product in order to entice people to fill in the survey. It depends on your personal preference (obviously if you do not offer a free incentive the numbers may not be as great completing the survey, but then the persons completing the survey may be more ‘real’)

Promote your Research
When you have a survey, you can get your family and friends to fill this in, but you can also promote the survey on social media websites. Promote this on Facebook, Twitter, and various other social media websites. This will give you a wide range of opinions from a wide range of people – ideal for Market Research. You could also used paid campaigns such as google Adwords.

Analyze, Analyze, Analyze!
Once you have the information, it is essential that you do something with it. Firstly sort the information into categories. The easiest way is to do this is in a spreadsheet. You can filter people by demographic, or by the responses people gave you. Create a graph of the results. It is an easy way to see the density of the answers.
Finally, use this information to adjust your product/service, rethink the product/service all together, or charge ahead with promotion.

Market Research is essential for every business. Always take the opportunity to ask your customers opinions and use the feedback to your best advantage.