If you are thinking about starting up your own business, there are a number of things that you may want to consider in order to make sure you have the best chance of being successful and conducting a proper market research will help you get a full picture of what you are entering into.
Conducting thorough market research is vital before starting out a venture. There are a number of reasons why market research is so important, the main one being to ensure that there is actually a market for your product or service. It does not matter how good your product is if there are only a few people that would actually be interested in it! It is very however important to conduct the research in a thorough and methodical way to ensure that you do not leave anything out.
1. Target market – Knowing who your target market is the very first step. If you have designed a product, you must have a target audience in mind to sell it to. The target market should be split down into these aspects:
- Gender
- Age
- Interests
- Needs
2. Market size – It is important to know how big your intended market is. If you have already decided who you are marketing to, it is vital that you also find out what percentage of the total population is in your target market. You are not going to sell millions of products if your target market is niche, only consisting of a few thousand people.
3. Market behavior – Finding out the behavior of your intended market is a part that is often overlooked, but it is an extremely advantageous area of research. If you know how much money your average customer earns, whether they buy their stuff online or from the brick and mortar shops, along with a number of other similarly useful factors, it will help tremendously in working out how to sell to them.
4. Market access – Working out how your potential buyers usually access products is important. If you are looking to sell items through an online setup, you need to ensure that it is a product that people actually feel comfortable buying online. If you are selling to a local market place, you need to consider the movements and flow of shoppers in the area.
5. Competition – Last but by no means least, you need to check out the competition. There is no use starting up a business (for selling a product) and then finding out afterwards that the market place is saturated with similar products and you do not have a unique selling point. It is not necessarily a bad thing to have many other people selling similar items, as it shows that there is a demand for such things.