How to Develop a Market Research Plan

Market research is often seen by companies as a waste of time and resources, and an unnecessary distraction. What they fail to see is the untapped potential that can help their companies grow by using information and strategy to improve their entire business process.

The first step to access this vital resource is to create a plan. By focusing your time on this, you will actually spend less time on the research itself. It will serve as a guide as you start focusing your energy on achieving the research goal without being side-tracked by unplanned events.

These steps will help you with this, so take a look and start developing a market research plan that works for your company.

Define the Problem and Set the Goals

To start developing your market research, you will need to define the problem you wish to solve and set the goal of your research. This will help you find out what do you want to know about the challenges your business is facing.

Defining the problem will help you figure out what types of information you want to collect. This will not only allow you to set the goals for the entire research but will determine your approach as well.

To do this, you will need to objectively answer some of these questions:

•    Who is your ideal consumer?
•    What is their biggest challenge?
•    How much are they willing to pay for your product/service?
•    What is the biggest drawback of our product/service?
•    Who is your biggest competition?
•    Why do consumers choose them?
•    How do consumers like to interact with your brand?

According to the answers, you will realize what the main goal of your research will be. This will serve as a long-term guide as you start conducting your research.

Additionally, set your focus on solving only one problem at a time. It might take up more time, but trying to achieve multiple goals all at once means the information you do receive won’t solve a single problem.

Make a list of all your goals and rank them according to their importance. That way you can tackle the bigger challenges first, and leave the details for later.

Create Your Targets and Questions to Ask Them

Defining a buyer persona is a key ingredient when creating a quality market research plan. Buyer personas are types of consumers your business aims to target. You will need to define two to three to focus on different demographics. These will serve as your target groups and the key source of information during your research.

You will also need to develop specific questions to receive relevant information from your target groups. This means making open-ended questions (those starting with What, How and Why), so the information comes from their own experience and isn’t tainted in any way. Once you have made a list of questions, you will need to implement a method of research to collect the data.

Conduct a Survey Online

These days, most surveys are conducted online. By using quality paid surveys online, businesses speed up the processes of gathering information. The information these tools gather is highly reliable since they provide added incentives to consumers for their honest feedback. You can also determine the specific buyer persona’s you want to target to achieve maximum results.

In case you are running on a strict budget, a less reliable option would be a tool like Google Forms. Using this would require some time to set up and send to potential focus groups. Plus, sending it by email relies on the open-rate of your mailing list, or the consumers desire to interact with this content on social media.

Conduct Interviews

Conducting interviews as part of your market research plan is a great way to add extra depth to the data you aim to collect. Using this tactic allows you to handpick the type of prospect you want to target and get answers to your questions directly from the source. You can even use it in combination with other methods as a follow-up targeted at the focus group with the biggest potential for your company.

When compared to surveys, interviews take a lot of time to be completed. Make a rough estimate of how long you will interviewing each person and set a limit of 10 people per focus group. Your plan should also include incentives, like discounts and vouchers, to motivate your prospects and reward their time and effort to improving your cause.

Analyze the Data

After you have collected all the information, it’s time to analyze and turn it into something useful. To do this, you will need to view the data as a whole. Disregard information that stands out, and makes a collective conclusion about your findings.

The patterns that emerge are the answers you were looking for. Create a shareable document of your results and conclusions, and provide access to everyone at the company.

You should also include recommendations based on the research and start A/B testing each one. It’s important not to make decisions based solely on research results, but allow time to see what actually works in practice.

Start Taking Action

Your market research plan is complete, and the results are in – it’s time to start applying them to your business. Schedule a meeting with every team and determine how you can use this to improve existing processes and campaign.

Remember to keep your mind open, since these findings provide you with opportunity. You might need to re-think some major business concepts in order to make others work, but you will also be able to take immediate action regarding simple alterations to your process.

Whatever the case, now you have a plan of action your market research can form around. The next step is to take it to your audience and discover new ways of improving business and gaining more success.