How To Do Market Research For a Startup

"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." - W. Edwards Deming

By Arsalan HaroonPublished 3 years ago • 6 min read

Market research is a crucial part of every great marketing strategy. Market research will help you better understand your industry, competitors, and customer. which ultimately helps make a better decision in your business.

Many startups don't know how to do market research for a startup. But in this article, we break down market research into four types market research. So you can better understand market research for startups more deeply, and identify what market research for startups is good for you.

Why is market research important

The main point in conducting market research is, understand your customer needs and how profitable your industry could be for you. If you are a startup. So before putting hard work into your startup, you can understand if your industry is profitable or not by conducting marketing research.

Market research is necessary. Because if you don’t do it, you can't understand your customer, industry, or competitors. So when you don’t understand what your customers need are. Then, how you can provide them useful products?

If you don’t do market research for startups, you don’t create a product for your customer needs. No matter how innovative your product is. If your audience doesn’t want it, the startup will fail.

This shows why market research is important for any business. Whether it is a startup or a successful business.

So let’s learn how to do market research for startups and what 4 types of market research for startups are.

4 types of market research

There are four types of market research that you are likely to come across. Each of them will provide you with valuable information and data about your industry, customer, competitors, so let’s understand each type of market research in more detail.

Primary research
Secondary research
Quantitative research
Qualitative research

Primary research

Primary research refers to all the data and research you did on your own, which is only available to you. Primary research is the best way to understand what your customer's needs are.

You can ask them questions that provide you data about what customers think. You can also target a focus group for your new product and take their feedback about what they like and don’t like.

Primary research is all the data you collected on your own, which is not available to everyone. which is a good thing, If you are doing primary research and your competitors are won't.

Then you have a better chance to understand your customer needs, and if you understand that, your customers will never go to your competitors. Because they know you understand what they want.

Some of the primary research includes:

Observation
Postal surveys
Interviews
Online surveys
Face-to-face surveys
Focus groups

You can do face-to-face surveys and ask your customers how they think about your product and what they like and dislike. Also, make sure you write their answer. So you can know what common thing, Which your customers didn’t like and how you can improve that.

There are lots of things you can do in primary research. Which helps you better understand your customers and the better you understand and provide them what they want. The better relationship they have with your business.

One of the best advantages of primary research is that you collected data and information on your own. So it is not available to the public, which helps you make a better decision than your competitors. Which will give you an advantage to more understand what your customer needs are.

Secondary research

Unlike primary research, where you collect data and information by yourself and, that data is don't available to the public. In secondary research, we gather data from a public source. Which helps us understand the industry as a whole and what our competitors are doing.

Secondary research helps you understand what your competitors are doing. So you can not only improve things in marketing but also improve more areas of your business. Where you see your competitors are ahead of you. some of the secondary research include;

Ebook
Case studies
White paper
infographics

For example, if you want to start a restaurant in an area and you find some research in public sources about that area regarding the restaurant. It tells you that it is a terrible place to start restaurants. Then you might save your time and hard-earned money.

Because if you directly start a food restaurant without doing market research. You will don’t know that this area will good for you or not. But if you conduct market research, you will know if that area is good for you to start a restaurant or not. So you can save your time and money.

Secondary research helps you understand your industry and your competitors better. So you can know how profitable your industry is and how you can improve more than your competitors.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative Research means you collect data by number for statistical analysis. Quantitative Research can be primary or secondary. This data shows you how much improvement you need in some particular area and how much you improve in something over the years.

They are based on data and, it is helpful for you to make a better decision based on quantitative research.

It can provide data that helps you identify your weak points and strong points in your industry. So you can work on things in which your startup is weak and get strong in it. some of the quantitative research include :

Bounce rate
Pageviews
Share of voice
Social media followers
Social media engagement
Subscribers

It will help you know when your audience quits your site and how many people engaging with your business. Which makes it easier for you to understand. How much brand awareness you have.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research refers to data that can not be measured, something like if you ask your customers what they think about your product? Qualitative research is how the customer feels about your product or service. Also, it can be primary or secondary.

You can do interviews, survey polls with your customer. to understand what they feel about your product or service. Ask if your product stands in your competitors ? in what areas do you think it can improve? Ask these questions and improve things which is the most common that your customers said.

You can do qualitative research when you launch your product. Ask for feedback and see what things you need to improve. Is your customer choosing your competitors? Did they provide better products than you?

You have to know what mistake you are making so you can get ahead of your competitors. Ask your customer about this and listen to your customer’s feedback. It helps you understand their needs.

Conclusion

How to do market research for a startup is not the most interesting thing. I know, but you have to do it no matter if it is interesting or not. Because it helps you understand your customer, industry, and competitors better.

If you understand them properly, you have a better chance of becoming a successful business. Market research for a startup is crucial and, the most important thing you can do is take your time and do market research for a startup before starting your business.

So you know it has a market or customer needs this thing. conducting Market research can answer most of your questions which helps you make better decisions