Are you planning to introduce a new product to the market? Flutterwave just became a unicorn and partnered with Paypal. Paystack was recently bought in part by Stripe. The headlines these days seem to be glistening with a lot of shiny news of erstwhile small startups achieving exceptional feats, and you are itching to be a part of these deafening echoes of good tidings. There is just one little problem. You haven’t even started your own journey yet. No product or business to put your hopes on, to maybe become the next big success the world gets raving about. But all hope isn’t lost. At the least, you have a product idea. A brilliant one or is it?
Having a blank view of the future of a prospective venture affects different entrepreneurs in different ways. Some with prospects never kick-off because of a fear of the unknown; others do start and end up wasting valuable time and resources struggling with ventures with no significant impacts, which would either have to make a pivot or shut down completely. The key questions then are. “How do you know if your product idea is worth developing?”
Most successful ventures leave very little to chance. They make a habit of testing, tracking, measuring, and analysing their concepts and ideas to gain valuable feedback. This is done through the different levels of their product’s lifecycle – development, introduction, growth, maturity, saturation, and decline. When this is done to evaluate the feasibility of a new product or service through research conducted directly with potential customers, it is called Market research.
How is Market Research done?
The market research process can be done through deploying surveys, interacting with your “sample” – a group of people whose use and engagement are being analysed, conducting interviews, and other similar processes.
The primary purpose of conducting market research is to understand or examine the market associated with a particular product or service to decide how the audience will react to it. The information obtained from conducting market research can be used to tailor marketing/ advertising activities or determine the feature priorities/service requirements (if any) of consumers.
Key steps you can use to conduct a simple market research for your product
There are a plethora of software tools available to conduct comprehensive market research and get actionable insights. And some of these are tailored to get the best results from specific product types. Irrespective of their brands, these products follow predefined steps as described below to conduct market surveys effectively. You can do the same;
1. Define the problem
Clarity on the problem your new product is looking to solve will help you ask the right questions. These questions must be relevant to the problem being addressed and clearly outlined to help your respondents in understanding them. Your research objective should be precise and include a brief description of the information needed. At this stage of your market research, it is important to answer the question “why are we doing the research?”
2. Define your sample
As we established earlier in this post, your sample is a group of people whose use and engagement are being analyzed to get insight into your product or service. A representative sample is a small number of people that reflect, as accurately as possible, a larger group. This group must represent characteristics that matter to your research. Note that the larger your sample size, the better your chances of capturing a holistic result.
3. Carry out appropriate data collection
Setting up an adequate data collection system is fundamental to the success of your research. Unanswered or incomplete surveys will cause errors in your research. Data collected should be quantitative and qualitative.
4. Analyze your result
Data without insight are just a set of random figures. This is why analysis is important. An in-depth analysis conducted without leaving loose ends is required to achieve correct insight about your products and services. As such, your analysis can not be handled with levity. When the research has been carefully planned, the hypotheses have been adequately defined, and the indicated collection method has been used, the interpretation is usually carried out easily and successfully. What follows after conducting market research?
5. Prepare a Research Report
This answers the question in (4) above. The insight gained from your research should be easy to understand and shareable. This makes it possible to transfer the knowledge gained to others who may join your team or take up the responsibility of progressing your research further in the future.
Note that you don’t have to present the reports in the same order or format you asked the questions. Great market research reports leverage vivid storytelling to make their findings easy to take in.
6. Decide your course of action
The true value of any research is in its applications. And well-executed market research already gives you sampled opinions of your target audience. This means that the success of your new product launch is more feasible when you leverage the results of your research.
Market research is an essential part of product development and, by extension, a prerequisite for building a successful business. Have you carried out market research for your products and services in the past? Feel free to share with us the strategies you applied, your experience during the process, and maybe some important findings you had in the comment section.