A thriving business requires constant market research to improve your products.

If you are a business owner looking to increase your sales, then one thing you need to consider is how you are gathering and implementing market research.   

Creating a prosperous business involves constant market research so you can develop new, helpful creations and update existing products. Below are five tips to help you start doing market research like a pro.

 

1. Develop Buyer Personas

One of the first things you have to do is discover more about your customers. If you don’t have a firm grasp on your audience, it’s hard to figure out what kind of people you should target in future ad campaigns.

There are plenty of tools available to help you develop customer profiles. As you fill out information about your customers, you’ll start to develop personas. These personas include important key information such as their interests, most common problems, and lifestyle trends. You can use this information to your advantage. 

Part of market research is discovering a common problem and coming up with a solution to that issue. The more customer personas you develop, the more information you’ll have at your fingertips

 

2. Conduct A Survey

A problem that many new businesses face is that they simply do not have a lot of customer information to use for their own market research purposes. However, there is a solution to this problem. If you want to gather more information about the people who buy your product, start conducting surveys.

Surveys are great options for your business for multiple reasons. First, it allows you the chance to write a custom questionnaire that customers can take part in. Try to include a few questions with text boxes so they can fill in their own response. You want as much information as possible so you can build successful, accurate profiles for your market research.

You can also use surveys as a means to get more sales. Some business owners find that adding the option to do a survey in exchange for a discount, such as 10 percent off the order, is more than enough incentive for customers to answer your questions. This is a win-win situation. You’ll gather more information about your customers and get more sales!

 

3. Upload Your Lead List to Facebook Ads

Social media is an excellent tool that every business owner should use to promote their business. As it turns out, social media, specifically Facebook Ad program, is a great way to gather market research information about your audience.

When you use Facebook Ads, there’s a feature called “Custom Audiences” that lets you import your marketing email lists. When you upload your email segments, Facebook automatically finds the profiles of the people on the list. After Facebook has gathered all the profiles, it builds charts that display trends among the people you added to the list. You can see what kind of habits and interests these people have and use it when conducting your market research. 

 

4. Research Your Competitors

When you’re in business, you have to face competition. There are different levels of competition, and you can leverage bigger businesses that offer similar products by diving into their customer statistics and analyses.

There are multiple websites that can help you by showing you relevant marketing research data on your competitors. Some programs let you look at statistics on how well content does on your competitor’s websites. This kind of research can give you insight into the topics that have a chance of interesting your audience. Delivering excellent, relevant content to your audience is another part of solid market research.

 

5. Set Up Multiple Small Ad Campaigns

Another way you can enhance your market research is by doing small sample ad campaigns. Once you’ve gathered customer data, you can start to set up email marketing campaigns to gauge their response.

Set up your ad campaigns to target certain groups so you can figure out what portion of your audience is likely to click-through and make a purchase. You can break down your campaigns by age, annual income, internet habits, etc.

These small tests are pivotal in finding out what kind of marketing works with your audience. As you develop a rich marketing research file, you’ll be able to pinpoint the people most likely to buy your product or service.

Everyone needs market research. It is a time consuming, yet an important part of any business. You have to know and understand your audience if you want to grow your company, get sales, and build strong relationships with the people who buy your product.

As you continue to develop your research, you’ll discover that people are complex and diverse. They have specific wants and needs that are begging for solutions. If you use your data properly, you can build great products that truly help people.

Take these five tips and start to implement them in your market research. Gather data, keep notes, learn what people like and you could soon have a business more successful than you ever imagined.