How to Effectively Conduct Market Research

Define a Buyer Persona

Do you understand who your buyers are? If not, how can you expect to effectively reach and learn about the real audience members you are selling to? Buyer personas are a generalized, fictional representation of your ideal customers. With these in place, you will be able to visualize your audience, streamline communications, and inform your outreach strategy. More than likely, you will have multiple personas that your organization is reaching out to. Just make sure that you are intentional about each specific persona when developing content and campaigns.

Engage With a Persona Group

After identifying your buyer personas, you can use that information to engage to conduct market research. This should represent your target customers so you can get a better understanding of their buying habits, demographics, and various challenges. It should also include people who recently made a purchase with your organization. Once you have identified who you are going to engage with, prepare a list of research questions for your participants to answer. These should be open-ended, allowing them to expand on their answers and provide the most accurate, detailed response possible.

Identify Primary Competitors

What is your competition doing that your organization is not? How can you better stand out from your competition? When you identify who your direct competitor is, it gives you the opportunity to evaluate your brand and see how it compares. This process is important because it will demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of your organization. Additionally, it will give you more insight into what makes your competitors so strong.

Summarize Findings

When you summarize your findings, it’s really just finding a common thread within your research of what works and what doesn’t. By summarizing what you found, you are effectively creating a list of action items for your organization to address. Compile everything into a list, with the following format as a guideline:

• Background – The goals of this market research study.
• Participants – Who talked to and why you talked to them.
• Consideration – The main themes you uncovered in your research.
• Action Plan – What you plan to do with this information.

How Marketing Eye Can Help You

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