Whether you are a business owner or marketer, you might be familiar with the term marketing research. Whether you are launching a product, service, or campaign, you need to do marketing research to gain an overview of your market and competitor. By doing so, you can increase the success rate of your product or service launch.
What is Marketing Research?
Marketing research is a certain study to obtain various information about your target market. This information can be used for many purposes like designing the most suitable concept product, improving product package, planning for your marketing campaign and other projects in your business.
What are the 11 Steps in The Marketing Research Process?
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Do you really need marketing research?
The first step in the marketing research process is to really consider whether you need marketing research or not. Good marketing research is costly so make sure that the cost won’t outweigh the benefit that you get.
- Define the problem
Before conducting marketing research, it is important to define a problem statement that you want to solve by doing market research.
- Establish the research objective
From the general problem, you can identify what information that you need. Ensure that it is clear and measurable.
- Determine the research design
What research approach can fulfil your objective? Several research designs that you can choose are exploratory research (the most superficial research, only focusing to answer “What” and “How” questions), descriptive research (deeper than exploratory research), explanatory research (explain the matter by answering “What”, “How”, and “Why” questions), and evaluation research (measure the effectiveness or result of a certain subject)
- Determine the type of research
Would secondary research be enough? Or do you need to elaborate more data by conducting primary research?
- Method for gathering data
Interviews, questionnaires, surveys, observations, or focus groups, which method would be suitable for your marketing research?
- Create the data collection form
Whether you use a survey form or discussion guide, this marketing research process can determine your data quality.
- Define the sample size
As it would be unrealistic to gather data from the entire population, you can take a random sample of individuals as representatives of the whole population.
- Collect Data
After you choose the instruments and methods that you want for gathering data, now is the time to conduct your marketing research. To obtain comprehensive data, it will be better to get a mix of qualitative and quantitative data.
- Analyze Data
To make it easier, you can write up a summary and use a table or chart to present the data.
- Conclusion
What can you conclude from the data? Based on the result, you can take action to improve your business.
And those are 11 steps in the marketing research process that you need to do so you can gather comprehensive data from your target market. It is quite tasking and may take a long time, especially if it is performed by unprofessional individuals.
References :
https://quizlet.com/148996577/11-steps-in-the-marketing-research-process-flash-cards/
https://scholarshipfellow.com/research-design-types-research-design/
https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/research/determine-sample-size/
