How To Carry Out Marketing Research For Your Business

Market research is the process of evaluating how well your marketing efforts are working.
You can perform market research to ask your clients about the effectiveness of your marketing message. Companies summarize the results of their research in a marketing report. Use the results of the report to make improvements in your business.



Consider why you should perform market research and write a report

What information is important to you? What will you do with the marketing report after it is created? This process requires an investment of time and expense. Make sure that you have a clear plan for using the information that you collect.


Specifically, does your marketing get the attention and interest of prospects? Are you converting enough of those prospects into clients?


Related post: Here is the active email address of High Net-worth Individuals in Nigeria to promote your business/services to these rich people



Identify your customer

Before you can identify your customer's need or problem, you must identify your target or typical customer. Your target audience is the specific customer profile your are trying to reach. This could be people of a certain gender, age, profession, interest set, group, or any other quality that you think makes a customer want to buy your product. In other words, these are the people who are most likely to buy your product and the people that you tailor your marketing to.


The more specific you can be about the identity of your customer, the better you can address their needs. Ask yourself, "Who am I targeting with this product?" and "What do they want?"
Look at your current customers. What's the average age? Gender? Education level? Personality? Lifestyle? Hobby? Occupation? Marriage status? Values?



Evaluate your customer’s problem

Consumers buy products to solve a specific problem. Your customers will only buy when they feel that solving the problem is urgent.

For example, based on customer surveys and your industry knowledge, you uncover a customer problem. In this case, customers are losing time working or studying when their cell phone dies. If they forget their charger, they may lose hours of productivity.



Detail your solution to the customer's problem

Think about how exactly you went about responding to the customer's problem. Why did you solve it that way? What make you think about the problem in this way? What exactly does your product or solution do or include?


For example, to solve the problem of dying cell phones, you create a phone charger built into a backpack. Your customers use backpacks to store computers and other work or school items. As a result, the worker or student can always charge their phone.



Determine how well your product solves your customer's problem

Figure out whether or not your product has reduced the impact of the problem you saw. This is also a good place to determine whether or not your problem needed solving in the first place. If sales are consistently low, this may be a sign that your solution was unnecessary.


Over time, more customers buy your backpack and like using the built-in phone charger. These clients also believe that your product is different and better than competing products. You are building brand equity with your customers.



Identify your competitive advantage

Examine your competitors' products and how the solutions that they provide differ from your solution. In other words, look at what your product is able to provide to customers that your competitors' products cannot.


What makes your product unique and better? The goal here is to identify a competitive advantage and focus on that advantage with marketing efforts. If this advantage can be sustained, it will lead to higher sales and greater customer retention.



Examine how you currently market your product

The idea of market research is to understand how you market now and how well clients respond. Analyze the steps you currently take to market your product. For example, if you market your product online, you may be using some of the following strategies:


You continually add blog posts, articles and other content to your website. Adding content drives traffic to your site. Your content also keeps a percentage of your audience coming back for new content.Y

Yoursite offers an opt-in button for readers to subscribe to additional content that is emailed to them. This group gets a weekly email from you with new content links.

You have an attractive home page that includes a picture of someone using your backpack phone charger. The site allows the user to easily navigate to your content page and to web pages with product information.

You provide an e-commerce option for customers. Clients can buy your product online and receive their backpack in just 2-3 business days.

This should also include information about the sales channels used, like online, bricks & mortar, types of retailers, etc. Analyze how well your product is doing in each of these channels.



Evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing

 Is marketing doing a good job of getting your product information to potential customers? If you are using blog posts or articles, are they actually being read? Determine if your marketing efforts are actually leading to traffic to your website and then if this traffic is converting into sales. If not, you may want to include ideas for a revised marketing strategy in your marketing report.


Note your market share compared to competitors and market share trends. Are you gaining market share, losing it, or holding your own?


Related post: Get active Nigerians email address database with free sending tool for your marketing needs



Summarize your findings for your marketing report

The results of your market research should be compiled and detailed in a market report. A market report includes a 1-2 page executive summary and a longer detailed report section.


Your report should include such items as definition of the market size, competitors and their marketing size, as well as estimates of market share.


You can use the market report to make changes to your marketing process. These changes can help you get more business from the time and money you spend on marketing.


Next Read: How to write/present market research report and executive summary

How To Make Money Blogging By Treating Your Blog Like A Business

When I started blogging almost seven years ago, there where no much money in it. Now that the general population knows they can earn income blogging, they all want in. The problem is they don’t treat a blog like a business.



If you’re also a blogger (or you wish to start blogging) who is wondering how to start turning your hobby into a business, here are a few places you can start.


Related post: How to start Gift Cards reselling business in Nigeria from your home



Decide how you’re going to make money

The first step in treating your blog like a business is figuring out how you actually make money. There are two (kind of three) options here.

• You already have a business (or are building a business) and a blog is a marketing tool.
• The blog itself gets you hired for specific services pertaining to content creation.

In the former example, you have a company and your blog is just one part of your sales and marketing funnel. For example, I have a student who is a travel agent and her travel blog helps her get clients.

In the second, the blog itself is what gets you paid. This usually looks like content marketing work, affiliate marketing and spokesperson work for major brands.


You can also have some sort of a hybrid and add multiple sources of income as time goes on, but in the beginning stages I recommend sticking to one or two things.



Figure out where your clients and customers pay you

The second step is to figure out your sales and marketing funnel. In other words, you need to determine how someone goes from being a blog reader to a paying customer or client. Here are a few examples:

Your following doesn’t actually pay you, but corporate brands hire you as a spokesperson because of your following.

• Blog readers purchase affiliate products from your website.
• Potential clients go to your site for advice, join your email list and you market your products and services to them.

Each scenario has a slightly different roadmap depending on how you’re actually making your money. When treating your blog like a business, it’s important to know what this process is so you can structure your business accordingly.



Create a marketing budget

There was a time when you could use social media and everyone would see your content for free. Sadly, those days are behind us. You need to look no further than the recent Facebook changes to see how this has changed over the years.

That being said, businesses have marketing budgets and as such your blog should as well. This may look like ads or services that help drive traffic or build your social media presence. Fortunately, these things don’t have to cost you a whole lot, but you do need to invest just like you would in any other business.


Conclusion

In order to treat your blog like a business, you need to deal with numbers, logistics, and marketing. While this isn’t the fun part, it is what actually gets you paid.


Related post: Get active and updated Nigerians email address database with free send out and blasting tool