What does your audience want? And how does your brand solve its customers’ most critical pain points? These are just a few examples of the difficult questions market research can answer. Although market research analysis techniques differ depending on the researcher’s exact objectives, there are several best practices everyone should abide by. In this blog, we will demonstrate procedures for conducting a market analysis and explain how market research analysis software—like the PureSpectrum market research Insights Platform—can generate actionable research results, fast.
What Are the 6 Steps Needed To Conduct a Market Analysis?
At a high level, there are six critical steps for conducting a thorough market research project:
- Outline your objectives
- Create your plan
- Collect your data
- Analyze your data
- Present your findings
- Outline what should be done next
Let’s explore each of these steps in more detail.
1. Defining Your Objectives
No market research project can begin without a clear goal in mind. Although the reasons for conducting market research vary widely from business to business, the same rules apply when choosing an overarching objective. Start by asking and answering the following questions.
- How can the analyses fit into your company’s larger business objectives?
- What are you hoping to learn about your target audience?
- Do you have specific stimulus to test in order to measure?
- What are the specific behaviors or perspectives of your customers and/or competition’s customers which you are investigating?
2. Creating Your Plan
In this stage, complete a market analysis template to keep your project on track and delegate specific tasks within the research team. A typical market analysis template will include:
- A brief overview of the project scope and objectives
- A project timeline
- A list of all related tasks
- An explanation of roles and responsibilities
- Budget information
By ensuring organizational alignment on the overall plan through a detailed template, your analysis will be set up for success before its conducted.
3. Collecting Your Data
Knowledge is power, especially in market research analysis. General industry insights can be derived from authoritative sources such as federal and state commerce resources and trade associations. For more specific data related to your target audience, you should use tactics like online market surveys and focus groups.
Although there is no such thing as too much data, you must ensure that all data collected is accurate. Unfortunately, the increase in anonymity in online spaces has greatly hindered overall data quality regarding sample for surveys. In many spaces, survey fraud runs rampant. To combat fraud, programs like PureSpectrum’s PureScore™ identify “red flag” patterns in the behavior of respondents.
4. Analyzing Your Data
After you collect all the necessary data, it’s time to analyze. This process often involves organizing your research into distinct sections. Remember, keep your overarching objective in mind, as this will help you anchor your interpretation of the collected data. Regarding analysis methodology, here are a few examples of effective analysis models:
- Demographic and Segmentation helps with market segmentation and enables you to establish clear groups of buyer personas for your data. By creating groups with similar characteristics, it is easier to identify patterns and trends in the data.
- Gap Analysis will help you identify opportunities in either the products or services being offered or different customer bases being left unfulfilled. This will help drive incremental revenue opportunities and a competitive advantage.
- Customer journey maps uncover how a customer interacts with a business over a certain duration of time. These maps enable researchers to clearly define the stages customers move through, which informs sales, marketing, and customer experience strategies.
Managing Data Can Be Difficult…But it Doesn’t Have to Be
How do you sort through the large amounts of data to carry you through the market analysis process? Market research insights solutions make it easy to store and manage all of the data collected throughout the analysis process. For example, the PureSpectrum Insights Platform empowers researchers to complete all types of analysis related to:
- Brand tracking
- Concept testing
- Creative asset testing
- Ad effectiveness
- Consumer sentiment
- Customer and market segmentation
- Ad-Hoc Testing
5. Presenting Your Findings
After your analysis is complete, it’s time to present your research to stakeholders. Whether you choose to distribute this information in a digital report or through a live presentation, here’s what must be included.
- Highlight What’s Important | Determine which data should be presented, and place your findings in an informational hierarchy.
- Create an Outline | Identify the main topics your report should discuss. Your outline could include the project scope, main questions/objectives, your chosen analysis methodologies, and final conclusions.
- Make the Data Digestible | Raw data is too much to handle on its own. When explaining your findings, you need to create easy-to-understand and appealing graphics. The PureSpectrum Insights platform creates automated data visualizations, giving you one less thing to worry about.
- End With Clear Objectives | Every analysis report should end by providing a clear path to solving identified problems.
6. Outlining Your Next Steps
After everything else is complete, it’s time to start making changes. Some common action items that come out of market analysis include:
- Adjusting your marketing efforts to expand into more social media channels
- Upgrading your customer service infrastructure to use less hands-on interaction
- Upgrading your brand to better highlight new products and services
As you outline your next steps, you must create realistic objectives that all relate back to measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) and objectives and key results (OKRs). Otherwise, it will be impossible to track your team’s progress, and all of your research will be for nought.
Understanding the Importance of Market Analysis
Do you need a market analysis for a business plan? What about advertising strategies, or marketing campaigns? Really, market analysis is critical for informing all decision-making across a business. With a strong market analysis, companies determine how to improve their business operations, hone in on their brand positioning, better serve their customers, and much more. Market analysis also allows companies to put meaning behind the endless figures and achieve:
- Reduced risk when making critical business decisions
- A better understanding of your customer base
- Quick identification of emerging trends
- Keep a strong pulse on their competitors
Do Researchers Need a Market Analysis Platform?
For far too long, researchers have relied on disparate market analysis tools to gather the sample and insights they need. Recognizing this issue, PureSpectrum created the Marketplace and Insights platforms. Here’s what both offer:
- Marketplace gives researchers access to a global market supply to aid in accurate data collection.
- Insights makes it simple to target sample through Marketplace, ask customized questions and empower analysis—all in a single platform.
We understand how complex market research analysis can be. That’s why our market research solution automates various research and analysis processes: so you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your target markets, customer behavior, and competitive advantages.
In short, PureSpectrum does the grunt analysis work so you don’t have to. Interested in seeing more? Schedule a demo today.