A Practical Guide to Conducting Market Research for Your Business
Market research plays a vital role in the success of any business. It helps you understand your target market, assess market demand, and make informed decisions to drive growth. In this guide, we will explore the step-by-step process of conducting market research with practical examples and tools.
- Define the Research Objective:
Before diving into market research, it’s crucial to define your research objective. Let’s say you’re planning to launch a new line of organic skincare products. - Identify the Target Market:
Identify your target market for the skincare products. For instance, you may target health-conscious individuals aged 25-45 who are interested in natural and eco-friendly beauty products. - Choose Research Methods:
To gather data, you can employ a combination of primary and secondary research methods. Here are some practical examples:
Primary Research:
- Surveys: Create an online survey using tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey to collect feedback on skincare preferences, interest in organic products, and purchasing habits.
- Interviews: Conduct one-on-one interviews with potential customers to gain in-depth insights into their skincare needs and preferences.
- Focus Groups: Organize small group discussions with members of your target market to explore their attitudes towards organic skincare and gather feedback on product concepts.
Secondary Research:
- Market Reports: Access market research reports from trusted sources like Statista, IBISWorld, or Mintel to understand industry trends, market size, and growth projections for the skincare industry.
- Competitor Analysis: Research and analyze existing organic skincare brands to understand their product offerings, pricing, marketing strategies, and customer reviews.
- Develop Research Instruments:
Create well-designed questionnaires for surveys and discussion guides for interviews and focus groups. Include a mix of multiple-choice, rating scales, and open-ended questions to gather comprehensive data. - Collect Data:
Implement your chosen research methods and collect data from your target market. Distribute surveys online, schedule interviews, or organize focus group sessions. Utilize video conferencing tools like Zoom for remote interviews or focus groups. - Analyze and Interpret Data:
Once you have collected the data, use tools like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or specialized data analysis software to analyze the responses. Look for patterns, trends, and key insights that will help you understand market demand, preferences, and potential opportunities. - Draw Conclusions and Make Recommendations:
Based on your data analysis, draw meaningful conclusions about the market demand for your organic skincare products. Identify gaps or unmet needs that your products can address. Use this information to make informed decisions and develop recommendations for product development, marketing strategies, and target market positioning.
Note:
Market research is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring of industry trends, consumer behavior, and competitor activities. By conducting comprehensive market research, you can gain valuable insights that will guide your business decisions, mitigate risks, and maximize your chances of success.
Remember to tailor your market research approach to your specific business and target market. The examples and tools mentioned here serve as a starting point, and you can explore additional resources and techniques based on your unique requirements.
A simplified example of Market Research: This is how you can do a market search before launching a business.
Let’s walk through a simplified example of market research for a hypothetical business idea: opening a specialty coffee shop in a specific neighborhood. Here are the steps you can follow:
Define Your Objective:
Clearly define what you want to achieve with your market research. In this case, it could be understanding the feasibility and potential demand for a specialty coffee shop in the target neighborhood.
Identify Target Market:
Determine the specific demographics and characteristics of your target customers. For example, young professionals, students, or coffee enthusiasts who reside or work in the neighborhood.
Gather Secondary Data:
Start by gathering existing information and data related to the coffee industry, market trends, and consumer behavior. You can utilize resources like industry reports, market research studies, government publications, and online databases to gain insights.
Conduct Primary Research:
Primary research involves collecting firsthand data specific to your target market. You can use various methods:
a. Surveys: Create an online survey using tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey to collect feedback on people’s coffee preferences, frequency of visits to coffee shops, and interest in a specialty coffee shop in the neighborhood.
b. Interviews: Conduct one-on-one interviews with potential customers, local residents, or employees in nearby businesses to gather qualitative insights and understand their needs, preferences, and expectations.
c. Focus Groups: Organize small group discussions with coffee enthusiasts or target customers to delve deeper into their thoughts, perceptions, and preferences regarding specialty coffee and their experiences with existing coffee shops.
Analyze and Interpret Data:
- Once you’ve gathered both secondary and primary research data, analyze and interpret the findings. Look for patterns, trends, and key insights that can guide your decision-making process.
- Identify potential market size, customer preferences, demand for specialty coffee, willingness to pay, and any gaps or opportunities that exist.
Evaluate Competition:
- Research and analyze existing coffee shops in the target neighborhood. Visit their locations, review their menus, observe customer traffic, and read online reviews. Evaluate their strengths, weaknesses, pricing strategies, and overall customer experience.
- Identify ways to differentiate your specialty coffee shop and determine if there is room in the market for another coffee shop.
Make Informed Decisions:
- Based on your market research findings, evaluate the feasibility and potential profitability of opening a specialty coffee shop in the target neighborhood.
- Consider factors such as location, target market demand, competition, pricing strategies, unique selling propositions, and potential challenges.
- Use the insights gained from your research to make informed decisions about your business concept, location selection, menu offerings, pricing, marketing strategies, and overall business plan.
Remember, market research is an ongoing process, and it’s important to continuously gather feedback and stay updated with changing market trends and customer preferences. The depth and complexity of your market research may vary based on your specific business idea, target market, and industry.
Google Ads V/s Facebook Ads: Which Will Get You A Better ROI?
It is one of the most asked questions in the digital marketing world. There’s constant competition going on between the two platforms, both having millions of users.
Marketers use the two platforms for advertising as they maximize visibility, thereby increasing leads and sales. But the two ad platforms work in different ways, and which one you need depends on your goals.
Google Ads
Google Ads, also referred to as Paid Search, is the world’s largest and even one of the two most popular PPC platforms. The other one is Bing Ads.
Paid Search focuses on keywords like some specific words and phrases likely to be used by a user and text-based advertisements. The ads are displayed on the search results. And each time the user clicks on the ad, a charge I paid by the advertiser. So, it is known as “Pay-per-click advertising”.
Marketers pay charges to gain new customers and achieve their goals.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is also known as Paid Social. This is because it is a social networking platform where advertising products are conventional. Being at the top rank of monthly active users, Facebook has become a highly competitive platform used for digital marketing.
Google Ads V/s Facebook Ads: Which Will Get You A Better ROI?
Unlike paid search, which brings businesses via their search queries, paid social help to find companies based on their interested items and the ways they behave online.
Google Ads help marketers find new customers, while Facebook Ads help new customers to marketers.
Google Ads will help you generate leads right away and give out an instant ROI on your investment while Facebook Ads will help new customers to get aware of your brand name and your products. This way will help to generate leads and better ROI in the long run.
So, choose wisely. Because their competition will never end.
8 Reasons Why PPC Outweighs SEO
Are you tired of working on your SEO strategies to boost your website’s ranking on search engines? If you have tried every SEO strategy possible but failed to generate results, it’s time to switch to another marketing strategy. What can be better than using PPC advertisements to get in front of millions of internet users?
PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, refers to the paid search advertising where you need to pay a charge every time there is a click on your ad. You won’t be paying any price for impressions. You only pay when you generate traffic to your website or landing page. People won’t click on your ad and visit your page unless they are interested in what you offer. That’s why PPC is more effective in bringing quality traffic to the website than by using SEO.
Solely depending on SEO might result in losing some valuable traffic or revenue. You need to include PPC into the picture to generate results. Therefore, you should think of using both of the strategies together. This might work great in your favor and reach out to more people.
However, PPC advertisements aren’t only for those who failed to use SEO effectively. Even if you haven’t given SEO a try, considering PPC over SEO will still be a good choice. If PPC advertisements are used effectively, they can have a major and positive impact on the business’s growth and even on customers.
Are you still confused about prioritizing PPC over SEO? If you are, the underneath reasons will surely help you get rid of the indecisiveness you have about them right now!
Here are 8 Reasons Why PPC Outweighs SEO.
1. PPC advertisements can bring Instant Traffic, which SEO can’t.
Instead of struggling to appear on the first page of Google with SEO strategies, you can use PPC advertisements. PPC advertising slots are already there on the first page. If you prefer using SEO, it might take months to actually find your website on the first page or have a better ranking. However, with PPC advertisements, you no longer have to wait for months to see traffic driving into your website. In other words, you will generate instant traffic to your website for any related search query. So, why don’t you think of giving a try to these paid search ads?
2. PPC ads appear above SEO results.
For any search query, PPC advertisements appear above SEO results. People don’t waste too much time digging through websites to find the right information. They are more likely to go for the top result for any search query. So, if your PPC advertisements appear at the top for a relevant search query, the chances of getting the clicks increases. So, don’t you think it will be a good way to target your potential customers?
3. PPC ads target ready-to-buy customers.
Unlike SEO, PPC lets you target customers who are ready to buy them. People search for products or services when they need them. So, if your ads appear in front of them when they are in absolute need of them, you will generate more clicks and even better conversions. This is known as inbound marketing. This is quite an effective way of positive revenue generation.
4. PPC ads can support your SEO strategies.
You can test your keyword strategy in PPC before actually using them for SEO. You need to do it because organic keywords are kept hidden most of the time. However, the case is totally different from paid search. You can get an overview of all the keywords related to your industry niche. Along with the keywords, you will find information like how effective they are in converting and their cost. You can use this keyword information while working on your SEO strategies. More specifically, you can use it while optimizing the website content, meta description, headlines, etc. For that, you have to work on your PPC advertisements first and then it can support your SEO strategies.
5. PPC ads don’t depend on the search engines’ algorithm changes.
One of the main reasons why PPC outweighs SEO is that it doesn’t depend on the search engines’ algorithm changes. Ranking higher on the SERPs and SEO strategies largely depend on search engine algorithm updates. However, PPC advertisements are more likely to not get affected by these algorithm changes. Even if it happens, it is very rare. You will rarely find PPC algorithms going through huge changes. This means you can easily determine how your ad campaigns will perform in the current and future scenarios.
6. PPC ads offer multi-layered targeting options.
PPC advertisements offer several different targeting options like users’ locations, ages, and preferences. This makes the targeting process even more specific and helps to attract customers locally or globally as per their preferences. Unlike SEO, PPC allows you to filter out your audience even more. As you create different ad campaigns, you will slowly be able to determine which campaign is working better for you. In other words, you will understand what kind of campaigns are engaging more people and even on which platform. In this way, you can easily target different types of customers on different platforms.
7. PPC ads are easier to produce than SEO.
Another great advantage of using PPC over SEO is that PPC ads are easier to create. You don’t need any designing or production skills to create the campaigns. However, you might need some expertise in this field if you want to create effective PPC advertisements. This is because doing keyword research properly or using Google Ads to create successful campaigns need certain basic knowledge. If you are new to this strategy, it’s best to hire some professional help. Like, you can hire a good PPC management agency near you.
8. PPC ads can bring positive ROI.
Like all other digital marketing tools, PPC also offers measurable results. Measuring the results regularly helps to determine whether you need to improve and when you need to monetize. In addition to that, PPC campaigns are a lot easier to measure than any other digital marketing strategy. It means you can keep on improving the ad campaigns until they generate positive results. Moreover, you can stop running the campaigns right away when you find they are not working. This prevents you from wasting your ad budget uselessly. In short, you can keep on experimenting with your ad campaigns until it offers your desired results.
Why do you need a PPC management service?
Businesses across the world depend on PPC management services for using PPC effectively. So, it is nothing new if you also think of using this marketing tool and getting a PPC service for your business.
As a business owner, you probably want to get the best results without investing much. However, as nothing comes free of cost, you might have to invest in some strategies like PPC advertisements to generate positive results. That’s why it is best to hire a professional PPC management agency. It will be a more cost-effective option than hiring an in-house team.
Our PPC specialists have years of experience and knowledge in creating PPC campaigns and ads on different platforms. So, once you join hands with us, you don’t have to worry about substandard ads that won’t produce any result.
10 Tips To Improve Your Local SEO Real Estate Websites
Are you an online real estate agent dreaming to rule your local market?
If you, you aren’t the only one dreaming to do so. All the real estate agents of your hyperlocal area also want the same. However, this isn’t a very difficult task. As you luckily have an online business, just focus on real estate SEO. This will enable you to compete with other real estate agents. Isn’t that what you want?
Focusing on local SEO will give a chance to fight, but only when used properly. So, here are 10 tips by which you can improve your real estate SEO.
1. Start with an SEO Audit:
So, where do you think you are right now? You have to know where you are, before heading anywhere. That’s exactly what an SEO audit does. It helps to determine which pages are going well and where to make improvements.
Performing an SEO audit can be a time-consuming process. However, it provides you with all the information you need to make progress. The key areas you must focus on are:
- Site Structure
- Page Structure
- Content
- Links
- Usability
When you improve above five areas, you can automatically see an increase in traffic. You can Google Analytics to find pages that need attention. In addition to that, you can use Google Search Console to find issues that need solutions.
2. Optimize for Search:
After generating the audit results, you have to focus on optimizing your website. This means you have to create a plan to address each of the issues. Then you have to fix all of those issues. Moreover, you have to look for other ways to improve your optimization further.
So, what are the things you should focus on? Well, there are several things you need to focus on with a systemic approach. Some of them are:
- Keyword reach and analysis
- SEO-friendly URLs
- Content optimization
- Optimizing of titles and meta descriptions
- Image optimization
- CTR and bounce rate optimization
- Proper outbound and internal link placement
- Schema
- Robots.txt
- XML sitemap
- SSL certificate
- W3C validation
3. Ensure Good Accessibility of Your Website:
Does your website provide a good user experience? Then you are lacking far behind in the competition. You have to make your website with good accessibility. Like with screen reading options for visually impaired people. This will ensure that you increase your customer base.
That’s why different businesses make sure that their sites are ADA compliant. This is especially important for real estate. You have to take care of some things to be ADA compliant. A few such things are:
- Multiple ways to access the site.
- Any live audio/video content must have text captions.
- Only links are underlined.
- The contrast ratio between background elements and readable elements must be at least 4:5:1.
- The keyboard focus must always be clear and highly focussed.
4. Ensure that Your Website is Responsive:
Do you know just how many clients abandon your unresponsive website? That’s larger than you can think of.
Do you want thousands of your potential clients to abandon your website? If not, you have to make sure that your website is responsive. By making your website responsive, you can keep Google and your interested customers happy.
The key areas to focus on while making the website responsive are:
- Responsive design
- Page speed
- Hosting speed
- Homepage
- Site navigation
- Site search
- Forms
- Conversions
- Usability
A responsive website allows your webpage to fit into the screen space of any device. With different device layout designs, you can make your website more accessible. Thus, allowing more traffic to drive in.
5. Add Your Site to Google My Business & Other Relevant Directories:
Is your real estate business listed in Google My Business? If not, get it done as soon as possible. This allows you to focus on your local citations.
Therefore, the more website your business is listed on, the better it gets. People will get your name, address, phone number, website link, and a lot more from there. That’s why you must have been list on sites like Google My Business and similar other sites, like:
- Realtor.com
- Yahoo Homes
- RedFin
- HomeSnap
- Neighborhood Scout
- Zoocasa
- Local.com
- Yelp
- Yellow Pages
- Manta
- Better Business Bureau
- Merchant Circle
- Angie’s List
- CitySearch
- Whitepages
However, with each of the directories, you have to complete your profile as much as you can. In addition to that, you can spice it up with photos, videos, and other relevant content. This will help in better engagements and ranking higher.
Just like you, many real estate agents are using these platforms to boost their lead generation. Therefore, get registered and begin your game.
6. Get More Social:
Haven’t used social media for promotion? Really? Why not?
Businesses use social media platforms for many reasons, like:
- More exposure
- Better connection with the targeted customers
- Build trust and brand awareness
- Drive more traffic to your landing page
- Better lead generation
- Better conversion rate
Social media is a must for businesses nowadays. Even real estate businesses are not falling behind in the race of using them. They are using these platforms to increase their online presence.
Are you wondering which social media platform to use? Well, there are a couple of media, namely Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. You can use any of them or all.
7. Publish Useful and Relevant Content on Your Blog Section:
Don’t you have a blog section on your website? Why don’t you utilize it?
Even small businesses use their blogs to generate traffic on their website, so why can’t you? You can create useful and relevant blogs for your targeting customers. This means your blogs need to be informative enough to drive in potential customers.
Informative articles can be posts about the housing neighborhood, like:
- Walkability
- Cost of living
- Social life
- Schools
- Crime
- Restaurants
You can also create visual content through images, video tours, and visual tours and live to stream. In addition to that, you can describe the pros and cons of living in these housing neighborhoods. Moreover, you can provide conversational videos of interviewing the local citizens. This will provide a unique perspective for homebuyers to consider.
8. Create Video Content:
Content is an awesome marketing tool. But video content is on a level higher. People prefer watching vlogs to reading blogs. That’s why you should prefer investing in creating and optimizing video content.
Other than the options mentioned in the above point, you can consider the following points as well:
- Create a YouTube channel and optimize it.
- Continuously upload videos.
- Share/upload your videos to your website and social media page.
- Perform live streaming on Facebook and YouTube to engage more audience.
In addition to that, you can create videos on an open house, Q&A live streaming, Q&A videos, and any relevant idea you can come up with. Just creating the videos won’t generate leads for you. You have to spend time optimizing the video content as well.
9. Use Structured Data Markup:
Do you know about structured data markup?
Structured data markup or schema lets search engines like Google know more about the content on any page. That’s the reason why so many real estate businesses use it:
- RealEstateAgent
- Offer
- Product
- Place
- RentAction
- Residence
- PostalAddress
- SearchResultsPage
- WebPage
Which one of the above to use depends on your site structure.
If you are confused about which one to use, you can get some consultation with an SEO professional. This way you will know how you can boost your real estate SEO.
10. Try to Earn Featured Snippets:
Do you know featured snippets can be a game-changer for your website? Featured snippets will let your website remain at the top of the SERPs. They can:
- Increase traffic.
- Attract users with your offers.
- Improve the search engine ranking.
- Increase the conversion rate.
However, earning them can be quite a task. Only a few businesses can have them in the local search.
