How SMEs can begin the journey into Market Research in 3 Simple Steps

Chances are you went in blind! You had a great business idea that was kissed by favorable markets and right timing and today you count yourself a successful enterprenuer with several years of business experience. Congratulations are in order, building a bsuiness is not a small accomplishment by any account.

What got you here may not get you where you want to go. Other competitiors have since mushroomed and muscled their way into your market share. You sense its time to do things different; Do more,....... inject some X Factor into your business.

Market research gives you the advantage of both internal and external perspectives about where your business is at, where it can potentially grow to and what threats may steal away the sales and profitability.

Its never too late to begin market research.Without knowing it or intending to, many SMEs have already accquired alot of business data that can be effective in helping give some primary insights into business strategy.

Here are a few steps that will help you get started on market research and transition your business from lucky happenstance into intelligence driven sustianble growth.

Identify your business need(s). Isolating a business need is the basis for framing a research question. From one business need you may be able to identify several criticl questions some of which youmay have ready answers and some of which may bestbe served as a question for further interrogation. This process helps feed the development of a research brief that can be shared with MR professionals or which you can begin to seek data on from your internal resources.

Audit your data sources: Data sources could be anything from your bank statements to records of customer contacts. The challenge here becomes many businesses have mutliple data sources scattered throughout different business operations. There may be need to seek the services of data professionals to clean, arrange and organize databases into formats that can be mined for insights.

Compile your research brief: With better understanding of what your bsuiness needs are and what data you have at hand, you can significantly reduce your market research costs and lead time into engagement with MR vendors as data accquisition can be a major cost factor.

Share your brief with MR service providers: With a better view of what your research needs are you are in a position to have more constructive engagements with market research service vendors. A good firm should be able to discuss your bsuiness needs and aritculate the right methodologies to capture and incorporate data from multiple sources.

Stay tuned for the next blog on How to Contract Market Research Services......follow us @Frontier Consulting KE