How to conduct marketing research for a small business.
You weren’t planning on basing your entire marketing strategy on your sixth sense because you ‘just have a feeling that it will work’, right?
Save yourself time and money by learning how to conduct marketing research for a small business like yours!
Having a fantastic product is no longer enough in our competitive market. Knowing who exactly you’re selling it to and who you’re competing against is what allows you to understand how to market it successfully.
After all, someone managed to sell seashells by the seashore. They must have had a clear USP!
How are you going to showcase yours if you don’t know what your competitors are focusing on and what your audience is actually interested in?
That’s exactly where marketing research comes into play.
Why is market research important for a small business?
Market research is important for all companies, but especially for a small business or start-up because of their financial situation.
While a huge corporation might be able to afford a few mistakes, a terribly wrong move could be the end of your business when you have a tiny budget.
Basically, market research is important for a small business because it allows you to make the most of it, saving time and money by marketing your products to the right audience and in the right way.
It also gives you the tools to stand out against your competitors, even if they can rely on a higher budget or stronger brand awareness.
In a nutshell, marketing research is important to:
- Make informed decisions rather than try different strategies and hope for the best
- Not waste time nor money going in the wrong direction
- Market your products to the right audience rather than to the masses
- Be different from your competitors and make your USP clear.
How do small businesses do marketing research?
Marketing research for a small business can be a bit different from big corporations because of the same tricky factor: budget.
You might have bumped into a few solutions that put you off due to their stellar cost, such as focus groups.
Don’t worry!
There are other ways to conduct marketing research for a small business. They certainly require some of your time, but no big upfront investments or, sometimes, no cost at all.
Overall, the two most important types of marketing research for a small business are
- Customer research
- Competitor research.
We’re going to show you the best strategies that you can use for both without breaking the bank.
How to conduct customer research for small businesses
Like Aesop said, “Please all, and you will please none.” No matter how unbelievable your new product or service is, it can’t be the perfect solution for everyone.
It’s much more effective to target a smaller but selected group of people and show them why that product is relevant to them.
That’s why inbound marketing techniques generate more than twice as many leads as generic outbound strategies!
However, in order to do this successfully, you must know exactly who your target audience is. This goes beyond their demographics!
Sure, you still need to know how old they are, their gender, and where they live, but the most important thing is to understand what they care about when it comes to your industry. Even better: what is their current pain point that your product—and your product only—can solve?
Luckily, there are several online tools that you can use to conduct customer research as a small business.
Social media
Let’s start with the obvious one. When over 3.8 billion people are actively using social media, we’d be really surprised if your audience weren’t lurking on them, too!
Discover on what platforms they’re most active (this will also help you create an effective social media strategy ) and look for relevant keywords. For example, your industry or type of product.
You can do so via hashtags, especially on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, or by joining groups populated by people who’re interested in that type of content, like on Facebook.
When you look for those hashtags, you can see what people have to say about those subjects, what type of content they engage with, and who these people are.
In groups, you can also see what questions they ask and what they care about the most.
This online forum relies on its users upvoting items that they consider worthy of value and downvoting those that don’t really matter.
Because it’s divided into lots of different and more niche topics (subreddits), you can look for those regarding your industry and type of product to see what’s popular among them.
Quora
Another useful way of conducting marketing research for a small business is to know what other people are asking about a product or topic.
What better way to do so than on a Q&A-based platform like Quora?
By typing a keyword regarding your industry or product, you’ll see what people want to know about them.
For example, if you realise that most of them aren’t really clear on a specific aspect, you might want to simplify your language when you talk about it or even include a simple explanation on your website.
Quora is also helpful to identify your audience’s pain points.
For example, if you sell reusable bottles, you might be focusing your marketing efforts around the fact that they can keep drinks ice cold for hours. However, if you find out that your audience is tired of reusable bottles that all look the same, you could start advertising your unique designs instead.
Google Trends
This free tool by Google is often used to discover what people living in a specific area are mainly talking about.
However, at this stage of your customer research, you should use Google Trends by typing keywords that are relevant to your industry or product and discovering what’s trending about them.
For example, if you sell Himalayan salt lamps, you’ll find out that people are interested in the ‘benefits of salt lamps’. Instead of focusing on how whimsical they look, you should prioritise the health benefits that they’ll bring to your target audience.
Google Analytics
If you’ve already launched your products and website, Google Analytics shows you who visits it, how they find it, and how they behave on it.
It gives you useful data regarding your audience, such as their age, gender, geographical origin, and interests.
For example, are they a bit younger than you thought? Then you might want to make your online copy friendlier and more ‘chilled’.
Knowing how they find your website can help you figure out on which social media platforms they’re most active and, when they come through search engines, what they’re actually googling.
What keywords or questions are they typing? That’s what they care about!
Finally, figuring out which pages are most popular will tell you what you should focus your marketing efforts on and, on the contrary, what still needs improving to feel more relevant to them.
Surveys
At the end of the day, the easiest way to figure out what someone wants is to… ask them. Simple as that.
While we’ve already established that focus groups can be too expensive, online surveys aren’t! With lots of free tools like SurveyMonkey, it definitely won’t be hard to create one.
If you already have a list of subscribers or some social media followers, you can ask them to take part in a quick online survey.
Ask them who they are, include a few age-ranges for them to choose from, and ask questions that tell you what they’re looking for in your products and what else could improve them. Understanding their ethos can also help you tailor your marketing strategy to them, stimulating an emotional connection.
If you’ve tried this before and didn’t get a large enough response, consider offering them an incentive, such as a small discount or a prize.
Once you’ve done your customer research and got all this information, you can analyse it and run an audit of your current strategy to see if it’s actually targeting the right people and if it’s doing it in the best way possible for them.
For example, once you’ve found out what your audience is mostly unclear about regarding your industry or products, you could answer those questions on your website or even create separate blog posts that target each of those long-tail keywords.
How to conduct competitor research for small businesses
Another essential part of marketing research for a small business regards your competitors. Chances are, there’s already someone out there selling a similar product to yours.
Knowing who these people are and how they’re marketing it will allow you to understand how you can reinforce your USP and why customers should buy from you instead.
Once you’ve got enough information thanks to the methods that we’re about to show you, you can run a SWOT analysis. This will help you figure out:
- Strengths: what are your competitors good at and known for? Why do customers love them?
- Weaknesses: what do customers complain about? What problems do they experience when buying from them?
- Opportunities: are they doing (or NOT doing) anything that could present an opportunity for your business? Is there a gap in products, services or features that you can fill with yours?
- Threats: is there anything about them or their offer that could threaten your business? Are they opening a branch closer to you? Have they got a better deal?
Now that you know what to look for, let’s show you how and where to find it.
SEO and websites
The easiest way to know who your competitors are is to look for the keywords that best describe your products and services and see who pops up on the coveted first page of Google.
Are their websites easier to navigate than yours? Have they got a better content strategy? Are they investing in niche-specific approaches like SEO for financial services?
You also want to take note of what their USP is and what they focus on the most when marketing their products.
Social media
These platforms aren’t just a goldmine of information when it comes to customer research: your competitors will be on them too!
Now that you know their names, you can find them on Facebook, Instagram or whatever social media platform is relevant to your target audience.
Analyse their posting strategy and see what type of content resonates the most with their followers. What gets the most shares, likes and comments? Is there anything that they’re forgetting about?
Amazon reviews
The best place to find out what your target audience really loves about your competitors’ products and what ruffles their feathers is the reviews section.
Find your competitors on Amazon or the platforms that they use to sell their products and check both positive and negative reviews.
If there’s a feature that your audience can’t live without, make sure you offer it too. Is there something that they hate? Show them why your product is different and solves that problem!
BuzzSumo
Your competitors might have managed to go viral with a specific piece of content. You now want a piece of the pie, right?
BuzzSumo is a dream come true. By typing a keyword, you’ll see what content (usually blog posts) got the most shares on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
This website will also show you its Reddit engagement, number of backlinks, and what they call ‘evergreen score’, which is whether it can still feel timely and relevant after 30 days.
Finally, it tells you the overall engagement generated by that blog post.
Don’t just copy them, obviously! However, knowing which of your competitors’ articles resonate the most with your target audience should give you an idea as to what you could write about on your business website.
Google Alerts
If you’re trying to stay up to date with your competitors and their products, you should set up a few Google Alerts for them.
This means that you’ll get an email with an overview of the most important pieces of content that mention them.
Google Alerts allow you to be among the first to know what your competitors are launching and changing, adding to your SWOT analysis and being able to be on top of the game.
Don’t forget that customer and competitor research shouldn’t be a one-off task. You should conduct them periodically and, especially, whenever you’re launching new products or strategies.
Overall, they can help you understand what your audience cares about and how you’re different from your competitors.
By conducting marketing research for a small business the right way, you’ll know how to convey this successfully and how to reinforce your USP. That’s how you sell seashells when you’re located by the seashore and surrounded by other seashell sellers!
Team Red can help you create a marketing strategy to reach your target audience and stand out against your competitors.