How to Conduct Marketing research for your SME
1. Identify your target audience
Before conducting any marketing research, it's important to identify your target SME audience. Think about who your ideal customer is and what their needs and pain points are.
Identifying a target audience can sometimes be tricky and it may require a couple of revisions. However, even if you identify the wrong target market the first time. You are still getting valuable information and feedback. Identifying that you have the wrong customer in an interview will stop you from wasting your valuable time and money developing a product that someone may not actually want.
Identifying your target market is one of the most important steps in product development. Finding your target audience and understanding their problems will enable you to tailor your product to meet their needs. This can generate significant interest and demand for your product.
Once you have identified your target audience and started conducting interviews, you need to develop specific questions for customers.
2. Prepare your questions
When preparing your questions, keep your customers in mind and focus on how they will answer. This will help you tailor your questions to get the most valuable feedback. Remember, we don't want to ask if the product is a good idea. Instead, we want to focus on finding out what their pain points are with the "x" problem.
Start by creating a list of open-ended question's. From my experience, having 5-7 questions usually works well. Then focus on asking follow up questions based on what your customer says.
Remember, questions are key! They are one of the most important factors in guiding your decisions for the future. When planning your questions, set goals for your interviews to ensure that you focus on questions centered around your customers. This will help you understand what is going on in their lives and what is important to them.
3. Conduct the interview
When conducting the interview, be respectful of your customer's time and make them feel comfortable. Start with some icebreaker questions to help put them at ease.
Here are some good icebreaker questions to start a customer interview:
Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
What made you decide to participate in this interview?
What are some of your favorite hobbies or interests?
Then move on to your prepared questions. Be sure to listen carefully to their responses and follow up with additional questions if necessary.
4. Analyse the results
After conducting the interviews, analyse the results and look for patterns or common themes. This will help you identify areas where your product or service can be improved.
Focus on making Nat necessary changes to your product or service based on this information.
5. The follow-up interview
After iterating on your product or service based on the insights gained from the initial round of customer interviews, it's important to go back to your target audience and conduct follow-up interviews. These interviews allow you to test and validate the changes you've made and gather further feedback.
By conducting follow-up interviews, you can ensure that your product or service is meeting the needs of your target audience. It also shows your customers that you value their feedback and are committed to improving your offering.
When conducting follow-up interviews, it's important to focus on the changes you've made to your product or service and ask specific questions related to those changes. This will help you gain valuable insights into whether the changes have been effective and how they can be further improved.
By following these steps, you can conduct effective customer interviews that will help you create a product or service that truly meets the needs of your target audience.
Final words 👋
So, before you dive headfirst into your new business idea, take the time to conduct proper Marketing research and gather unbiased feedback for your SME.
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