‘What is the purpose of market research in business?’ may be a question you’ve heard thrown around by new entrepreneurs. Market insights are important in understanding where your new business stands in the commercial marketplace. No matter what type of business you’re running – it’s useful to know your main competitors and where you can find your main client base.
In this article, we’ll explore five reasons your new business needs market research and market insights, where they come from, and how you can use them to build an intuitive business plan for your enterprise.
What Are Market Insights?
Market insights are the result of deep market data analysis. It explores relevant and actionable data that can be used to help grow a business in its industry market. It is about looking at the business and its target audience to discover the best ways to get a product or service to the people who want it. There are lots of types of market research specific to the industry. For example, if you own a drug company, you would use specialised biopharma market insights to identify the right places and people to get your specific medical service.
Market insights are not just data. It’s a common misconception that they are simply sales numbers used to see how a product sells. Instead, they are a much deeper combination of field research and customer intelligence. While sales data has the potential to become intelligence, more is needed on its own to attract new clients.
Reason 1: They Reveal Your Target Customer Base
Understanding your product or service market is the most obvious and important part of market intelligence. It will be incredibly difficult to structure any marketing strategy if you know your target audience and where to reach them.
Getting actionable data on your potential customers helps you to understand what they need and get it to them. Your marketing team will be able to increase your reach and profits by ensuring that campaigns are only targeted towards relevant audiences.
Reason 2: They Help You Look To The Future
Market insights are forward-thinking – it’s not just about what you can do now but also what you can do in the future. They can help you to see which areas require a certain product. For example, if you have a drug company, you can use biopharma market intelligence to see where there are high numbers of patients looking for a specific treatment and use this knowledge to launch your drug in a place where there will be sustainable, long-term sales results.
Reason 3: They Prevent New Products From Failing
New products are always a risk to launch – even if you have a fantastic idea, they don’t always succeed as they don’t always manage to reach the right customer base. There are countless examples of products that had to be launched, re-launched and launched again to accumulate the right customer base.
Market intelligence can stop this from happening to your business by ensuring that you find your target demographic before launching your product. They help you create a buzz surrounding it and even get people to anticipate its release. Entering the market is all about relativity – you need to have people ready and waiting to purchase your new product.
Reason 4: They Help Save Money On Marketing Campaigns
Though market insights come with an upfront cost, they save money in the long run. They prevent marketing campaigns from failing and help you to sell your product to those who want it at a faster rate. Market intelligence can also reveal if there needs to be an audience for your product.
In this case, they can stop you from wasting thousands on marketing campaigns that might fail to prompt you to rethink your enterprise and optimise it for the audience you want to reach. It is better to spend money on market research before launching your product to define whether there is a place in the market; then, it is best to begin marketing it to people who aren’t interested.
Reason 5: They Offer You An Insight Into Your Competition
Competition is fierce these days, and most markets are saturated with new products and ideas. To help your business stand out, it’s useful to know what convinces your target audiences to purchase competitors’ products to identify how you can make yours stand out as the better option. Market research can help you to see where your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses lie, helping you to optimise your marketing structures.
Top Tip: Be Specific
When sourcing a company to conduct market research, the more specific you get, the better results you’ll yield. For example, if you run a drug company, it’ll be best to use a biopharma intelligence agency for your research. If you’re launching the software, go with a technology agency for detailed research.
Ready To Launch Your New Business?
We hope that we’ve been able to answer your question, ‘what is the purpose of market research in business?’ you have some awareness of the importance and usefulness of market intelligence when launching a product. We wish you the best of luck with your new enterprise!