All the usual ways of market research are important. But here is a little known secret for how to market research.  You can set up an internet site that solicits people to take surveys and pays them a small sum. The great thing about this is that market research may be only one of the benefits!  You can pay people to take surveys and get the market research you need, but you can also sell market research to other businesses. In addition, you can set up all sorts of affiliate programs where if people try three products they can get a forth for free.  Or, you can have lots of affiliate ads on the website where your survey is! It’s all a numbers game, so even though you are paying a small sum for the people to take surveys, you will earn it back because a certain percentage of people will click on affiliate ads on your survey page and this will generate revenue for you.  It is the best kept secret for how to market research for free!

Another secret for how to market research is to pose as a customer to find out more about the inner workings of competing businesses.  They may not want to give you much information if you just ask, but as a customer, you can find out a lot about a business.  It is not dishonest if you actually buy something!  Every business I know has a library of samples of competing products in their pantry.  You can find out a lot about a company’s customer service, prices, and business structure. As a customer, you can also establish friendly relations and ask questions about the beginnings of the business.  It is important to know the market when you are about to start a business, so use any and all means at your disposal!

If you love to research but you don’t know how to market research, this article will point you in the right direction.  The age of the internet is your time!  Finally, there are many places on the internet where you can put up a page or a blog about anything you want, and you can make money by posting ads on the page, or doing affiliate marketing.  So, if you are a research buff, the next time you are in the market for a new washer and dryer, or a used sail boat, and you do what you naturally do by making spreadsheets and comparison charts, you can post it and make money!  Here is another secret for how to market research. You can get a job as a market researcher with a market research firm!

Businesses need to have business plans when they look for venture capital, and they all need to have people who love to research do the research on the market that their product will be marketing to.  If you love to research, this may be the job for you!  Yet another secret for how to market research is that if you have a great idea that you’ve done a lot of research on, you can try submitting it to places like “Invention Submission Corporation”.  You might try talking to the chamber of commerce or just googling to find out which companies may be interested in your work.  Be careful not to sell it too cheaply. Create some buzz about it by printing up nice glossy flyers and talking to several businesses about a possible joint venture. If they want to buy your data, make it sound as if you have lots of other offers and you need to carefully consider if you are willing to sell it outright or if you want a partnership.  This way, you’ll drive up the price they are willing to pay.

In Austin, I worked for a place that delivered breakfast tacos to businesses and sold to individuals at their desks.  What a great idea!  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea will import to another city, or that another city’s way of selling will import to Austin.  Several taco vendors tried to establish street carts like they have in Seattle for Lattes.  It just didn’t work, because in Austin, the parking and office buildings are set up differently and there isn’t a lot of business pedestrian traffic on the streets. People tend to park in garages that lead directly inside the office buildings.  We would set up tables in lobbies and sell breakfast tacos, but we had to get special permission to set them up from the building owners.

When you have a new business idea, you have to consider a lot of things, and you have to know how to market research your idea.  Will Seattle people like breakfast tacos?  What if they are marketed as authentic Austin Tex-Mex?  How do you find out?  You can do a trial run if it is not too expensive, but many businesses cost a lot in start up. That is the whole point of the business plan and the market research.  To find out the answers to these questions in advance, you could look at the most similar businesses.  What kinds of food items are sold in Seattle on street carts?  Are there any kinds of food sold that are brought around by vendors carrying the food on their shoulders?  Are there any breakfast foods sold in this manner? What are Seattle business people eating for breakfast?  How do the local fast food companies do for their breakfast business?  The chamber of commerce may be a good resource.  Also, you might consider putting out a survey yourself.

Studying the businesses that you’re modeling yourself after is one thing, but what if you are writing a business plan for a totally unique business that no one has tried before?  Theoretically, this could put you in a great position to capture a niche.  On the other hand, it could just as easily mean that there is no need for what you are proposing, and the business will flop.  Your business plan has to show that it will be the former and not the latter.  So you need to know how to market research when no one else has done what you want to do.  The most ideal situation is if no one has done what you want to do in your particular geographical area, but there are examples of successful businesses elsewhere that you can study.

For example, remember back when Seattle was famous for having the best coffee anywhere? A friend of mine wanted to borrow the Seattle tradition of having latte stands on every corner for business people walking to work.  She wanted to import the idea to New York City.  I think it worked!  She had an idea and her timing was perfect. She was ahead of the curve.  For her, market research would include studying the latte stands and customers in Seattle. But then, she would also have to study the market in New York.  Do people actually spend time walking on the street?  Are there other street vendors?  How do they do? What do they sell? How much coffee do New Yorkers drink? Even a great business idea won’t work if the market isn’t right. You have to find out if they want your product. Don’t be afraid to actually send out a survey and ask!  But be sure to target your survey to the right audience.

So you’ve got a business idea and you need funding. You know you will need to put together a business plan to approach banks and venture capitalists.  Libraries and the internet can provide a wealth of information on writing a business plan. One of the most important parts of the business plan is the market research.  This article will get you started with how to market research.  The most obvious thing to do is start with the yellow pages and google to see who is doing what you are doing in the area that you are marketing to. Find out what their business model is.  How much do they charge?  How much do they do in sales each year?  How did they get started? How long did it take them to break even?  Then, find out more about their customers.  What are the demographics?  What sex, age, class, and creed are they? Who are the household decision makers, who are the ones that want the product, and who are the ones that do the actual buying? For example, it may be the dad with the final decision, the mom who does the actual buying and the children who want the product.

This is all important to keep in mind.  You want to find some success stories of business who have done what you want to do, but at the same time, you want to show that there is room for you in the market.  It would be ideal if it were a barely tapped market where there was a clear need.  Demonstrating this might involve collecting data on what people are complaining about.  You might even put out a survey yourself. Other sources of information might be town hall meetings or chamber of commerce meetings.  It all depends on your market.

For 20 years I’ve worked for a market research firm, and my market research involved gathering data in localized areas.  Increasingly with the world wide web, any business is a world business. The world is the new market.  Even businesses that you think would be strictly local have a presence on the web.  An example of this would be restaurants.  For most restaurants, it is very unlikely that someone will fly from Japan to San Diego to try the latest lasagna.  But in this day in age, it behooves any business, including restaurants, to have a social networking presence on the web.  This gets their name out, allows people to interact on line, and order on line.  A side effect of this online presence is that they get to present their unique style and vision to the world, even if they can’t always present their flavor. Oftentimes this does lead to tourist interest and the sales of cookbooks and franchises.

My market research career now requires that I find out what is going on all over the world on the web.  What kinds of websites are other people creating?  Who is clicking in? Who is on top with Google?  What percentage of business is coming from on line marketing and what percentage is coming from yellow pages, local marketing, repeat business and word of mouth?  Increasingly, social media marketing is taking the internet by storm, so we’ve had to add this as a major category when we consider source of business and effective marketing strategy.  One way in which I have enjoyed the way that this has impacted my market research career is that I can now work from home.  Almost all of my work can be done on line. Even local research can be done on line rather than going to the library.  The firm that I work for eventually decided that there was a great cost savings in not providing workspace for employees. I am lucky that they passed this savings on to the employees by offering a better health insurance package.

If you like thinking about marketing strategies but you don’t like getting involved in sales, you might be interested in a market research career. As a market research person, you won’t be designing marketing strategies, but you’ll be gathering the data and information that will inform the marketing strategies that your company uses. You’ll be exploring many different markets and finding out how other companies price and market their products successfully. With a market research career, you will also be exploring demographics and community economics. You’ll be able to be in dialogue with the folks who design the marketing strategies, and give them useful feedback about what has worked and not worked for other businesses. You are the reality check that grounds brainstormed ideas by checking them against the facts at hand. You will also have to like the process of research and presentation. In a sense, there is some sales involved because you may be asked to frame the data you collect to look favorable to potential investors.

Usually, a company that is hiring you to do market research will be selling their business plan to investors or just members of the team. You may be asked to make the data turn out to look like what was hoped for, but your job is ultimately to present accurate data. Every business needs certain personality types to function properly. They need brain-stormers, strategists, routine and detail people, due-diligence enthusiasts, and even nay-sayers who specialize in seeing quickly whether an idea is viable or not and why. These are the people who can see around the corner and predict what will happen. To others, this may seem like a kind of 6th sense, but it is actually just about having a lot of experience and background data that they easily match up in their minds with the proposal at hand. Which type are you? If you are always pushing for more research, or you enjoy evaluating the viability of a project, a market research career may be for you.

Are you looking for a market research career?  The first thing to do is to determine that you have made the right choice.  Do you like research? Do you like learning about business, economics and demographics?  Once you are clear that you would like a market research career, you need to decide what kind of work environment would suit you best.  Do you like to work at home?  Do you like to be part of a bustling team? Do you like to have frequent change to keep things interesting? Alternatively, do you like to be part of a long term project and really see the impact of your work over a long period of time?  These questions are important because there are many options for a market research career.  You can work from home as a free-lancer, working for one company or several.  You can advertise your services on the internet or in the yellow pages.  You can also find work with one start-up firm. If you really like to be part of a long term project and see how it grows, you have to find just the right company that is always growing and always in need of additional market research.

Market research is used for business plans at the start of a new venture, but it is also used to assist marketing experts in assessing the viability of new marketing strategies.  If you want to work for one company for a long time, you will need to find a large company that needs the services of a market researcher on a continual basis.  You can also work for a market research firm that contracts with many business. This would be good if you like to work for a company, and with people on a team, but you also like constant change to keep you stimulated.  You will be working with many different projects and exploring many different industries.

A market research career can be exciting for someone who likes to do research and enjoys finding out what is going on in a community or a specific industry.  People who have a market research career work for one company or contract for several companies to do market research. Sometimes people work with firms that specialize in market research.  A market research career can be a lot of fun because you get to dive deep into one industry and see who is doing what, how much profit there is to be made, what is working and what is not, and you get to try to asses if there is room in the market for another company to be profitable.  One time I applied for a grant to start a singing telegram business.  The market research involved in that was to find out where the nearest singing telegram businesses were.

Since there were none in the area, I found and contacted other entertainers, like magicians and clowns, and asked them how much they charged and how much business they got.  They all told me that they couldn’t keep up with the business.  This impressed the people to whom I was applying for a grant, and they gave it to me!  Many people feel that if they don’t need investment capital that they don’t need to put together a business plan.  It may seem like a time-consuming exercise with little benefit.  But the market research portion of a business plan can give the business person many new ideas and perspectives to help them be successful in their chosen business.  When you have a market research career, you are helping entrepreneurs with this portion of their business plan.  This is a great service because many entrepreneurs are creative people who don’t have the kind of attention span for this kind of tedious research and analysis.  A market research career can be quite an education in the world of business and may lead you to many other opportunities.

Market research involves gathering facts and statistics about the potential market that a given product or service will market to. The purpose of market research is to find out if a business plan is viable. Examples of market research are: identifying your target market; profiling the demographics of your target market and the geographical area that you are marketing to, so you see if there is a match; finding out who your competition is and how much they charge and how much they earn so that you can see if you can compete.  Finally, market research includes figuring out if the market is saturated, or if there is room for your business to compete.

Is there still an unmet need in the community?  If you are considering a market research career, you may have a love of marketing strategy. But for a market research career, you must first and foremost love the process of doing research. You must also enjoy to work with tables and graphs so that you can present your information.  Market research usually gets presented in business plans to banks and investors.  In your market research career, you will probably be encouraged by your bosses to frame the data in a way that suggests the most positive outlook for the business you are working with. You will be a very important part of the team that assembles a business plan to submit to banks and investors.  Investors need to know that the business is viable, and your market research is the main thing that tells them if it is or not.  You may want to ask your friends if they think a market research career is right for you, or seek out a mentor who has a market research career and ask them what they like and dislike about their job.