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Researching Your Target Market
In this month's Insights newsletter we explain the value of research and the importance of defining your target market. Research is the foundation of our Marketing of Innovation program and is the first step to gaining a clear and accurate perspective of your market situation. This issue will outline how to research industry trends and customer needs, analyze the competitive landscape and evaluate all communications options available.
Understanding industry trends - Defining and determining the current state of your market is a crucial first step in the research process. You can do this by reviewing all external research available to your company (such as publications, reports and white papers), conducting extensive online research, and interviewing key industry thought leaders via telephone or email. What are people talking about? What technology is being developed? What new services are going to be important to offer in the future? These questions will help you learn about market size and value, trends in product innovations, the nature of the industry value chain, and how the industry structure is evolving.
Identifying customer needs - Your past and current clients, even lost contracts, are excellent sources for researching the key needs of prospects. Qualitative data gained from one-to-one interviews over the telephone or in person can offer incredibly rich feedback. Focus groups also can be helpful in discovering how potential customers view a certain product or idea. Quantitative research, such as online surveys, provides a broad view of the market, and requires less time than the qualitative methods discussed above. These two tactics should be used in tandem to provide the most insight into your target market.
Analyzing the competition - An understanding of your competitors, their marketing techniques, and factors that influence their successes and failures is imperative to determining where your product or service fits in the market. It also will help define your competitive advantage. The first step to a comprehensive analysis is deciding which competitors to focus on. Research these competitors to understand their value proposition and communications tactics, and then distill from these some key factors for competitive success. After you've researched your competitors, compare customer key needs with the solution that you and your competitors provide. This will help you determine the areas where your products and services will best meet the needs of your customers. Competitive analysis should be an ongoing, updated activity within your marketing program.
Evaluating communications options - How do customers go about finding products and services such as yours? Researching and comparing all possible communication channels will help you identify the most viable methods of customer interaction for your company. To gain an understanding of the communications structure within your industry, research these channels: interest groups, events, media, industry experts and channel partners.
The Marketing of Innovation model places a strong emphasis on the research module. By implementing the methods discussed above, you will have a better understanding of the market and can define the ways to effectively reach customers. Next month, we will discuss how to use your research to define an effective marketing strategy.
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