It’s all too common for companies to invest heavily in product development yet neglect to focus on market trends and how to capitalise on them. Entrepreneurs who do capitalise on trends in market strategy gain more customers and sustainable sales increases.
If you own a start-up, it’s crucial to make choices backed up by hard data. Increasing your growth rate is possible when you do your research and ensure that your ideas are most likely to reach a receptive market. While product innovation can make you a strong competitor, combining innovation with strong market strategies will help you give customers the type of customer experience that results in loyalty and a growing customer base.
Here are four crucial steps for conducting market research that will help you grow your start-up:
1. Collect Actionable User Data
What is actionable user data? It’s user feedback that can guide your business decisions. Collect user data using survey tools such as Qualaroo and Yotpo. Simple questionnaires can yield vital insight into the things that matter most to your customers. Surveys typically have low response rates. You can incentivise them, however, by offering limited giveaways for willing participants.
Besides simply collecting user data, you will need to evaluate the information. Sort data into the top three relevant categories of answers. For example, users might desire convenience, affordability and mobile accessibility. You could find that small changes in product development are all you need to start seeing profitable results.
2. Keep An Eye On Competitors’ Strategies
Another excellent strategy for increasing your company’s growth rate is competitor listening. When you see what customers love about competitors, you can incorporate similar functionality into your own product, and you can also learn from (and improve on) competitors’ failings.
Digital tools now available let you track whenever competitors change their websites – this will help you keep abreast of new trends.
3. Find Helpful Customer Profiles
If you have no idea of who would be the ideal match for your product, it’s time to gather together some customer profiles or personas. Truly understanding customers’ concerns, pain points and desires will enable you to innovate and expand. Through mapping customer feedback data, you can form customer personas around topics such as:
- What customers fear and what challenges they need products to solve
- What gives them feelings of success
- What their goals, inspirations and influences are
- The kind of company and private cultures they participate in
- How customers’ behaviours have changed and why
Share any of these findings with your product development team and make full use of these findings to examine how your product could better ease pain while fulfilling desires.
Also remember to validate each result and check back with the same customer segments you used to glean insights once your product or service is at a later iteration. Making sure feedback confirms the effectiveness and desirability of your product ensures that you’re on the right path to a successful result.
4. Launch Your Start-Up’s Product Or Service And Track Developments
Once you’ve got enough data to make strategic decisions based on real market response, you can launch. Keep tracking what customers are saying throughout the entire process. This will enable you to adapt and adjust to changing customer needs and demands.
Keep an eye on your conversion rates and measure these against industry norms. This is the percentage of people who opt-in for your product or service after reaching your start-ups landing page. Using verifiable data to make decisions will help you make the choices that will yield the best conversion rates. Optimising everything from copy to user experience according to real-world market sentiment will help you accelerate growth.
Contact us to find out how we can help accelerate your growth for you.