As a small business owner you are the cashier, inventory, marketer, advertiser, and every other aspect of your business – you probably feel as though you do not have time for market research.
However, market research is a crucial part of marketing that will help you grow exponentially if you put the effort in.
So how can you as a small business owner go about doing market research?
Large companies spend millions of dollars and hours on research so that they can better serve their customers, but small businesses do not have that kind of time and money. That’s okay! Let’s scale market research down to viable options that can still have a huge impact on your bottom line.
Asking For Feedback
Although it might not seem like market research, asking for feedback is a great way to better understand and “research” how customers are feeling about your business. This can be done by sending an email or text message with a link to leave a comment, or as simply as asking a customer how their experience was as they check out. Either way, the important piece to this information is actually using this data.
For example: You own a record store and you organize your records by genre. You have had multiple customers tell you while checking out that they had trouble finding music from a specific decade. You might want to start organizing records by decade as well.
Website Analytics
Your website’s analytics may look complicated and scary – but if you take the time to learn and understand what it is telling you then you will have a gold mine of market data to help you improve your small business. Important data includes: most viewed page, how much time someone spends on a specific page, and more.
Forms & Surveys
Guest forms and surveys are a great way to gauge how your customers are feeling about your business overall, or a niche section if you want to focus on it. Again, the most important part about collecting this data is actually looking through the information and making informed changes and decisions BASED on this data.
If you are looking for more real life examples of how a small business can conduct market research, check out this episode of the S.O.B. Marketing podcast! You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch the YouTube video below.
Did you find this content useful? Feel free to share your thoughts with me, I can be reached at vivian@theseasonedmarketer.com or just leave me a comment below!
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