Market Research Best Practices Before a New Launch

When you’re planning to launch a new product or service, you need market research to understand its viability. How well is it going to be received by customers? Can it go toe to toe with the competition? Do market conditions allow for profit? Good market research will help you answer all these questions – and more.

Below, Najera Design and Marketing covers some best practices to follow before the launch of a product or service:

Create concrete research goals 

It’s critical you have specific research goals. They should be based on your main business goals – in this case the launch of a new product or service. What information do you need to make your new product or service successful? Is your product or service viable as is or does it need to be changed somewhat?

Understand market conditions 

Your research goals will help give you clarity on market conditions. Said conditions determine your potential success and profitability. According to The Codest, you can determine market conditions by examining 5 main factors: market size, market growth, competition, consumers, and profitability.

Know your competitors 

Almost every niche is saturated, meaning your product or service will more than likely have a great deal of competition. Furthermore, said competition will likely have set some standards, which you’ll have to meet or, preferably, exceed. It’s a good idea to research competitor products or services, profitability, activities, and how they do things.

Avoid research mistakes 

Research can be difficult to pull off. Many companies make mistakes and end up with low-quality, unreliable data. Digsite lists some of the biggest ones: recruiting too narrow or too broad an audience, insufficient fraud protection, underestimating outside influences on behavior, putting people in a situation that doesn’t give you honest answers, and overwhelming people with too many questions.

Use digital tools and automate 

You can use digital research tools for many things such as help with formulating questions, creating surveys and administering them, analyzing data, visualizing the results, and much more. Good tools will help you automate many – often boring – parts of your research. They should also help you save on research money and time.

Create or recreate your product based on your research

Once the results from your research are in, you may need to act upon your findings to make or remake your product. You can use a 3D design tool to visualize your designs or create prototypes. This tool also allows you to make changes to a model without having to redo the entire process every time. This enables you to test different versions of a design more efficiently, receive consumer feedback faster, and help you make better decisions when researching potential products. You can try the tool out to determine whether this is a good fit for your business.

Consult with a marketing pro 

As you can probably tell, research can be complicated. If you’re new to market research, you could consult with a marketing professional for assistance with user research and analysis, competition analysis, and other related subjects. Having a marketing campaign accompanying your product or service launch is also essential. A marketing professional should be able to help with that too.

Conclusion 

Keep in mind that market research takes time – typically a handful of months. Leave enough time before the launch to gather the data you need as well as to make changes to your product or service, if necessary. Also, if you don’t have a research program as a part of your marketing initiatives, you should consider setting something up – you’ll always need research data on a frequent basis.

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