Performing Market Research On A Budget

Conducting market research can give you better insight into your market, and help you create new products, features, promotions and pricing aimed at fulfilling their needs.

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Host 1:                                  00:00                     Podcasting from southern California, this is On The Net, your go-to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there—brought to you by Lunarpages.  We’ll help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era.  From web hosting to ecommerce to security and protection, if it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got it covered. Let’s get started.

Host 2:                                  00:31                     Hello everyone. Welcome to On The Net, where it’s all about your online presence.  Thanks for joining us! This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online business of every shape and size.  Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a web site, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions.  To start and run a successful business, you really need to know the marketplace you operate in and what your competitors are doing. If you don’t have psychic powers to read your customer’s minds, then you do have to fall back on market research to learn what your potential and existing audience wants, and what you can do to earn their trust and business. Whether you realize it or not, you are in all likelihood continually running market research informally. Every time you talk to a customer about what they want or discuss business with a supplier,

Host 2:                                  01:22                     you are in fact conducting market research. But you also need more formal market research to keep your business growing and also to retain loyal customers. Conducting market research can give you better insight into your market, and help you create new products, features, promotions and pricing aimed at fulfilling their needs. Proper market research should guide your business’s marketing plan and determine the essential details of each variable. We are not talking of complicated statistical models, massive surveys and international focus groups run by market research firms or big budgets here. Even though market research can seem intimidating and hard to pull off on a small business budget there are lots of creative research tactics in every marketer’s toolkit from research surveys and questionnaires to focus groups, phone interviews, competitive intelligence, and structured interviews. But first you must plan your research goals so that you know the kind of data you need to collect and also to find out what your future marketing materials should be.

Host 2:                                  02:21                     Then you need to determine the type of market research method you want to focus on. There are two broad types of market research- primary and secondary. Let’s look deeper into primary research. Primary or original research involves conducting research by yourself or someone contracted by you...