Proper market analysis is key to business success, especially for newly opened companies. All marketing initiatives, business strategies, and tactics derive from the results of market research and the insights gained.

What is Market Research?

Market research involves collecting and analyzing information about your niche: the target audience, main competitors, the supply-demand ratio, customer needs, and other market-related factors.

Market Research Stages

The complex and extensive process of market research includes the following stages:

• Competitor analysis
• SWOT analysis
• Target audience and segmentation
• Product or service research
• Pricing strategy analysis

Depending on the depth of study, there are two types of market research: primary and secondary.

Primary Market Research is the collection of “first-hand” information about customers and the industry. It is essential to segment the market and identify buyer personas. Primary market research is divided into:

• General “reconnaissance” – collecting general market information without focusing on specific segments.
• Specific primary research – often follows general intelligence and involves studying specific segments or conducting surveys with a narrow audience to solve particular problems.

Secondary Market Research involves analyzing existing data and facts to draw conclusions about trends, statistics, and sales data. It is especially useful for competitor research and includes:

• Public sources – information available to everyone and published by reliable sources (e.g., government, statistical centers).
• Commercial sources – information published by well-known statistical sources, niche-specific websites, and authoritative pages.
• Internal sources – information already available to the customer, such as sales revenue, the number of returning customers, and other relevant data.

After collecting and analyzing this information, the next steps include:

• Development of Marketing Strategy: Defining KPIs
• Planning: Selecting tools, setting the campaign timeline, budgeting, and forecasting results
• Reporting: Analyzing the effectiveness of the tools used and evaluating forecasted KPIs