Researching Your Market

I'm a big fan of market research, anyone starting any type of business needs to know what they are getting themselves into! That's not to say market research will tell you everything you need to know but what it will do is give you some idea of what you can expect.

What type of market research you do really depends on the type of business you are going to be starting. For instance, I was recently helping a guy who was setting up his own plastering business, he'd been a plasterer for 20 odd years and knew everything there was to know about the trade. He'd recently been made redundant and decided to follow his life long dream of working for himself. This guy knew who his customers were, he'd been dealing with these people for over 20 years, it really was a no brainer and understandably he didn't see the point of market research. So he knew who his customers were but he didn't know why other people weren't his customers.

What I asked him to try was simple; list 10 business that weren't his customers and get in touch with them to see if they'd consider using his services. On the list were:

• Estate Agents
• Local Authorities
• Shopping Centres
• Construction Firms
  
• Other Contractors

What we found was that 6 of the 10 were interested in using the service, and 3 of those wanted work doing immediately. The potential was immediately obvious as one the businesses, an estate agency had a lot of landlords it represented and these people often needed RELIABLE tradesmen to fix up their properties. Just by making one phone call my client got a client with massive potential!

There are three main questions you need to ask when doing market research:

• Will you buy my product / service?
• How often will you buy it?
• How much will you spend?

To get an idea of your market these are the things you really need to know. It's not rocket science and can often be a good excuse to make those phone calls to generate leads. So get out there and start asking questions, you never know what you might find out.