One of the most important things to do when contemplating your business, arguably the most important is determining if there's a genuine need for your product or service.
Most business owners struggle because they get the process backwards. They first create their products or services, then try to find the market for these. This isn't necessarily bad. You may discover a market for your products or services after you've created them, especially with the help of the internet but this isn't the best strategy.
A smarter approach, one that guarantees far better results is to first determine via careful research the needs of the market. Once you've done that, then proceed to create products or offer services that satisfy that need.
In this article, we are going to highlight 5 ways to identify needs by research as well as a really efficient strategy to fill these needs.
1 Surveys and Questionnaires: One of the ways you can research needs in the market is by utilising surveys/questionnaires. These are tools that allow you to gather information by inviting your prospects to answer a series of questions. If structured properly, the feedback you get via these can be very valuable in assisting you make your business decisions.
These surveys can be administered in a number of ways and the form you adopt will depend on the methods most convenient to you and your prospects. You may conduct surveys online via simple web pages which you create and send to your prospects inviting responses. You could do it in person where you physically approach and ask questions. It could be done over the phone, via text messages or chats.
2 Free Trials: Another way of identifying needs is by giving out free trials. You may introduce a small batch of products into a particular market to test the response and determine its viability. Depending on the results, you may then access if there's sufficient need for the product.
3 Observation: This form of research involves simply observing prospects. The focus of observation may vary depending on your goals. The information gathered via this research method is very reliable as they report actual behaviour and tastes.
4 Focus Groups: Focus groups involve getting a group of prospects pooled according to certain criteria in a room or similar setting. These prospects are usually fairly representative of the people who would buy your products or services.
Your research would then entail presenting this group with product concepts and listening to their opinions. You may inquire as to what improvements they want made on products they are already using.
Since focus groups obviously involve a small, concentrated number of prospects, you can employ focus groups just before administering surveys to a larger pool of prospects for better results. With the feedback you get from the groups, you can then modify your survey questions to be more specific and targeted.
Alternatively, you can employ focus groups after you've already conducted surveys as a way to further explore recurrent issues that came up during the survey.
5 Interviews: Though similar to focus groups, this is a more narrowed down approach to identifying needs. This can be used to glean individual information that would be otherwise difficult or impossible to get when observing large numbers of prospects at a time.
Once you've identified a need via any of the above research methods, how do you proceed to satisfy these needs?
An excellent strategy to do just that is by niching.
What's a niche?
A niche is a market within a market.
To demonstrate this, let's look at the guy who wants to start a consultancy offering his services as an analyst. If he simply sets up a site or blog posting content and trying to sell his services, he has a big problem.
And the problem is that he has instantly gone into direct competition with thousands of other analysts globally, across several sectors. Analysts who have been in business before him, have built huge audiences and perhaps boast more credibility.
Facing these obstacles, this analyst may find himself several months or years down the line making little or no money. It doesn't mean that there was no need for his services or that he's not good. He may in fact be an excellent analyst. It's just that by not niching himself properly, he found it difficult to distinguish himself in a very competitive market place.
Compare him to the other analyst who also intends to market his services. However before taking any steps, he does a few things:
1 First, he specialises his service. Instead of offering services as an analyst. He offers his services as an analyst specialising in developing patterns yielding 100% returns on investment in the sports sector.
This analyst has achieved several things by doing this, mainly, significantly narrowing down the competition and hence, boosting his chances of success. He's no longer competing with analysts across all fields - business, policy, security etc. He's now competing with only analysts in the sports sector.
What's more, he's not competing with every analyst in the sports sector, he's only competing with analysts who also develop patterns yielding 100% returns on investment. An analyst developing patterns yielding 20%, 50%, 80% returns can't compete against him. No. Its strictly analysts whose patterns yield 100% returns.
2 Having done this, instead of offering his services as an analyst to every investor/client in the sports sector, he further specialises the niche he can operate within. He wants a niche, however small it may be that he can get his teeth into and focus on.
So he decides to offer his services as an analyst developing patterns yielding 100% returns to only investors who are investing a certain amount - X naira. If you're investing Y naira or Z naira or any other amount apart from X naira, his services are not available to you. It must be X naira.
He modifies all his messages, content, adverts, marketing materials, sites/blogs and services information to reflect ONLY these terms and people. He doesn't work with anybody else or under any other conditions. No. Just these. He totally immerses himself in that niche.
Now, he's really in a good place to start making money relatively quickly. When an investor in the sports sector needs patterns yielding 100% returns and who's investing X naira comes across this analyst's blog/site/advert, his interest is immediately captured. His attention is gotten. The analyst is instantly distinguished. His expertise is obvious and the chances that he ends up doing business with this investor are excellent.
He signs up this client and does good business. His charges are a bit on the high side but the investor isn't bothered since he seems to be the only one available to address his specific needs.
The process of doing this means that this analyst's market is smaller than that of the analyst in the first instance. But he finds it far easier to get business and charge handsomely from his narrowed market which offsets the perceived disadvantages of a smaller marketplace.
Having identified the need via research, the more you niche, the better. You will deaden the competition, get business far easier, make more money quickly, get more referrals and hit your goals faster.
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