My employer, a small startup, has never conducted official market research. They provide services to the academic community, but they are limited in their knowledge. To determine what our “target market segment” should be, I’d like to help in conducting more in-depth market research (e.g., “universities with at least 5000 students or 500 faculty members”, etc.).
Do you have any experience doing this at work? What is the first step? Is it safer to employ an outside firm that specializes in market research or is it preferable to handle this internally? Any guidance or resources would be greatly appreciated.
Consider your target user before your target market at first. Do you have a specified user and buyer yet? If not, start there and, depending on the segment’s size, either enlarge or narrow the section.
To figure out your target market segment, you can follow these steps:
Identify the characteristics of your ideal customer: This includes demographics, behaviors, needs, and pain points.
Conduct market research: Use surveys, focus groups, and secondary research to gather data on your target market.
Analyze your competition: See who they target and how they position themselves.
Evaluate your product or service: Determine how it solves a problem or meets a need for your target market.
Segment your market: Group similar customers together based on their characteristics and needs.
Select your target market segment: Choose the segment that best matches your product or service, and has the most potential for growth and profitability.
Define your target customer: Create a buyer persona that represents your target market segment, including their demographics, behaviors, needs, and pain points.
Test and refine: Continuously monitor and adjust your target market strategy based on feedback and market changes.
This is good, in my opinion, though I would add that at this point you might not have product-market fit. So, concentrate on providing a solution to a user’s problem so that you can determine your market from there (assuming you actually have a product people want).
Your first statement about conducting market research for your startup, if you haven’t done it yet, you can follow these steps:
Start with secondary research: Use online sources such as government reports, trade publications, and academic journals to gather information on your target market.
Identify key players: Make a list of universities and academic institutions that are your potential customers and their characteristics, such as size, location, and focus areas.
Conduct surveys: Reach out to your current customers and potential customers to gather data on their needs and preferences.
Hold focus groups: Gather a small group of customers and conduct in-depth discussions on their experiences, challenges, and pain points.
Analyze the data: Evaluate the data from your surveys and focus groups to identify common themes and patterns.
Define your target market segment: Use the data to determine your target market segment, for example, “universities with at least 5000 students or 500 faculty members.”
Create a buyer persona: Develop a detailed profile of your target customer, including their demographics, behaviors, needs, and pain points.
Test and refine: Continuously monitor and adjust your target market strategy based on feedback and market changes.
It’s important to note that market research is an ongoing process, and it’s important to regularly collect and analyze data to ensure that your target market segment remains relevant.
Thank you so much @AnushkaGarg and @MichaelYoffe for taking the time to give such a detailed reply. It was really helpful learning about conducting market research. But my main concern was as the title of the thread suggests “identifying my target market segment”. If you could please share your experience and let me know how can I do this?
I was coming to that point in my following post. To figure out your target market segment, you can start with the following steps:
Identify the characteristics of your ideal customer: This includes demographics, behaviors, needs, and pain points.
Conduct market research: Use surveys, focus groups, and secondary research to gather data on your target market.
Analyze your competition: See who they target and how they position themselves.
Evaluate your product or service: Determine how it solves a problem or meets a need for your target market.
Segment your market: Group similar customers together based on their characteristics and needs.
Select your target market segment: Choose the segment that best matches your product or service and has the most potential for growth and profitability.
Define your target customer: Create a buyer persona that represents your target market segment, including their demographics, behaviors, needs, and pain points.
Test and refine: Continuously monitor and adjust your target market strategy based on feedback and market changes.
Market research and segmentation wonderfully explained by @MichaelYoffe. Really appreciate. As for whether to conduct the market research in-house or hire an external company, it depends on your resources and expertise. If you have the skills and expertise to conduct the research in-house, it can be cost-effective. However, if you don’t have the resources or expertise, hiring an external company that specializes in market research can provide more reliable and comprehensive results.
There are several resources available to help you with your market research, including online market research tools such as Google Trends, and books on market research and customer segmentation, such as “Marketing Research: An Applied Orientation” by Naresh K. Malhotra. Additionally, organizations such as the Market Research Association and the American Marketing Association offer resources, events, and training on market research and customer segmentation.
Begin by conducting user researcher research, i.e. Discovery. Try to identify any shared characteristics among users based on section. Investigate the existence of those common segment identifiers to see whether they are necessary or merely accidental.
I would begin with client interviews and then design a survey using the learnings.
I believe that the academic community is quite unique in terms of users and their tastes, therefore unless you are working with a team that has expertise (and success) with this audience, I would not recommend hiring an outside company to handle this if you already have the necessary capabilities in-house.
Thanks! They would need to hire someone new because they don’t have the experience. But is a full-time staff really necessary for this? It seems like something you wouldn’t constantly update.
Although they have success and experience, there hasn’t really been a defined strategy or target market. Most of it was pure luck. They want to improve at this but are unsure of where to start.
I’d guess that would depend on how big the organization is. Knowing your target audience is quite important, but if your organization has only 20 members, that position requires quite a bit of specialization.
ETA: You wouldn’t need to update this constantly, but a good UX person’s importance can’t be overstated.
It is not necessary to hire a full-time employee for market research, especially if you only need to conduct research periodically. You have several options for conducting market research, including:
Freelancers: You can hire a freelancer with market research experience to conduct a specific project. This can be a cost-effective solution and you can find freelancers on platforms such as Upwork or Freelancer.
Market research agencies: You can also work with a market research agency that specializes in providing research services to businesses. This can be a more comprehensive solution and the agency can provide expertise and resources that you may not have in-house.
Interns or students: You can also consider hiring an intern or student to conduct the research as part of their academic program. This can be a cost-effective solution and a great opportunity for the intern or student to gain practical experience.
It is important to keep in mind that market research is an ongoing process, and it may be necessary to periodically update your target market segment based on changing market conditions and customer needs. Therefore, it’s essential to plan for the ongoing collection and analysis of data to ensure that your target market segment remains relevant.
You can understand market research in different ways. We have done market research which includes:
User research - understanding their pain points
Competitor research
Filed research - for example our product Anania is an AI powered self-service analytics tool. We should know about AI field, trends, etc, we should know about the market size of self-service analytics tool.
Additionally you information on indirect fields and markets, in our case BI tools.
You don’t need to hire an additional person to do the research. Usually this is done by product manager (called discovery phase), by founders or marketing guys.
I’ve done it multiple times with various budget plans and situations. I once worked for a well-funded company where we had the resources and expertise to carry out independent research. But even then, we would hire outside support if we needed to do a really sizable poll.
The antithesis of that is a company I work for where the resources are lacking, there aren’t enough of us with the necessary expertise, and it would be beneficial for evangelization to have an outside organisation conduct or oversee the study.
To begin testing hypotheses, you can sample various people from various segments. You might discover that there are contrasts or parallels. Following that, you proceed by improving and iterating your hypothesis, defining market groups, and
Try to find out about more about one user on a micro level - through user interviews or surveys. Then try to do for a few more users. By talking to them, you will get a hold of who are the users.
I’m sure you will also have some aggregate data on macro level like age group of who visit app/website and more demographics.
Compare them and identify the top 3-5 user types. Then extrapolate to find out how many are there like that (with some external data). There goes your target segment and size.