Whether you are starting a new product and want to estimate demand or changing an existing product and want to find out acceptance in the market for this product, a market survey is the best way forward.
You may have a great idea for a product or service, but before you go any further, first make sure there’s a market for it.
Market surveys collect data about a target market such as pricing trends, customer requirements, competitor analysis, and other details.
Most marketing managers depend on market surveys to collect information that would catalyze the market research process. Also, the feedback received from these surveys can be contributory to product marketing and feature enhancement.
In this article, we explore the concept of a market survey and enlist the steps you need to take to conduct a market survey for your product/business.
Whether you are starting a new product and want to estimate demand or changing an existing product and want to find out acceptance in the market for this product, a market survey is the best way forward.
Today, we live in a consumer-driven world, and businesses face cut-throat competition to survive and succeed in the market.
A company cannot succeed without understanding the consumer’s needs and behavior, so it relies on intensive backend market research. Market research not only tells a company what to produce, but it also tells how to present the product to the consumer. Work doesn’t end here. Once the product is out in the market, market research is conducted to gather information about customer feedback so that the company can make necessary changes to increase its reach.
If you’re new to market research, this guide will provide a blueprint for conducting a thorough study of your market, target audience, competition, and more.
A company cannot succeed without understanding the consumer’s needs and behavior, so it relies on intensive backend market research
Lack of funding is attributed to be one of the common reasons behind failed businesses.
You just came up with a great new business idea – great! But is a great idea enough for a successful business?
If that’s what you believe in, it’s time for a reality check, my friend.
Coming up with a great idea is the first step to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Now you need to work on turning that idea into a reality by funding it, taking it to market, and letting your business change the world. According to a recent study, over 94% of new businesses fail during the first year of operation. Lack of funding is attributed to be one of the common reasons because money is the bloodline of any business.
The Indian government has launched the following schemes to promote and support entrepreneurs in their startup journey.
Introduction
For entrepreneurs, the easy availability of capital is an important factor that affects the enterprise’s growth. Many business ideas do not come into existence because of a lack of working capital. To curb this situation, the Government of India has launched several schemes for funding startups. Through these schemes, the government provides financial assistance to entrepreneurs.
About Startup Funding
Funding refers to the money required to start and run a business. It is a financial investment in a company for product development, manufacturing, expansion, sales and marketing, office spaces, and inventory. Instead of raising funds from third parties, some startup founders go for bootstrapping (to prevent debts and equity dilution). However, most startups raise funding, especially as they grow larger and scale their operations. A startup here means a company built to grow fast, and a high-growth company almost always needs to burn capital to sustain its growth before achieving profitability.
India is gradually on its mission to build a robust startup ecosystem by launching government schemes for funding Startups.
Diversifying your sources of financing will allow your startup to meet your specific needs.
Introduction
To grow a startup business, it is inevitable that you will need funding. Launching any business requires capital investment. There’s a need to purchase equipment, rent offices, hire staff, and, most importantly, grow. So unless you’re independently wealthy, you will require outside capital to do these things.
If you’re wondering how to raise money for a business, you’ve come to the right place. In this guide to startup funding, we’ve compiled a list of some business fundraising channels you can take advantage of.
About Funding
Funding refers to the money required to start and run a business. It is a financial investment in a company for product development, manufacturing, expansion, sales and marketing, office spaces, and inventory.
Without startup funding, the vast majority of startups will die. A startup here means a company that is built to grow fast, and a high-growth company almost always needs to burn capital to sustain its growth before achieving profitability. There are, of course, exceptions who successfully bootstrap (self-fund) themselves.
Acquiring funds for a startup can be done with the help of an eight-step funding process.
The information age has introduced a rapid increase in the number of startup companies. The brains behind these startups are either young graduates from schools and colleges or someone who left their corporate job to pursue their dream (well, majorly). Whoever it may be, funding a startup is a difficult task. Many people try to fund their ideas themselves, while others rely on external funding to satisfy their needs.
Acquiring funds for a startup can be done with the help of an eight-step funding process which involves different stages of startup funding. These startup funding stages are:
While a good business idea will have an impact on all phases of a company’s development, other entrepreneurial efforts also play a role in shaping the future.
Everything begins as an idea. Whether you’re in business, school, jail, or debt, that’s how it all gets rolling. But what is the true significance of an idea? An idea is a thought or collection of thoughts generated in the mind. Ideas often form during brainstorming sessions or through discussions.
All world-changing events and great success stories can be traced back to a single idea. But don’t fall into the belief that having a great idea is all you need. If you have a great idea, then you’ve completed the first step of becoming a successful entrepreneur. Now you need to work on turning that idea into a reality by taking it to market and letting your business change the world.
A business idea is a starting point for any current or future entrepreneur. It is necessary because it marks the start of a new life – the life of a business and an entrepreneur.
While a good business idea will have an impact on all phases of a company’s development, other entrepreneurial efforts also play a role in shaping the future.
This post covers all the necessary steps for an entrepreneur to take an idea to the market.
A business idea impacts the overall development of the company.
The two quickest and most common ways entrepreneurs use to determine the market size are the top-down and the bottom-up approaches.
One of the most important things to know before you even think about turning an idea into a product is the size of the market you’re going to be targeting.
You might have a great product, a cutting edge website, a well-trained and enthusiastic team, and customers who love your product, but your company might still run at a loss if there aren’t enough customers in the market to support the business.
To avoid such a situation, professional entrepreneurs and investors conduct market sizing exercises before investing in a new business.
Don’t find customers for your product, find product for your customers- Seth Godin
You might think your product or service will sweep the market away, but without having a foundation of information about your customer’s wants and needs, you can’t know if your product will do well.
Thousands of new products launch every month. Yet only a fraction of those gets enough traction to be considered successful.
Knowing whether or not your product will sell is one of the biggest questions in marketing. You might think your product or service will sweep the market away, but without having a foundation of information about your customer’s wants and needs, you can’t know if your product will do well.
In this article, we explore the concept of product marketability and ways to know whether your product is marketable.
Conducting market research can help you learn how many consumers or businesses could use the product
What Is Product Marketability?
Marketability is essentially a measure of whether a product will appeal to buyers and sell at a set price range to generate a profit.
Marketing techniques include public relations, advertising, trade shows, collateral production, and other functions such as product quality assurance and documentation.
Product developers should complete a marketability evaluation before attempting to market products. Doing so helps marketing managers and other executives determine whether the product is marketable in the current and future market.
4 Ways to Know if Your Product is Marketable
When starting a business one of the big questions you’ll want the answer to is, “How can I know if my product will sell?”
There are several ways to know if your product will sell before creating it. These methods don’t guarantee success but will dramatically increase your odds.
Conduct Market Research
Researching to determine if there is a market for your business is key to successfully selling your product.
We recommend you do some market research before devoting too much time and money to the business. Conducting market research can help you learn how many consumers or businesses could use the product. Once you’ve determined the demand for your product, ensure that it can be made and supplied at a low enough cost that your retail pricing is affordable. It can also help you assess your competitors, which will exist regardless of how unique you believe your innovation is.
Listen to the Market
If you are in the business world, you need to accept that customers in the market determine the fate of your company’s success. Customers have the final word when determining whether an item is purchased or not. Getting to know the market before you begin selling your product can give a clearer outline of what you will experience.
Once you have a better understanding of the market you are about to dive into, you can make better business decisions on how to approach the market.
Your target customer should serve the base upon which all other concepts are built. After all, your consumer determines your product’s success.
Test Your Product
Some of the biggest companies test their products before introducing the product to an entire market. You can create a prototype and begin with small testing either online or in select stores. It will help you answer questions to a degree that research may not. Getting customer feedback can help you tweak your product or idea before mass producing something that might fail.
If your target customer enjoys your service and offers good feedback, you know you’ve got a marketable product.
Find the Right Price
One of the most impactful product marketing tactics is pricing. Product price gives your product a status (affordable or high-quality), an audience (based on disposable income), and competitors. Use your product, audience, and competitor research to identify the perfect price point for your product, considering product costs and profit margins. Keeping up with market trends will help you determine if you should raise your lower your prices.
The key to determining your price is that it needs to sustain your business. If you price your products at a loss or an unsustainable profit margin, you will find it challenging to grow and scale.
There are other important factors that your pricing needs to account for, like how you’re priced in relation to your competitors, and what your pricing strategy means for your business and your customers’ expectations. But before you can worry about anything like that, you need to make sure you’ve found a sustainable base price.
Product price gives your product a status.
The Product Manager Roles
The product manager is in charge of determining a product’s marketability and is ultimately responsible for its success in the market. In terms of determining the marketability of a product, the product manager’s responsibilities include product conception (product market and market research), product development, product launch, product sustaining, and product discontinuance.
Wrapping Up
People often laud entrepreneurial risk-taking. Indeed, starting a business requires a leap of faith. However, it is important to remember that people who took a risk and lost it all tend to keep their failures to themselves, and thus we only hear about those who have succeeded.
We recommend that you start your own business only when you’ve done your research and are confident you will succeed instead of underestimating the risk involved in starting a new business.
To take your idea from concept to market, you must prepare to invest time and money and factor in some determination to turn your vision into reality.
If you’ve moved past the ideation and conceptualization stage of business, you have moved on to the business development stage. You’re ready to start manufacturing, marketing, and selling your product or offering your service.
While many people believe that coming up with an exciting idea that you believe in is 90% of the work done, reality often deceives expectations. The hard reality is that coming up with an app idea is easy, and figuring out what to do next is the hardest part.
However, the magic is in the execution.
To take your idea from concept to market, you must prepare to invest time and money and factor in some determination to turn your vision into reality. But if you’re struggling with where to start, this article will help you get going. So read along!
Innovation, creative or new idea concept are the first step before reaching the market.
Steps to move your product concept out of the ideas shed and launch into the marketplace:
1. Conduct Market Research
The importance of this step cannot be overstated. Without conducting market research, the chances of your business failing at the first point of contact with your customer increase greatly.
Conducting market research can help you learn how many consumers or businesses could use the product. It can also help you assess your competitors, which will exist regardless of how unique you believe your innovation is. We recommend going offline and conducting real-world market research to nail this first step.
2. Connect with customers
Knowing your customer in a wholesome manner is prominent to having a strong customer base. As an entrepreneur, you must know what your customers want, their preferences and desires, what they are looking for, and their purchasing behavior.
Maintaining an enhanced customer base will build confidence and loyalty in them for the brand and give the company free marketing in terms of word of mouth.
If you are a retailer with no online presence, consider setting up a web store as another way to capture sales and connect to the clients. Consider engaging with your clients through emails and social media campaigns.
3. Profile your customers
When designing a product, it is easy to get caught up in your passion for the idea and become disconnected from those who will ultimately buy the product. Understanding your customer will help clarify your design parameters, what features add value, and which are just adding costs.
Anything that helps you get closer to understanding your customer is useful. It’s great to think out of the box as well. Your ultimate goal must be to make an abstract concept of your customer into a real person with wants and needs.
4. Leverage social media
Social media is one of the strongest tools in the business development strategy. Numerous social media platforms allow sellers to reach their potential customers and the masses.
By implementing a comprehensive social media strategy, you can ensure social media works as a driver of new business that positively promotes your service offerings. However, to best leverage social media, it is important to understand your customers and identify the channels through which they prefer to communicate. Instead of using social media to sell your product, use it to give away your knowledge, industry trends, and insights on the preferred platforms, and focus on building a relationship with your followers.
5. Do your legal due diligence
Legal due diligence can refer to intellectual property (IP) rights as well as product compliance and safety testing. It is possible to carry out a certain amount of due diligence yourself, but at some point, you will need to spend some money to make sure your product does not infringe any law, is itself protected, and can be legally sold in your target market.
Most third-party testing houses will give you free advice and a list of legal testing requirements that you will need to pass to launch your product.
Draft a business plan and execute it with a business coach.
6. Market Your Product
Marketing is the process of getting the right goods or services or ideas to the right people at the right place, time, and price, using the right promotion techniques and utilizing the appropriate people to provide the customer service associated with those goods and services or ideas.
A business plan forces you to clarify the strategic plan for business growth.
It consists of the answers to some key questions – how to get your product or service into the hands of customers who are your target market. Will you do it yourself, or will you outsource manufacturing? Who is going to physically transport your product to customers? What are the methods of distribution: retail, online, and/or catalog purchases? Who will sell it: you, in-house sales staff, independent reps, telemarketers?
7. Launch the product and research future market opportunities
Launching the original product is the most exciting part of the process, but the work doesn’t end here. Apart from marketing, an entrepreneur should look for other opportunities in the market. Is there a way the product may be useful for another audience? Are there improvements or expansions that should be considered for the line? This method of continuous innovation is what turns a single creation into a global product line.
