How to Do Consumer Research in 6 Clear Steps
Knowing how to do consumer research is vital in today’s market when 76% of consumers will go to a competitor after just one bad experience with a previously preferred brand. Conducting consumer research helps give structure and basis for your business. How much and what type of consumer research depends on your goals, budget, and deadlines as well as your field of work. You can learn how to do consumer research in six steps:
- Start with a Defined Objective.
- SMART Goals.
- Google/Bing/Search Engines.
- Checkout the Competition.
- Look for Research Articles/Reliable Blogs.
- Conduct your own User Research.
Why Do Consumer Research?
Know Your Primary Users
Consumer research reveals not only who your primary audience is but also information about their demographic. What devices do they prefer? How much time do they like to use shopping? Do they know what they want, or do they browse for a bit? How much money do they tend to spend on this, and how much do they want to spend? What are their current pain points with what is available currently? Consumer research makes sure that you actually know your primary users, enabling you to craft your products, services, and marketing with them in mind.
Uncover Secondary Users
Sometimes you have users/consumers/audiences that are not the main ones you are designing your services or products for. Consumer research can help identify secondary users who you should try to attract through advertising, tweaks to existing products and services, and adding additional options to better cater to these users.
For example, if you run a gym equipment online shop, you could find that your main audience are experienced exercise enthusiasts while a secondary audience are beginner runners. You could add a ‘tips for beginners’ book or blog to help entice and encourage them. Remember that if users give up or lose confidence in their ability to complete goals, they will give up and leave your site!
Find Pain Points and Opportunities
Consumer research is used to find how user friendly a website, items or services are to customers and/or visitors and find pain points and opportunities to improve the site or service. These are issues that make the user’s tasks harder to accomplish. After completing the research, you should have an idea what you need to focus on to make them pain point free. You may also find you need to add services or tools to allow users to accomplish other tasks (less critical tasks should also be user friendly; how many services have you terminated when you couldn’t find how to contact customer support?)
On top of that, you can find that competitors already have additional services that you don’t or, even better, that they are lacking in an area you can expand in. Use consumer research to find opportunities for new products and services or other expansions to keep up in today’s market.
Creates a Basis for Your Business Strategy
Having good consumer research means you that you have data to base your business strategy in:
- Marketing
- Branding
- Website Design
- Specific Products and Services
- Product Designs
- User Personas
How to Do Consumer Research
Start with a Defined Objective
The first part of how to do consumer research is to have a clear objective in mind before starting the research. What questions do you have that you hope to have answers to? What is your focus here, and what is bonus information? Having a clear objective makes sure your research will be both accurate and precise in completing your objective.
SMART Goals
The second part of how to do consumer research is to have SMART goals to complete the objective. While it may seem obvious, knowing the goals a project needs to accomplish at the start is critical for planning and designing the project. Also, it makes sure that the team (including a team of one) are all on the same page as to what the project is (and is not), what its purpose is, and what problems or issues the project will be solving. Make sure the goals not only complete the objective but are SMART goals:
- Specific
- Measureable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- TImely
In other words, make sure all goals are clearly defined and detailed with no room for confusion, have a way to track to tell if they are being completed, is both reasonable to complete and worthwhile to completing the objective, and contain a time limit to complete the goals within the goal statement.
Google/Bing/Search Engines
There’s no point in doing work that others have already done, so look up information through your favorite search engine to start with. There’s a change that a study has already been done and published that you can use for your research. Even if there is not something convenient like that, you can start gaining information about your users and their habits using google.
If you have a Google analytics account, then you can find out where most of your users are coming from, what devices they are accessing your site from, when they tend to go to your site, and what pages are most traveled. Another method to try is to use US census data. It gives a good overview of demographics, which is an excellent place to start.
Checkout the Competition
Look up competitors by searching for products and services like the ones you offer. Check their featured items and their designs to figure out what users they are focusing on. You can check their social media accounts for their marketing strategies and what they think is important to their consumers. Remember not to just copy your competitors though; make sure your designs, ads, and products are distinct enough that you are not in danger of plagiarism. Don’t do it kids!
Look for Research Articles and Reliable Blogs
For deeper information or data about specific topics, look for research articles and blogs for more info. This also gives you credible sources that can back up your own conclusions and look good for work cited, bibliographies, or other sections for ‘how did you get this’. User experience is growing into a critical part of most companies, so it is a popular developing field. You can find many free articles across the internet on how to better your company, its strategies, and catering to your consumers.
Conduct Your Own User Research
If you have the time and budget and want to test your products and website directly or investigate your specific main audience in depth, conduct your own user research. You can make user journey maps, conduct A/B testing, run user usability tests, make surveys, or conduct eye tracking tests.
Just make sure the research method(s) you choose will result in the data you want. When you get the data, either from your personal research or other people’s, use it to make a customer persona and a red route matrix to better organize the information. This makes it easier to go back and review later on when you are designing new items or trying to find a new marketing strategy.
Summary
Conducting consumer research helps give structure and basis for your business. How much and what type of consumer research depends on your goals, budget, and deadlines as well as your field of work. You can learn how to do consumer research in six steps:
- Start with a Defined Objective.
- SMART Goals.
- Google/Bing/Search Engines.
- Checkout the Competition.
- Look for Research Articles/Reliable Blogs.
- Conduct your own User Research.
