Primary market research is a customized technique of obtaining market research data directly from the sources, rather than data that is already compiled as in secondary market research.
This type of market research will provide insights into how the prospects or customers would relate to the business’s products or services.
For a small-scale business, primary market research is a great way to gather information on the size of the market that the business is trying to target and the amount of demand available in the market for the service or product they have got to offer.
Majorly there are two forms of primary market research techniques and are termed qualitative research and quantitative research.
Qualitative research:
Qualitative research is basically a research technique that helps in understanding and finding answers to the ‘why’ behind the customer’s behavior. It utilizes open-ended questions that would collect information and perceptions of the audience that leads to effective decision making.
Qualitative research will only focus on the concepts, opinions, and experiences of the prospects and does not include any numerical data for analysis. It is a less formal research technique compared to quantitative research.
Quantitative research:
Opposite to qualitative research, quantitative research focuses on collecting and analyzing the numerical data that could be used to find patterns, make predictions and test a hypothesis. This research technique can be used to represent a larger sample size or population.
Primary Market Research Methods:
This list of actions can be performed as part of the primary market research. It consists of both qualitative and quantitative research techniques and hence which ones to use will depend on the objective of the business.
Focus group
This is a simple technique but often can be hard to put into practice. The basic idea is to gather a bunch of people with different demographics, interests, or occupations and ask them about whatever the business wants. For instance, about a new product that the business wishes to launch.
These discussions would help the business in understanding the wider population’s view over something and also pull out some insights that would help them to improve the product or service and make a well-informed decision.
Social Media Listening
In today’s world, social media has reached a point where it is seamlessly integrated and is a digital extension of ourselves where everyone expresses their thoughts and opinions.
Since people share so much data in social media, it can be seen as a treasure trove for market research. By using some of the social listening tools, researchers can simply identify and analyze the data that is relevant to them. It is significant due to the vast amount of unfiltered data availability.
Competitive analysis
This market research technique is considered to be a more specific and highly strategic form of research since the researcher analyses the company’s competitors. There are a number of topics to compare your business with that of the competitors.
It starts with defining the product, service, and market segment. It could be either from the market perspective or in the form of a product perspective.
Public domain data
The internet is an open place for enormous data. Since more and more data is produced every year, it is helpful for researchers who are strapped for resources, or for those who are simply searching for some extra data to support their research.
There are different types of open data available that could be useful for researchers. Some of the open public data are government databases, polling data, facts data from research centers, etc. One massive advantage for the researchers is that most of the data is accessible free of cost.
