Intro to Market Research:

How many times have you had a great idea and then later found out it exists? It’s extremely rare to have a completely original idea. Uber, Facebook, Airbnb, Instakart, and just about every other billion dollar startup was in no way original. Not even close! All these ideas and most likely your idea already exist on the market.

Don’t worry, that’s perfectly ok. Why? Markets are typically pretty huge and those huge markets are made up of segments. Different segments of the market have different needs or at least different secondary needs. We want to identify those market segments, how big they are, and what their secondary needs might be.

In Market Research 1, we will identify and characterize the two forces that make up the market – the supply (competition) and the demand (customers).

The logic is simple. We want to know what the people want, how many want it, who they are and we want to know what products/services are already available to them in detail. Based on this, we can have a clear vision for how we might shape your idea to fit into that market space.

Objectives:

1) Complete Market Overview and Keyword Search Volume

2) Segment Your Customer Market

3) Identify Your Direct, Indirect, Hybrid Competition

4) Complete a Competitor Analysis Matrix

5) Illustrate Your Market Positioning in 2x2 Matrix (x2 as needed)

6) Define Your Target Market and Customer Avatar

Download Actionable Steps Powerpoint

Submit Actionable Steps for Review

Key tools:

*Keywords Everywhere – this is a critical tool for free that every entrepreneur needs to have plugged in. It allows you to quickly see keyword data on Google like search volume, CPC, and competitiveness.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/keywords-everywhere-keywo/hbapdpeemoojbophdfndmlgdhppljgmp

Facebook Audience Insights – this tool gives you deeper insights into your audience and allows you to reveal customer characteristics for your target market segment. See the video below for more information.
https://www.facebook.com/iq/tools-resources/audience-insights?ref=fbb_blog_ai

See the complete list of tools under the videos below. Choose the tools that fit your business model and market research needs.

Watch these videos (especially ) to help you learn and complete your action steps.**

**Watch this video to see the theory behind market segmentation. Note the 4 common types of segmentation. This video is core to understanding marketing and a great starting point for beginners.

*This video is a great intro to what “customer avatar” refers to and what characteristics the customer avatar should focus on. It also explains the purpose of defining your customer avatar and avoiding the “stuck in the middle” phenomenon.

*This video will help you download and install keywords everywhere and show you two to three different ways to use this tool. We are most concerned with the third way, which is scrolling to the bottom of Google.

This video addresses why it is ok to share your idea and why it is ok if your idea is on the market. It also looks at the concept of direct, indirect, and hybrid competition and a real world example of the fierce competition one of my funded startups faced.

**My COMPLETE market research process for the Oaxacan travel platform startup. This video is played in 2x speed, but you can watch them in normal speed by skipping to the next videos in the youtube playlist.

In this video, Steve Jobs ties all the concepts together. Customer avatars, market segments and their sizes, their target market, and where their value proposition can fit in.