Market research is one of the most crucial roles of a digital product manager. Research into the demands of your customers is very important to ensure that you are a successful digital product manager. This will also help you produce an effective and profitable strategy for your product. Market research is an important core skill used by virtually every product manager.
Market research is a process through which product managers gather information about the business’s buyers’ personas, customer needs, market drivers and target audiences. It also helps them to gain a deeper understanding of the diverse market factors like the nature of the market, the value of what you are building and the problems of the users.
The excellent market research also helps you explore the potential areas of growth and provides insight into how effective marketing efforts are. But when we talk about competitive markets, time is the key element. Some businesses are constantly searching for a competitive advantage, with new developments taking place every second to put the success of the product strongly at risk. That’s why effective market research is very important for a successful business.
Investigating your competition means you are using different market research concepts and techniques to understand what your competition is doing today and get an idea of their plans for tomorrow.
In this article, we’ll discuss what are the problems that market research can solve and the steps followed by digital product managers for market research.
Key problems that market research can solve
Product managers use market research before taking a decision. Here are some important categories of decisions they use market research for.
Identify markets
Evaluate new markets
Segment markets
Identify customer problems and market needs
Document the journey of the customers
Investigate the best market options
Create and test product messaging
Measure marketing programs and campaigns results
Scope products
Solidify pricing
Define or test new product concepts
Prioritize features and releases
Analyze business success
Learn about the competition
Measure customer satisfaction
Steps of market research
Market research is a method of collecting and analyzing data on the needs and wants of customers to appeal to them in more novel ways. This method also helps businesses explore who is their target audience and what product they want from the brand.
For digital product managers, market research helps them gain a competitive advantage against their competitors who are launching similar products. Your business will be a great success and gain a greater advantage within the market by meeting the demands of the customers more quickly than competitors.
Now, let’s discuss the steps digital products managers should undertake to research the market effectively.
Identify the opportunity
The first step of market research is to identify the problem you are willing to solve. Asking specific questions or conducting online secondary research will help understand the issues and reveal the biggest opportunities to accomplish your research objectives. You can also use primary research methods to understand the issue and how you can solve them. Some questions you should ask in the first step are:
How many of the recent buyers are purchasing the product for the first time?
How can we turn first-time buyers into repeat customers?
Are the prices too high?
Why sales are lower than in the last quarter?
How the checkout flow can be made more efficient?
Why the customers add items to their shopping cart but don’t complete the transaction?
Once you define your problem, you’ll be able to solve the problem efficiently and improve the user’s experience.
Develop a strategy
After identifying the issues, you need to come up with the most efficient solution to your problem. Its the duty of the digital product manager to ensure that the solution is beneficial for both the company and the customers.
A research plan will help the business figure out how what strategy may be best through the use of focus groups. This will provide you with an understanding of how the clients would like to solve the problem or through other primary research methods such as forms or questionnaires to collect qualitative data.
The second step will help the digital product manager to set the strategy for the most effective results for the problem.By creating an effective strategy, the digital product manager will provide the ideal solution to all the problems in the market.
Collect the data
After identifying the strategy, it’s important to start collecting important information. Quantitative data will help you generate an unbiased approach to the problem and allow for a more conceptualised and rounded view of the situation. You can collect quantitative data through face-to-face interviews and longitudinal studies where you’ll get high-quality information. This would provide you with an opportunity for a range of question types.
Quantitative data collection will provide confidence to your team because you’ll have a strong platform for strong evidence before you start marketing your products or services. Through this method, the information gathered will help you understand how to tailor your services to the customers and ensure that business efficiency and customer satisfaction are both guaranteed.
It’s very important for digital product managers to make maximum use of the benefits of having a team. By having a team they can discuss the data and its implication on their strategy to determine the best course of action.
Analyse the data
After collecting all the relevant data, it’s time to analyse it and uncover trends and patterns in the data that can impact a business’s market performance. Utilise methods such as scatter graphs for your research to actually become effective and find positive correlations between data. This will direct your team towards the right path to meet the needs and demands of the consumer which will improve the overall success of your product management.
As a digital product manager, this step will provide a target to aim for and how you can achieve it. This would also prove to be highly beneficial in reaffirming the success of the business.
Take action
The key to effective market research is to act on the information gathered through research. The planning and organisation of your research are invalid without action. This step is significant. Without action, your market research is wasted as it cannot be effective. Once the data is collected and analysed, it’s time to develop an actionable plan to put your data into play.
The final verdict
By implementing a good strategy guided by good market research, as a digital product manager, you can establish a great product strategy that will provide success to your company. It’s very important that you understand how to communicate that strategy to your entire team to win in the market.