Your job as a marketer isn’t just to focus on the solution you’re promoting. Talking about features, benefits, and special offers is all well and good, but it’s really more of a sales task. To create an effective product marketing strategy, you must start at the top of the funnel — understanding who your audience is and what they need.
This simple market research recipe will ensure all your company’s marketing and sales efforts effectively target and engage the buyers you want to sell to.
Context: What is Market Research All About?
Market research isn’t just about doing a Google search on your competitors. It’s about discovering exactly where and how your solution fits in the market — if there’s a lucrative market for it at all. A company that provides market research services (like TPM) can help you get answers to the questions that matter most at this stage:
- What is the problem you solve?
- Who will you solve problems for?
- Is the problem pervasive and urgent enough to create a market for your solution?
- Will solving the problem be lucrative?
Recipe: How to Conduct Market Research
The recipe below can be used to navigate the market research process yourself or help you identify a market research agency that will get the job done right.
Ingredients (What You’ll Need)
You’ll need all of these components to make the market research process a success.
Instructions (How to Do It)
Be sure to invest time and effort into each of these steps. A half-assed attempt at market research will result in a half-baked understanding of your market.
1. Information Gathering
You might not have all the necessary ingredients at hand. This step is all about gathering everything you need for effective market research.
- Talk to your audience. This can include direct conversations, customer satisfaction surveys, ratings and review sites, and win-loss interviews.
- Conduct keyword research. You’ll gain valuable information about what your audience is searching for — and where they’re looking.
- Participate in industry discussions. Get actively involved on social media, at trade shows, and in industry communities. Connect with influencers, SMEs, and decision-makers to get a feel for trends, common goals, and challenges.
- Ask for help. Consider engaging an experienced market research agency to ensure you’ve fully explored the market you want to enter.
The right AI prompts can take a lot of the work out of researching your audience or competitors.
TPM’s Ultimate Lead-Gen Kit includes a guide filled with sample prompts and templates to help you easily find the information you need.
Get your copy of 3 ChatGPT Prompts You Need to Understand Buyers Better now!
2. Competitor Research
Don’t make the mistake of thinking competitor analysis only covers the market leaders you’re preparing to challenge. This step must include understanding where your organization stands against:
- Direct competitors (companies offering the same basic solution as you)
- Indirect competitors (companies offering an alternate strategy or solution that could disrupt your sales)
Compile as much information as you can find on both direct and indirect competitors.
- Company (size, location, reputation, spending power)
- Product (price point, features, omissions)
- Message (differentiators, language, stats, keywords, use cases, proof points)
- Target audience (ICPs, personas — are they targeting the same people as you? Is there someone they sell to that you’ve overlooked?)
- Existing clients (case studies, testimonials)
- Sales model (price, subscription vs. single purchase, etc)
The two Perplexity.ai prompts can help enhance competitor research. (The same prompts will likely work in ChatGPT, but Perplexity was built specifically for these kinds of tasks.)
Note: the bracketed placeholders are intended to be replaced with information specific to your company/what you are trying to find out.
The first prompt will help you identify who your competitors are, if you don’t already know:
I’m building a [brief description of your product or service] for [target audience] in the [industry or market]. Can you list both direct and indirect competitors offering similar solutions? Please include companies of various sizes, from major players to smaller or emerging ones, and explain why each one is considered a competitor.
After you find out who they are, you can ask follow up questions to dig deeper on specific competitors.
This second prompt will help you research a known competitor:
I’m researching a competitor called [company name]. I want to find out information such as [item 1], [item 2],and [item 3]. Please focus on credible and up-to-date sources, ideally published within the past [X] years. If data isn’t available within that range, include the most recent available and specify the publish date. Provide links or citations wherever possible.
Don’t forget, your team isn’t just competing against other brands — you’re also up against customer inaction. Use the information you gathered in the first step to create a picture of what prospects who opt against purchasing any solution will face.
3. Data Analysis
Now it’s time to dig into all that data you’ve collected and see what it can tell you. Create competitor battlecards or comparison tables to identify where your solution has a competitive edge — and where it may fall short against rival offerings.
- Quantitative analysis
Use numerical data to make predictions about future outcomes (like forecasting sales or identifying potential audience segments) and provide recommendations or insights that can optimize your outcomes.
- Qualitative analysis
Much of the information you’ve gathered won’t be hard data. Analyze interviews, reviews, survey responses, and focus group transcripts to identify themes and patterns in what prospects, customers, and experts say about your solution and your market.
TPM: Your Market Research Agency
Don’t have the time, resources, or expertise to conduct your own market research? Let the team at TPM help! Located in beautiful Vancouver, we are one of North America’s top product marketing and market research companies, helping brands across Canada and the US hone their message and grow their market. Contact us today.
