A Practical Guide To Conducting Industry and Market Research

Our team compiled this practical guide to conducting market research. We found these steps to be particularly helpful in bringing a client's product to market in a new country or within a new demographic.

Industry Research 

• Key players
• Growth
• Trends
• Competitors

Market Research 

• Size of market
• Psychographics
• Geographics
• Behaviors
• Trends

Before Getting Started

• Identify the client’s industry and segment research if need be 
• Request a care package from Google support team
• Submit a request to AskWonder to understand market research trends and size of market and any other interesting information you would like to uncover
• Check statista.com to identify any interesting metrics, trends or reports
• List of competitors that the client provided to compare and contrast the competitive landscape you identify
• Analysis from Adventure’s senior data scientist

Step 1‍

Identify key players and the competitive landscape.

Key players - Who are the key companies or businesses in your industry? Who are the biggest businesses in the industry and what are the core products and services that they sell? What are their business models?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 CompetitorsCWho

Competitors - Who are your key competitors in your industry? Are there businesses who are using strategies that are similar to yours? How are you different?

• Google searches in incognito and regular browser

• Multiple variations depending on the client industry (lead gen vs. ecommerce) look at both shopping and search 

• Facebook Ads library
• SEMrush
• Similarweb.com

• Provides similar sites to competitors

• Porter’s 5 Force Model
• Auction Insights report
  

Step 2

Conduct competitor analysis.

• Competitors unique selling points, what makes them different, what makes the client different. 
• Showcase interesting ideas/facts that the competitors are doing

Questions or thoughts to consider:

• How are they highlighting their ads? 
• What are they highlighting on landing pages and their website? 
• Reading through competitor's reviews to determine the consumer perception of products 

• Include a quick summary/synopsis of the competitive analysis after going in-depth. 

Step 3

Identify industry growth and industry trends.

• Googles care package for YoY numbers 
• Statista reports
• Askwonder reports
• Google searches to identify any growth or trending patterns

Step 4

Conduct market research by identifying the market size.

• Market Size

• Google keyword planner insights for historical volume numbers 
• Google keyword planner insights for forecasted volume numbers 
• SEMrush
• statista.com

Step 5

Pinpoint market trends.

• Trends

• Google trends 
• General searches

Step 6

Identify target audience based on customer information.

• Target audience

• Analytics overview information 

• Segment by products and filter users to understand differentiation 
• Geographic information for their customer and industry specifically 

• Read client’s reviews to understand the customer’s perception vs the company's perception of themselves (based on their website, ads...)
• Identify geographic interest

• Google care package report which includes category development information based on geographic region. 

• Audience personas

• Google’s care package 

• Similarweb.com to identify target audience of competitors 

Step 7

Create buyer personas based on target audience analysis. 

• Buyer Personas (saving the best for last)

• Creating customer avatars based on the audience insights you uncover. 

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