Hey everyone, it’s Alexander Seery, founder of Shifts to Success, helping police officers break out, make the change, and live their lives.

And today, I’m going to be talking about market research, and why it’s so important for your business as an entrepreneur.

Conducting proper due diligence by market research is crucial when you decide to take on the entrepreneurial journey, but often many people neglect this process because they don’t hear any negative feedback about their business or idea. But failing to conduct market research can seriously take companies to an early grave. And companies that do perform proper market research are the ones that often succeed.

There’s some key points that you should focus on when it comes to market research, such as products and services, past, present, and potential customers, customer characteristics, spending habits, location, needs of your customers, and of course your competition.

And it’ll be great to start to conduct market research into those key areas first by collecting two types of market research, primary and secondary.

The objective of primary research is to collect data yourself, or you could hire someone else to do it directly from the source, which would be your customers or potential customers.

But, I would always advise doing it yourself at the early stages of your … Of developing your business because you’re in the mix, and you’ll get a real sense for what your customers or potential customers are feeling, and how you can best solve those problems.

You can send them surveys, questionnaires, and feedback forms to formalise your data. The objective of secondary research is to collect data that is already available for your business industry and market.

And this can be found on competitor’s websites, forums, reports, books, and other available content that’s out there in the market that’s already been formalised for you.

Secondary data is what you’ll be collecting most often, especially at the early stages of your entrepreneurial journey, as you just won’t have any customers, to be honest.

When you collect data from your market research, you’ll see that what potential problems your customers have, what their frustrations are, how you can best solve those problems, what barriers there are in buying your products, what their demographics are, what do they normally buy and who from, where are your customers located around the world, what are your competitors offering, and how can you offer something better.

There are a tonne of valuable data to be collected, which is all at your fingertips. And when you have this data, you can better prepare yourself in building a successful business, and you will have a better chance of succeeding.

Mainly because you understand your customers and your competitors. For example, when I started conducting market research for police officers for my company Shifts to Success, I posted a survey on a Facebook forum consisted of my ex-colleagues of Nottinghamshire Police.

And within two days, I had over 100 pieces of valuable content around their problems they’re facing in the job. Why they haven’t decided to leave yet. And why they haven’t started their own business yet.

I also spoke directly to police officers either by phone or take them out for a coffee. And by collecting this data, I could fully understand their problems.

And when, sorry, and best how to plan to solve those problems. And it also gave me content ideas that I could start working towards in developing products, which is all an example of primary research.

Another thing I did was look online to see what other data I could collect. I gathered a lot of information online due to the data that organisations are already collected for me, such as the Police Federation, the home office, police forums, which aligned well with my data, that I collected in my primary research.

This confirmed that I was on the right track in gaining confidence moving forward in creating and developing my business. This is all an example of secondary data.  Collecting primary and secondary data from your market, really is essential, so make sure you conduct it properly, and take the time to do it because it’s all at your fingertips. And all you generally need to do is go online, or make a few calls.

If you have any questions about market research, then do let me know in the comment section below, and I’m more than happy to answer them for you.

I hope this video served you well. And if you’re a police officer thinking about getting in business, then go and take the police officer’s score card quiz by clicking in the link in the description.

Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe. See you next time.