Looking at market and industry trends can make a huge difference to whether your business venture succeeds or fails. Hitching yourself onto a growing trend can greatly increase your chance for success. In order for a business to be sustainable, there needs to be enough demand for your products and services to bring in a viable level of revenue. To predict whether there will be enough demand, you need to conduct market research about your specific market. If you’ve completed the Evaluate Your Business Idea Guide, that exercise should stir up some key questions that you will need to answer.Before getting right into it, its helpful to introduce some basic concepts.
- Target market- refers to a group of potential customers a company wants to sell its products or services to
- Primary data- firsthand information that you gather by conducting focus groups, interviews or surveys
- Secondary data- information that already exists from various sources i.e. StatCanada and Bizmap
When you are conducting your research online, a simple search can yield a long list of results. To help you sift through this information, we’ve included some helpful articles and resources.
Additional reading:
- How to Use Market Research to Evaluate Your Business Idea Article
- How to Use Google Trends to Perform Market Research Article
Additional resources:
- Trend Hunter– spark new ideas with one of the largest trend platform
- Trend Watching
- Springwise– curation and analysis of the hottest innovations for new product ideas
- Google Trends
- Market Research Checklist
- Resources for Market Research
If you are finding this a little overwhelming and don’t know where to begin, we offer a workshop led by our Market Analyst, where he can walk you through the various steps of conducting market research: