Market Research and Identifying a Target Market

By: Rachel Newcombe - Updated: 28 Jul 2016 | *Discuss

 

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When you’re planning on launching a gardening business, it’s important to do your market research in advance, as this will help you with identifying a target market. Here are some ideas for undertaking your market research and tips on spotting a potential market for your services or products.

Market research is one of the crucial steps involved in creating your small business and making it work. Whilst you may think your idea is perfect and just what the market needs, you can’t take it for granted that that’s definitely the case – you have to carefully suss out what’s currently available out there, make sure people really would want your products or services and identify a group of potential customers.

It all sounds like a lot of hard work and, to be honest, it is. But undertaking market research, listening to public opinion and gathering data can be very rewarding and have a positive effect on your business prospects, so take it seriously and you could gain heaps of benefits.

Carrying Out Market Research

There are various ways in which you can carry out market research, but the important aspect to focus on is to thoroughly research the current gardening market in your area and try and identify gaps in services or products that your business could offer.

When you’re carrying out your research on a local level, lots of valuable information can be gained from talking to the general public and other small businesses doing similar work to you. Sometimes it may be necessary to not reveal all your small business plans to them, but you can easily get an idea of how they operate by visiting their businesses, employing their services or buying their products.

Carrying out your own small market survey can be a good way of gathering data and information about what people actually want. If you find the logistics of setting this up tricky, then you could employ a market research company to do it for you. The main benefit of employing a company to research on your behalf is that they may be able to do the analysis too, and present you with reports at the end of it.

Attending any local or national gardening shows, whether aimed at consumers or traders, can also be useful, as can networking with relevant business organisations. To get an idea of the type of customers located in one particular area, you could look through the electoral registers.

Identifying Your Target Market

When you’ve carried out your market research, you should end up with a clearer picture of what the overall market situation is like in your area and how your new business could fit into it. In fact, you may well have managed to identify gaps in the current market that your business would be ideally placed to fill.

It will help you considerably in setting up your gardening business, and with producing a business plan, if you’ve got a clear idea of who your customers are likely to be. So it’s a good idea to think through the potential demographics of your customers and sketch out the specifics, so that when it comes to launch your business, you’ll have a good target to aim for.

Some of customer demographic questions to work through include:

• What age range are your customers likely to be?
• Where are your customers likely to be based – where do they live and work and are they based in the town, city or country?
• Are they likely to be male or female?
• Are they single or married?
• How much disposable income do they have to spend on gardening services or products?
• How often do they use gardening services or buy garden products?
• What type of gardening assistance are they likely to require and how often might they need it?
• Do they enjoy gardening themselves?
• What size garden do they typically have?
• Do they typically enjoy following gardening trends?

When you’re doing this, it may seem like you’re building up an outline of imaginary customers. Whilst some aspects may be stretching the imagination somewhat, it’s a very useful way of getting inside your potential customers minds and working out what they may want and need and, in the long run, you should find it a very useful task to have done.

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