How To Write A Good Market Research Report And Great Executive Summary

After successfully conducting a field market research, the job will not be considered as completed with a report with executive summary.


When writing an Executive Summary, think about the purpose of an executive summary. You need to provide a one page, or at most two page, summary of the results of your marketing research. Be sure to hit all of the major points of the rest of your report in this summary. Many people will read the summary first, to get a quick overview of your results.


The summary should include specific, numeric details from the rest of your report. These details should be condensed into bullet points and made prominent on the report.



Features of the Executive Summary


Describe your company: The summary should provide a basic account of what your company does, where it is located, what type of employees (if any) you have, and any other organizational details. Also describe your products and goals for your future products or sales.



Detail the objective of your research: Your report should specify what exactly you were trying to determine in your marketing research. This could be whether or not your marketing was effective in content, whether or not it reached the right audience, whether or not it properly informed customers about your product, or any other determination you wished to make.



Related post: How to carry out market research



Evaluate how well you are reaching your intended audience: Typically, the objective of your market research is to assess how well you are convincing people in your target audience to buy your product. You need to be making sure that you're reaching an audience that will actually be purchasing your product. If you're not doing so, explain why you think this is the case and offer suggestions for different courses of action.



Display marketing conversion data: This figure represents how many potential customers or visitors to your website actually purchased a product. This can be evaluated with site traffic counters. If this number is particularly low, you should offer explanations as to why this might be the case and how you can improve on it.



Admit any data collection difficulties or incomplete sections: Your executive summary should also include a section where you explain whether or not you had any difficulty attaining the data within. This could help explain incomplete or omitted sections or topics. Sometimes, there's no way to obtain a certain set of data reliably. If this is the case, explain why it is so in your summary.



Explain any factors that you think might come into play: This can include more people coming online, more traffic coming to links to your website, or any other trends that you think might help or hurt your marketing techniques.
You should also consider the fact that other competitors will arise if you are successful. Significant returns attract more competition, so if you don't have direct competitors now, rest assured that you will in the future. Have a plan in place to sustain your competitive advantage in spite of new entrants to the market.



Calculate marketing return on investment: It's also important to know if the money you're spending on advertising is increasing your revenue enough to make it worth it. Simply total your expenditures on certain marketing campaigns and compare that to how much your sales have (or have not) increased in the time since beginning those campaigns. Keep in mind that there may be a significant delay between implementing your marketing campaign and the resulting bump in sales. Consider the value you are getting for spending your money on advertising.



Conduct surveys and compile the results: You can conduct surveys on your website or by using a email marketing campaign. You can also get information from focus groups. Your focus group should include people in your target audience.

To get the most out of your focus group, carefully plan the exact series of questions you want to ask. Your marketing report should include the questions you ask and why those questions are important to you.
In your survey or focus group, ask people how they first heard about your product.


Document the results of both your surveys and your focus groups. Your report should provide both questions and responses. Give the reader the percentage of each type of response.

Your qualitative research (survey and focus group questions) may be 5 to 10 pages of your report. The responses to those questions will also be 5 to 10 pages of material.



Use your marketing report to make changes in your business: The purpose of your market research is to find out what is working and where you need to improve. If you can make the right changes, you can market more effectively without increasing your marketing budget.

Evaluate the extent to which your customers view your product as different and better than the competition. If they don’t see a difference, dig into their responses and find out why.


Decide on some conclusions: You conclude, for example, that your website needs to emphasize that your product is much more durable/reliable/nutritive/better than the competition.

You decide to make changes to your website and your other marketing communication pieces.

After a period of time, you can assess these changes to see how they have impacted your market share. Perform more market research to evaluate the impact of your changes.

How To Carry Out Marketing Research For Your Business

Market research is the process of evaluating how well your marketing efforts are working.
You can perform market research to ask your clients about the effectiveness of your marketing message. Companies summarize the results of their research in a marketing report. Use the results of the report to make improvements in your business.



Consider why you should perform market research and write a report

What information is important to you? What will you do with the marketing report after it is created? This process requires an investment of time and expense. Make sure that you have a clear plan for using the information that you collect.


Specifically, does your marketing get the attention and interest of prospects? Are you converting enough of those prospects into clients?


Related post: Here is the active email address of High Net-worth Individuals in Nigeria to promote your business/services to these rich people



Identify your customer

Before you can identify your customer's need or problem, you must identify your target or typical customer. Your target audience is the specific customer profile your are trying to reach. This could be people of a certain gender, age, profession, interest set, group, or any other quality that you think makes a customer want to buy your product. In other words, these are the people who are most likely to buy your product and the people that you tailor your marketing to.


The more specific you can be about the identity of your customer, the better you can address their needs. Ask yourself, "Who am I targeting with this product?" and "What do they want?"
Look at your current customers. What's the average age? Gender? Education level? Personality? Lifestyle? Hobby? Occupation? Marriage status? Values?



Evaluate your customer’s problem

Consumers buy products to solve a specific problem. Your customers will only buy when they feel that solving the problem is urgent.

For example, based on customer surveys and your industry knowledge, you uncover a customer problem. In this case, customers are losing time working or studying when their cell phone dies. If they forget their charger, they may lose hours of productivity.



Detail your solution to the customer's problem

Think about how exactly you went about responding to the customer's problem. Why did you solve it that way? What make you think about the problem in this way? What exactly does your product or solution do or include?


For example, to solve the problem of dying cell phones, you create a phone charger built into a backpack. Your customers use backpacks to store computers and other work or school items. As a result, the worker or student can always charge their phone.



Determine how well your product solves your customer's problem

Figure out whether or not your product has reduced the impact of the problem you saw. This is also a good place to determine whether or not your problem needed solving in the first place. If sales are consistently low, this may be a sign that your solution was unnecessary.


Over time, more customers buy your backpack and like using the built-in phone charger. These clients also believe that your product is different and better than competing products. You are building brand equity with your customers.



Identify your competitive advantage

Examine your competitors' products and how the solutions that they provide differ from your solution. In other words, look at what your product is able to provide to customers that your competitors' products cannot.


What makes your product unique and better? The goal here is to identify a competitive advantage and focus on that advantage with marketing efforts. If this advantage can be sustained, it will lead to higher sales and greater customer retention.



Examine how you currently market your product

The idea of market research is to understand how you market now and how well clients respond. Analyze the steps you currently take to market your product. For example, if you market your product online, you may be using some of the following strategies:


You continually add blog posts, articles and other content to your website. Adding content drives traffic to your site. Your content also keeps a percentage of your audience coming back for new content.Y

Yoursite offers an opt-in button for readers to subscribe to additional content that is emailed to them. This group gets a weekly email from you with new content links.

You have an attractive home page that includes a picture of someone using your backpack phone charger. The site allows the user to easily navigate to your content page and to web pages with product information.

You provide an e-commerce option for customers. Clients can buy your product online and receive their backpack in just 2-3 business days.

This should also include information about the sales channels used, like online, bricks & mortar, types of retailers, etc. Analyze how well your product is doing in each of these channels.



Evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing

 Is marketing doing a good job of getting your product information to potential customers? If you are using blog posts or articles, are they actually being read? Determine if your marketing efforts are actually leading to traffic to your website and then if this traffic is converting into sales. If not, you may want to include ideas for a revised marketing strategy in your marketing report.


Note your market share compared to competitors and market share trends. Are you gaining market share, losing it, or holding your own?


Related post: Get active Nigerians email address database with free sending tool for your marketing needs



Summarize your findings for your marketing report

The results of your market research should be compiled and detailed in a market report. A market report includes a 1-2 page executive summary and a longer detailed report section.


Your report should include such items as definition of the market size, competitors and their marketing size, as well as estimates of market share.


You can use the market report to make changes to your marketing process. These changes can help you get more business from the time and money you spend on marketing.


Next Read: How to write/present market research report and executive summary

Reasons Your Side Hustle Is Not Turning Into A Full Scale Business

Side hustles grow into full-time businesses because of strategy and the right mindset.



There are very few feelings in the world as discouraging as side hustling and seeing hardly any growth over months or years. Even if you started side hustling just to supplement your full-time income, you’re probably hoping the side work will someday overtake your full-time income so you can ride off into the entrepreneurial sunset.



Here’s the hard truth: Side hustles stay side hustles and don’t turn into legit businesses for reasons. Here are a few reasons why your side hustle isn’t growing:



You’re a master of none:

Side hustling and running a business are two different animals. The purpose of side hustling is to make as much as possible however you can. Maybe your main hustle is freelancing but you rideshare a few days during the week and tutor other days of the week as well.


If you want your main business to be freelancing or consulting, you need to specialize in it. You need to become a go-to person who does a specific thing, and not a hustle generalist. Doing a bunch of different hustles means you spread yourself thin and cannot devote the time necessary to turn one of your hustles into a legitimate business.


Choose one of your side hustles to focus on. Give yourself a time frame where you will dedicate all of your energy to growing this one hustle. Focus can do wonders.




You’re grasping at straws:

It’s difficult to grow a business when you have no idea what need you fulfill in the marketplace. I’m of the belief that not everyone needs a full-fledged 100-page business plan to make their business work.

However, you do need to establish what you do, why you do it, your business model, who your target market is and what’s your unique edge. It’s also a good idea to picture where you see your business six months, one year and five years from now. If you focus on day to day activities, you’re not doing the forward thinking that’s necessary to grow your side hustle into a full-time business.



Put together an abbreviated business plan if you need one. Don’t fall into analysis paralysis thinking it needs to be perfect. You don’t have to feel trapped by your business plan. You can change directions as you’re operating.

 Another planning exercise you can do is think about how many people you want to serve and why.

You can reach more prospects through marketing/advertising. One of the easiest and cheapest/free marketing/advertising means you can use to promote your service is email marketing. Click here to learn more.



You’re playing small:

You think you want success, but you’re subconsciously holding yourself back. Playing small leads to small growth. People play small in different ways. Maybe you haven’t yet set up business systems to take on more clients because you’re subconsciously scared of getting too busy.

Perhaps there are clients you want to pitch but you’re scared of rejection so you procrastinate by doing useless tasks like tweaking your social media bios.



When you’re stuck, start asking yourself some of the hard questions. Why are you scared of taking on more work? Why are you scared to pitch new clients? Confront your fears so you can push forward and grow. If you’re scared of getting too busy, it may be time to raise your prices so you can do less work for more money. Fear of rejection is common when pitching. Practice your pitch and try to make cold leads warmer so you can feel confident.




Conclusion:

Side hustles grow into full-time businesses because of strategy and the right mindset. Take some time to sit down and think through what area of business you want to specialize in, what your purpose is and how to up your game. Nothing in business happens miraculously. Success happens through intentional steps and learning experiences. Stay focused on where you can offer the most value to customers and you should be able to successfully turn your side hustle income into a full-time income.






By Taylor Gordon; due.com/blog