When running a startup company, doing market research is an essential task to know more about your customers. But with all the work that you have to do daily, it can be hard to run a proper research study. Here, outsourcing can be an effective solution. Learn how to do it the right way through Virtua Solutions’ help.
Why Outsource Your Startup Company Market Research?
One thing that you might wonder at this point is why you would want a third party to handle market research work for you. After all, you will likely have your team ready to do the work. But that team might be too small, limiting how much research work they can do. Beyond the size, there are other key advantages of outsourcing your research work.
A More Objective Point Of View
While you may try to avoid it, there is always a risk of your in-house team introducing some information bias into your market research. That can often be due to the team’s preconceived notion of how the business should work. Such bias can give you a less accurate picture of the market.
Third-party research teams have less risk of falling into such biases. Since they are independent of the company, they have a more objective view of the market they study. These teams can also provide insights you might not have thought of before.
More Effective Research Practices
Many third-party marketing research providers have been in the business for years. As such, they have already refined their research techniques. In particular, they have made the work more efficient, ensuring you get your research data quickly.
That efficiency also benefits your in-house team. With experts handling the research, your internal team can focus on developing strategies based on the research data. They can even use the external research team’s expert knowledge to refine these strategies.
What Your Startup Company Should Consider When Outsourcing Market Research
Once you decide to outsource your startup company market research, you need to plan it carefully. Like any outsourcing effort, you need the best firm for the job. For this, you should consider the following factors.
How The Firm Works With Clients
The first thing you would want to confirm with the research firm is how they will provide reports. For example, you would want to see how often they send interim reports about their progress. You might also want to check if they can provide regular updates.
This is especially important if their research is in a fast-paced market. You would want to see more reports to plan.
Additionally, review their methodology. That will give you an idea of how applicable they would be for the market study you want. For instance, they might rely more on focus groups or interviews. See if such methods would work with the respondents you intend to target.
How The Firm Understands Your Objectives
It is also essential that the research firm has a good understanding of your research objectives. For that, you also need to be clear about those objectives. In particular, you should have an idea of the information you want to get. That will help the third-party research team to better design their methodology.
You should also be clear about what the data’s purpose is. For instance, you might use the information to plan out a new product launch. Or you could use it to discover a new niche your competitors have not reached.
By knowing the exact purpose of the marketing research, the third-party firm can do more than just design the right method for you. They will also be able to present the results in a format relevant to your specific needs. That makes it easy for you to run to the results and apply them for that purpose without going through the tedious task of organizing everything.
We at Virtua Solutions understand this particular consideration well. The virtual assistants we assign to your market research team are adept at collecting and preparing a large amount of data. They can then turn this data into comprehensive but easy-to-follow reports you can present to your startup business stakeholders right away.
Overseeing Your Startup Company’s Outsourced Research Work
While the third-party team can conduct the work by themselves, outsourcing your market research is not a fire-and-forget deal. You still need to oversee everything. And one thing you need to decide on is how much control you shall exercise.
For that, decide how much of the project to send out. For instance, you might simply want to outsource the data collection tasks and have the organization and reporting done in-house. Doing so will give you better project control, ensuring that everything aligns with your overall research goals.
It would also help you to do some trial runs. You can have your outsourced data-gathering team start with a smaller section of the actual sample size assigned to them. That strategy will help you see how well they perform on the field before going full blast.
Virtua Solutions also prefers this setup as it helps us refine our agents’ methods. We work with you continuously to determine areas that need improvement. Those meetings are held regularly throughout the study to accommodate any changes you might want to introduce.
We also make sure that there is ample communication between us and your internal research team. Once the research project is underway, we set up different communication channels, like chat and email. We also discuss different data standardization strategies to ensure that we are all on the same page.
Keep Your Startup Company Informed Through Our Help In Market Research
With Virtua’s help, your startup company can gain a lot of handy market data faster and more efficiently. So contact us today. Our highly trained research specialists are ready to lend a hand in your studies.