460: Market Research on a Budget
Brought to you by: Pet Sitters Associates. Use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
What does it mean to do market research? As a pet business owner, it’s imperative that you have an understanding of what is driving your local economy and purchasing decisions of your ideal clients. Once we understand the ecosystem that our business exists in, we can make well informed and powerful decisions. We break down a simple (and free) process you can use to gain insights into your local community and better understand how to serve your clients.
Main topics:
Defining market research
Putting a plan together
Continual research
What to do with the results
Main takeaway: Regularly revisit and update your research to stay current with market trends and customer needs.
Links:
ProTrainings: For 10% off any of their courses, use CPR-petsitterconfessional
Give us a call! (636) 364-8260
Follow us on: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, & TuneIn
Email us at: feedback@petsitterconfessional.com
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
business, market, clients, services, pet, research, understanding, local, pet sitters, industry, competitor analysis, people, work, surveys, confessional, offer, target, serve, pricing, specific
SPEAKERS
Collin Funkhouser, Meghan
Meghan 00:00
Oh hello, I'm Meghan.
Collin Funkhouser 00:03
I'm Collin.
Meghan 00:04
And we are the hosts of pet sitter confessional and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you to our sponsor for today's episode, pet sitters associates and our Patreon supporters who have found value in the over 450 episodes and want to support us with a little bit of their hard earned money every month. If you have found some of our episodes helpful as well and would like to keep the podcast going, you can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support, to see all the ways that you can help out. We are getting ready to attend the Texas pet sitters conference. And we can't wait to see everybody it's about a month away. And we will be podcasting from the conference as well. So keep an ear out for that. We had a great question from one of our Patreon supporters. Her name is Yvonne. And she had asked about market research as a business, what is it how to do it without breaking the bank? And we wanted to make a full episode about it. So here we are, because it's a great question. Market research is nothing more than just the process of gathering, analyzing, and then interpreting information about a market, including information about your target audience, we talk all the time about your target client, who you want to talk to who you are talking to your competitors, and then the overall industry. So here we will define your market as who and where you are trying to serve.
Collin Funkhouser 01:19
It seems a little counterintuitive to talk about market research in defining that we'll also using the word market. So here when we say market, it includes things like your geographic area, the services that you offer your target customers, competition in the local economy, and then other trends or cultural things going on as those tend to change from year to year or decade over decade. Basically think of this as the entire ecosystem that you and your business are in. It's everything that will influence your business, and your client. Market research also involves understanding the dynamics of the market that you operate in. It's about assessing the what potential customers want, or need, and identifying how these needs and wants can be met through your services. We're
Meghan 02:03
going to walk through a simple process. And each one of these is just one aspect of a robust market research system. Depending on your exact needs, and your current knowledge or specific questions that you have these may change. But remember that the goal here is to have a full understanding of the ecosystem your business runs in and the clients that live in your area. Firstly wants to identify the target market. This is going to be pretty easy if you already have a business that's up and running. But you want to define the service area that you plan to serve. Research the demographics of pet owners in that area using local census data, or social media groups or community boards. How many people live in your area, and how many people have pets use the US Census data. If you are in the United States, check out statistics and Pew Research for other surveys and reports on consumer trends. You could also attend local events or pet related gatherings to get a sense of the community. A few months ago, we went through research to find what percent of workers in our area drive to work, we serve two different areas. And it was different for both of those areas. But we found that information on how long their drive was, and it gave a great insight into where our target market was actually living versus where they worked. So we could direct our efforts on advertising and staffing to those areas. After you've researched your target market, then you want to do a competitor analysis. So make a list in a Google sheet or an Excel sheet of all of the dog walking and pet sitting services in your area, all of the companies all of the solo sitters any business, and then use Google and Facebook searches and Yelp to help you in this. When you go on Facebook, you can type in pet sitter into specific groups. And you can see all of the people that have searched for I need a pet sitter in that Facebook group, and then see who was recommended on those posts. It gives you great insight to all of the potential people that you may be competing against. And it really does the research for you. Instead of having to scour the internet and do lots of Google searches, you can really go to your local Facebook groups, especially if there's 1000s of people in them and just search pet sitter or dog walker, and a lot of those posts will come up, it
Collin Funkhouser 04:10
will really give you a sense of just how many other people and businesses are out there doing this kind of work. Because then what you'll do is go and visit their websites visit their social media pages to understand what they are offering and more about their pricing. If you want to know what kind of web traffic they get and compare that to yours, use something like simple web or Alexa. And what these will do is these will tell you how many people are visiting that website on a given over a given period of time. And just to give you a sense of how popular that those are. For yourself. Make sure that you have Google Analytics connected to your website so you have something to compare this too. While
Meghan 04:49
you're looking at their social media and website note any unique services or marketing strategies that they use. So for instance, are there is there specific language or colors or services that they use? Can you figure out who they are trying to target? Is it the same one as you or somebody totally different? submit their website to chat GPT and ask it to explain what they do and who, based on their language and brand, who their target market is, you could do this for yourself as well. But it's also important to do this for competitors to see, are you both trained to go after the same people? Do you have the same prices, similar services, how comparable are your businesses,
Collin Funkhouser 05:24
this also will help you build a list of people to refer out to if you are unable to serve particular clients in different areas, as well as what kind of service mixes that they have. So that you know, again, is this a direct overlap with somebody else, okay, that's going to change how I market and target and price and how I communicate my services, versus there could be 100 other businesses and there's no overlap, well, then you are free to go about and know that you're not competing directly with anybody in particular,
Meghan 05:54
when you are doing the market research, it's important to also look at industry trends. So if you follow pet care blogs, you might also want to follow magazines and industry reports. We know that the National Association for professional pet sitters and pet sitters international have very specific statistics on the people in our industry. So look at those, get connected with those and also stay connected with things like pet consumer magazine to see what pet owners are also reading and viewing and, and looking at, you may consider joining these professional organizations or other online forums or Facebook groups related to pet care services, we have a Facebook group called sitter confessionals. There's also next level pet business and pet sitters forum that are great for discussing all things pet care, you can also attend a pet industry, trade shows or conferences, there's a ton of them out there. Now the Texas pet sitters conference and the Florida Pet Services Association, you don't have to be members of those states in order to attend the conferences, check out the links in the show notes to see all of the ones out there. And
Collin Funkhouser 06:52
this is important because as you are plugged into the industry at large, you get a sense of trends that are happening that may take five years or so to reach down to your exact local level. You can see trends and talk to other businesses across the country to get a sense of consumer expectations or pricing or structures or new services ideas that you can apply to your own business and bring to your local community. So while it is important to stay connected to much larger and broader trends across your country, across the region, knowing how that applies to your specific market, we see this all the time of Well, that may work for you over in XYZ place, but that would never cut it where we live. And that's fine. But understanding those differences and then how that applies or doesn't to you is where the where this discussion comes in.
Meghan 07:41
Yeah, I mean, you will always want to start hyperlocal exactly where you are your neighborhood and then expand out from there. Because as we are seeing the industry is going to not so many house sittings anymore and going to employees instead of independent contractors. So these big picture, high level things you do need to be aware of. And
Collin Funkhouser 08:01
a lot of understanding that local behavior is through understanding your customer needs and their particular preferences. You can do this through creating surveys with questions about their needs, and preferences and distribute this through social media, local community boards or in person at pet friendly events and locations, I would suggest that you start with your existing clients to make sure that you are serving them well. And then broaden this out to your community in your town. You can also conduct informal interviews with pet owners that are attending dog parks at pet stores or other community events. What's important to know about this, though, is that this is this kind of thing this surveying is very time consuming, just as anybody who does this kind of consumer surveys for a living just how much time it takes. And importantly here, you might not also be connecting with your actual target market, you could talk to 1000 people at a pet store. But if the target market that you actually want to do doesn't shop at a pet store, it's completely pointless for you. So be extremely careful with this and just how much time you dedicate to it. We
Meghan 09:04
talked a minute ago about doing a competitor analysis and part of that is the pricing analysis. gather those those prices from your competitors. Once you've made a sheet of all of your competitors, it's important to gather pricing information and you may not be able to find it some people don't have it on their website or it's not readily apparent on their Facebook page. But once you have a general consensus of everybody else, you do need to consider your own budget and your costs and the value of your time which you can never get back to set a base price. You don't want to initially set that base price based off of anybody else because you have your own budget that is nobody else's you know your numbers. You may find it necessary to adjust your pricing based on the services you offer and your local market rates because of cost of living is different everywhere. But it has a major role in your pricing. So don't even worry about when someone else across the globe or even a state away is charging because it's it should not be the same
Collin Funkhouser 09:59
Seeing the pricing of people who are also offering similar services will help you understand how you need to be marketing and who you are connected with as far as a target audience and a target client as well, it will help adjust how you present that may lead you to changing your branding to match certain price points that you are trying to hit. This is where the holistic approach really comes into play.
Meghan 10:25
You need to be strategic when doing a market analysis. Think about the marketing channels that you have, identify where your target client is, and spend time there both online and offline. We talk about this all the time, knowing who your people are, and going and finding them. But how do you do that? How does how does that practically play out in your business, you could start with your existing clients if they're if there are certain clients that you love and want to target their demographic or their neighborhoods specifically, you could go and ask them, you can collaborate with businesses and ask about where they find clients and who is going to them search on social media follow forums and online communities for pet owners or dig into Google Trends and use their keyword tools. I think it boils down to knowing the kind of person you want to serve and then going and finding them experimenting with different marketing strategies like social media advertising, local flyers or partnerships with local pet businesses or not even pet businesses at all just other businesses, you could track that effectiveness of different channels and different strategies to see what is going to work best
Collin Funkhouser 11:30
be out talking to the financial advisors be talking to the bankers, the house cleaners, the yard crews to get an idea of the kind of people that they're serving and see if there's an overlap with you. All of the topics of market research that we've discussed at this point have been focused on our clients where they are and how we can best serve them and looking at our competitors as well. A very key aspect of this is also understanding the regulatory environment. So spend time researching your local regulations regarding the kind of pet care business that you are running. Actually contact your local government or a business lawyer for specific legal requirements that are going to apply or not to you and ensure that you have any necessary licenses, permits, the insurance, whatever that is ensure that you actually have that. So yes, you are going to have to talk with the city or the council and be prepared to explain what you do and how you do it over and over again. Get an answer, write it down, get the person's name and then call back the next day and see if you can get a talk to a different person and see if you get the same answer. It's going to take some research, you can't really it's hard for us to understand and dig into city bylaws and zoning requirements and the business searches that they anticipate. actually go and talk to somebody and explain what you do to get a very specific answer from them. It's worth putting in this time because we don't want to be caught five years 10 years in into running a business with not having everything in order and not understanding the regulatory environment or not understanding changes to the regulatory environment.
Meghan 13:03
robust market research is not complete without a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Reflect on your own strengths and weaknesses as a business owner, so get a little introspective here. But then also identify opportunities in your market, like unmet needs or underserved areas, things you find out from your surveys and general research and then recognize the potential threats, like new competitors or changes in local regulations or gas prices. Because those seem to always just be going up for large service areas that is going to make a difference. Overall, though, remember, at the end of this market research is an ongoing process. This is not a one and done thing. This is not a set it and forget it thing, this is not a I can only do this when I start my business. No, this is an ongoing, probably annual thing that you need to be doing regularly revisit and update your research to stay current with market trends and customer needs. It's never a one and done thing, which can be a little frustrating. But you do need to stay on top of how the market is changing, or not changing around you. Yeah,
Collin Funkhouser 14:05
let's say you define your ideal client, you nail your advertising to them, you understand what's driving your local economy. What happens in the next 10 years? Are your clients still the same? Is the same advertising still working? Is it still is the economy driving your local community still the same thing? Are there other outside influences and cultural things that have shifted that you're not aware of? You won't know until you look so stay on top of that with an annual look at how your local market is doing.
Meghan 14:34
Let's say you had done research and 2019 and nothing since then you probably wouldn't understand the client demands and their expectations for in the faster booking process that is really needed in today's market.
Collin Funkhouser 14:46
Part of that ongoing market research is to make sure that you are staying connected with your local business community through local small business development centers or a business networking events or groups or even your local chamber of commerce. These are an immense wealth of information Shayne, our local chamber actually provides demographic data that's been extremely beneficial to our business things like percent of homeowners versus renters. And the reason that's key is because in one of our service areas, finding a pet friendly rental is basically impossible right now. So we know that our total addressable market is not the total number of people living in the area, because a percentage of them are living in rentals, which most likely don't allow pets. It also gives things about age ranges, demographic data, the leading industries in the town, so we know who to focus in where people are likely coming from and their work hours. It also talks about household income, which helps us understand more about the cost of living for where we're serving. Somebody
Meghan 15:42
that's always important to is pet sitters associates, as pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members. And that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help for over 20 years, they have provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you could take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote at pets@llc.com. You can get a discount when joining by clicking membership petsitter confessional and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at pets@llc.com.
Collin Funkhouser 16:19
If you're wanting to take a deep dive into more hard numbers, industry specific reports or about economic trends in general, try visiting Google Scholar to search for those actual research papers on the industry or your local economy and what's driving and influencing those. Because if your local economy is driven hard by manufacturing, staying on top of manufacturing trends can actually be extremely beneficial to you and understanding how people's personal budgets may change as that industry is impacted. Or you can visit a public library which everybody loves to do. Interestingly, a lot of Public Library's most of them, in fact, have access to so many market research tools and databases to really drill down into data. So ask your library especially if you are in the US to see whether they have access to one of these are not you might not have access to all of these, but even one of these can be extremely beneficial. There's something called a reference UAE it's a powerful online research tool that provides detailed information on millions of businesses and consumers in the US and Canada. Also, as Megan mentioned earlier statistic offers statistics and studies from over 18,000 different resources. It's a really great resource for finding data on market trends, consumer behavior, and really industry specific information. There's also something called a Business Source Premier, it's another database of economic information, you may ask them about Mintel reports, which provides market research reports covering various industries and consumer sectors. It gives insight specifically into consumer trends, different market analyses and the competitive landscape. And these are updated extremely frequently. Factiva offers access to a more global news and more global business information to see big level and high level trends. LexisNexis is one that I've used before. And it's known for actually legal, regulatory and business information. It's a massive database about news financial information. And then there's IBIS World. This is this offers, again, industry specific reports. So it might not have one about pet care, but it may have one about Pet Services, or veterinary or even your local industry reports that can help you understand the kind of people that you're wanting to serve. So there's a lot of potential information out there, ask a library because they may have a subscription to one of these. It's really important to note that at this point, we have not spent any money at all on any of this. We've used free resources at the library. We've done free Google searches, we've surveyed our existing clients, and potentially those in our community. We've done searches on Facebook and social media to do a competitor analysis. And we're talking with our own clients and using those free resources and getting connected to the larger business community. But what have we spent time this takes a lot of our time to do
Meghan 19:06
you probably won't get through all this in a weekend or less than a month or two, it's going to take a while, especially if this is your first time giving everything else that you have to do the actual running of your business. But that's okay. Recognize that this isn't something that you can do in an afternoon and that you're going to need to work on this and make an intentional effort with it. Because local businesses really do need to have a full understanding of this particularly service base do you need to be targeting your person and going after them? We love talking with realtors and businesses in manufacturing and shipping. It gives great insight into our local economy and its ups and downs.
Collin Funkhouser 19:43
So what now we've gone through everything. We're sitting with a Google spreadsheet, we've got a lot of list of phone numbers, maybe we've attended a bunch of meetings and notes in a notebook. What do we actually do now? What how does this impact how we move forward as a business?
Meghan 19:57
You may consider tailoring your services. Make sure that it aligns with what customers actually want. For example, if there's a high demand during a local sports game, you may offer Game Day packages that clients can purchase. Or if you found that there are a lot of potential business executives in your area, offer those high end and premium services that they may not be expecting, but really ultimately want.
Collin Funkhouser 20:20
As you are tailoring your services, you may find that you have to adapt your pricing. So keep them competitive, but still profitable for you, as we talk a lot about make sure that it reflects the value that you're bringing while being attractive to your target client. And that's my understanding the income levels, the cost of living, and the kind of services that you're offering with the clients that you're trying to target out is so important. If you find as you're doing a competitor analysis and you're looking at pricing, if you actually find that you are way more than everybody else doing a similar service. Instead of lowering your prices, make sure that you are marketing those services in the right way, and that you're actually targeting the right people for that price range. And in that you may find that you have to change your marketing strategy entirely. You may see that you have to shift to more or less social media, depending on what you find about your clients and where they are or are not. You gonna have to move to more events or partnerships with local businesses. If you find that that's where your audience is. That way, you're not dumping good money after bad. And instead of saying no, I have to always use social media, because that's what everybody tells me to do. If your target clients aren't there, stop dumping money and time into that and instead go to where they actually are.
Meghan 21:30
After your market research, you may find that you may need to change your business operations and optimize them make them more efficient, maybe because of regulations or your service area or client feedback. For example, your city may have just passed a law that does not allow off leash walks anywhere. And that's what you were previously doing well, you need to change your business. If you find that your clients want longer walks, or that is what your potential clients are needing, you know that you can't book as many in one day. So you're going to need to either offer group walks or just tailor your services to longer walks and up your prices. You have to change how your business operates based off of your market research what you find and what clients are wanting. And
Collin Funkhouser 22:13
after all of this after everything, can you answer this question? Is there enough addressable market to sustain your business with your current services? Or do you need to change something maybe add something? In Josh Kaufman's book The Personal MBA, he talks about doing a basic market research and market analysis and ask some really basic questions, and we've hit on all of them except this one, market size, right? How many people are actually buying things like this? Or would potentially buy things like this in your area? This is where that sweep of the competitive analysis really comes in, give you an understanding of is this a large market with a lot of people serving this? Or is this a small market with a few people doing this? Or is this a brand new service that nobody's ever heard of? Because then you have to be the one to make the effort to get that idea out there. And target really specifically to this. And market size can be a little confusing, because let's say you do a competitor analysis and you find that there are three dog walker companies in your area? Well, are there only three because there's not a market for this? And you're actually going to find yourself struggling to actually build your business? Or are there only three, because they haven't been doing the work to market their business and get connected with a target audience. This is where we we never look at just one element of a total market analysis. It by itself, we wouldn't we would want to compare this with with maybe client surveys. Or maybe you'd want to compare this with those Facebook posts. And you see, man, there are a lot of people asking for these services. I don't see anybody volunteering or anybody putting their name out there. Okay, well, there's a gap here in the market of the demand is high. But the current businesses are not able to fill that wanting to fill that or know how to fill that you can come in and fill that gap. And that's where again, where we start laying each each each aspect each question each day to on top of itself, you get a fuller and more robust photo of this. And again, we can't stress this enough, you have to keep the feedback coming. You can't forget to do this next year or the year after that. So build systems to automate sending out requests for feedback to your client, or just have a notepad on your desk that reminds you to do this next year or an event in your calendar, set reminders to check other businesses for what they're doing. That takes a lot of work, going to each website, searching out their Facebook page, checking them out on Instagram. So set aside a couple hours every quarter or twice a year to do that survey, you know, okay, I looked at them last year. Let me see where they are out. Let's see, there's somebody new that I saw on that Facebook post. I'm going to add them to the list and I know what I have to do about this. And
Meghan 24:53
again check those industry changes frequently to get an idea of where your clients will be in years to come. Listen to podcasts, read books, talk to people read blogs, look at the big organizations and what kind of things they are putting out there for pet owners. We would love to know how you have done market research in your own business. You can email us at feedback at Pet Sitter confessional.com. or look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pitzer confessional. Thank you for taking your time and listening to this today time is something we can never get back. So we really appreciate you listening to this. And thank you also to pet sitters associates. We will talk with you next time.
Collin Funkhouser 25:29
Bye
