For startups or small scale businesses, knowing the market landscape is vitally important. Whether you are launching a new product or are a player in a small niche, the accurate information regarding your customers is very important. Market research is very a very important aspect and is certainly part of very complete plan for a business. However, the whole idea of researching a large market can be daunting. You would need resources, time and money to be invested and all done with no guarantee whatsoever of a useful result. Small businesses can be really very hurt by such a task at hand. Here are some tips which can help small business owners to conduct their market research.Start By framing a budgetFirst thing you should know about market research is that it is scalable and hence can cost from almost nothing to a lot of money. Everything is dependent on how much you are willing to invest. Hence, the first step would be to set a skeleton with some room for expansion depending on the positive outcome of your market research.Broadly decide the medium of researchYou can do an online market research or an offline one. Both follow different sorts of strategy, with the core idea being the same. However, since you would need tailor your plans according to the medium, it’s a good idea to choose it right from the start. For online businesses, having an online market survey is most useful because of its lower costs and wider reach. Moreover, doing an online market research gives you more avenues to grow.Conduct surveys or pollsThis is the most direct and hence the surest of ways to obtain data regarding your market. What’s important is that you ask less question but the correct ones. There are two forms of surveys, one is a closed form survey and another is open one. In the first variant, people are asked to answer in yes, no and maybe or rate something in discrete numbers. In the latter case, one is asked to describe their reactions or answers. The first and the second form give almost the same sort of information. However, the first one is taken by larger number of people, while latter is avoided because it takes too much time.Track Sales recordsThis is especially useful if you decide on doing an offline market research. You can find the data on the sales records at various stores and find our information like at what time of the year, people buy more things, or what people like to buy in different times of the year. This sort of information from market research will help you fix modulate your sales volumes and also channelize your advertising efforts.