Consumers today hold immense power. Consumers can do their own research and decide to buy your service or product on their own; more likely still, they are likely to read reviews online or ask friends for recommendations rather than speaking directly with sales reps. Have your marketing strategies evolved with how consumers shop, research, and buy?
In order to do this effectively, it is vital that you first gain a firm grasp on who your target market is as well as the factors impacting their purchase decisions. Market research analysts allow companies to define their target audience and gather opinions and comments directly from customers in real-time, either within their organization or via an outside market research agency. Companies use market research data collected during market studies to enhance products, and user experiences, plan out future initiatives with precision, generate quality leads quickly and increase conversion rates.
What Is Market Research?
Market research involves collecting information on target audiences and customers to evaluate new products' success or an existing one's perception as part of your team's attempt to communicate value effectively through your brand.
Market research can offer answers to various queries regarding the industry's current state; however, it should not be seen as an instant source of customer insight for digital marketer. Instead, market researchers take several weeks or even months to gain a full picture of all aspects of business within an industry and look closely at multiple aspects relating to it - just one area can give insight into customer desires.
Experience in your industry or with customers can provide useful guidance; however, market research services provide additional benefits beyond this approach. Consider two aspects when conducting market research:
- Your competitors likely boast an extensive customer base and possess experienced professionals within their industry, giving them an advantage. Your immediate resources may overlap somewhat with those of their immediate resources - thus giving your answers greater coverage than they might.
- Customers do not reflect the opinions of an entire market; rather, they reflect only what segments have already shown an affinity towards your brand.
Why Is Market Research Essential?
Primary market research exists with one aim - determining its demand from target customers to provide accurate predictions as to its success or otherwise within that particular target market.
- Your product/service should have the potential to succeed by researching its likelihood and appropriate pricing while understanding which customers would most be attracted by it.
- Marketing research allows you to become more innovative. Furthermore, this investigation enables you to devise new strategies and set yourself up for future success. So having as much insight into your competitors as possible is vital for survival.
- Researching your market enables early identification of problems, leading to faster business expansion. Avoiding potential pitfalls will save both time and money in the future.
- Market research can assist your decisions by giving you access to data that quickly enables you to draw accurate conclusions about customer satisfaction, which allows for quicker expansion plans of business operations. You may discover huge existing gaps and use those as leverage against which to expand operations further.
- Without knowing your strengths and weaknesses, competition may surpass you in performance. Market research tools will assist in pinpointing where the focus should lie or which areas require extra focus or investment.
- It helps increase efficiency as well as sales.
Lean Market Research: Benefits
Lean market research can bring many advantages. Vehicle marketing solutions provide businesses with cost-cutting benefits by reaching target areas more quickly and effectively than traditional approaches like hiring marketing agencies can do, creating greater market competitiveness while improving your bottom line.
Primary Research And Secondary Research
You have two choices for conducting market research based on what kind of studies and information your business needs. Qualitative market research concentrates on public opinion about products currently on sale in the marketplace. At the same time, quantitative analyses use data analysis tools techniques to detect trends from public record information. Prim and Sec markets research provide two methods market research companies can employ to gather actionable intelligence about their product line - let's review them now.
Primary Research
Conducting primary market research to gain a first-hand understanding of your customers and target market can provide invaluable knowledge indispensable in segmenting markets and creating buyer personas. Market researchers typically divide primary research into two distinct categories: exploratory and specific.
Exploratory Primary Research
Exploratory primary research seeks to identify issues worth solving collectively rather than focusing on measuring trends directly, often as part of its initial process before any actual research occurs. Methodologies may include open-ended questions or group surveys for this phase.
Research Specific
Specific primary market research typically follows exploratory market research, delving deeper into issues and opportunities already identified as being crucial by businesses. Specific studies allow businesses to narrow in on a particular segment or audience with questions designed to tackle an identified challenge or difficulty.
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Secondary Research
Your secondary research should encompass any public data you can find to draw inferences (e.g., trend reports, statistics on the market, or content from industry publications. Sales figures, or product inventory figures). Secondary research can also help analyze competitors and should include the following:
Public Sources
When conducting secondary research, public sources will serve as your initial and most accessible resources - often free - making them easily accessible and useful to you as the researcher. According to Entrepreneur magazine, government statistics such as those available through the Bureau of Labor & Statistics or Census Bureau may offer great value when conducting this type of investigation.
Commercial Sources
They usually consist of market reports compiled by research agencies such as Pew Gartner or Forrester that contain industry insights. Although this data can be easily carried with you and downloaded, its acquisition costs money.
Internal Research
Market research performed through internal sources should receive greater consideration than it currently receives since you already possess market information! You can utilize historical customer health records such as retention rate or average revenue per sale figures to draw meaningful insights about what customers need or desire.
How Can You Perform Primary Research?
Primary research allows you to collect previously unseen data tailored specifically to your company and provides current insight. By undertaking primary research, you may gain the following:
Qualitative Vs. Quantitative
In qualitative research, non-numerical data sources like language are gathered, examined, and interpreted. When conducting qualitative market research, questions are open-ended with 6-10 respondents for closer introspection of the subjects being researched. This allows a deeper exploration of subjects.
Qualitative studies offer ample scope for creativity and interpretation. Yet, researchers must still collect as much data as possible to quickly write up findings. Quantitative research involves objectively gathering numerical information to describe, predict or regulate aspects of interest.
Quantitative research seeks to make accurate predictions and extend findings from small populations to broader ones, with its primary aim of discovering general laws of behavior or experience that can be applied across contexts. Furthermore, analyses help test theories to support or disprove them.
Specific Versus Broad
An exploratory approach takes an open, broad approach, often including in-depth interviews with one individual or small groups of people. Initial research should focus on potential problems that should be tackled collectively rather than customer trends.
Specific research can help address such problems. It involves more formalized interviews. A business may use specific research by gathering smaller customers or subsets more targeted of its target clients and asking questions directly about an issue to facilitate its resolution. Once we've reviewed the various broad categories of market research, let's dive deeper into different forms of investigation that you could pursue.
Market Research Types
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Interviews
Face-to-face interviews (both physically and virtually) allow for natural conversations that flow smoothly, giving you ample opportunities to observe body language from interviewees as you get information and answers that help create buyer personas of target customers that reflect age, family size, income level, occupation challenges faced at work as well as any additional aspects relevant. These buyer personas will help guide marketing strategy development by helping identify product features or content to add to websites or build buyer personas of customers that might become customers over time.
Read More: What Is Market Research, How To Do It, And Some Examples
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Focus Groups
A focus group is an audience carefully chosen to evaluate, demonstrate and provide feedback for a product/service in question; provide specific answers or respond to specific queries for market research purposes. Conducting this kind of focus group research can help identify the unique qualities of your product in its niche marketplace; ask this group some focus questions and show some examples about your service offering before using their feedback to refine and improve upon them.
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Researchers Are Conducting Product/Service Use Research
This market research method gives an idea about your product or service's usability for the target audience.
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Observational Research
To gain the full benefit from observational research, observe how your audience interacts with your product/service and what aspects they appreciate about its UX. Also, identify any roadblocks that might simplify the adoption of your offering for everyone involved.
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Buyer Persona Research
Researching buyer personas gives an in-depth view of your target audience's needs, challenges, and motivations behind wanting your service or product while outlining what can be done to meet those requirements.
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Research Market Segmentation
Market segmentation helps give you a deeper insight into your target audience's expectations, discomfort points, and overall goals.
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Pricing Research
Research can give you a deeper insight into what similar services and products sell for in your locality as well as an idea of the amounts people are likely to be willing to pay for your offering. This helps establish price ranges for listings - vital information when developing pricing strategies and business plans.
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Competitive Analysis
Understanding your industry and market is vitally important. Competitive analysis provides a chance to examine what works well, understand your audience's perception of products offered, competitors you need to compete against, and strategies and plans that could set your firm apart from its rivals.
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Customers Satisfaction and Loyalty Survey
Customer satisfaction and loyalty studies provide insights into what drives customer retention (e.g., rewards, loyalty programs, and exceptional service) to discover ways to enhance customer delight. You may use CRM systems such as Salesforce CRM to automate surveys that collect feedback directly from your customer base.
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Brand Awareness Research
Brand Awareness Research measures what your target audience knows and recognizes about your brand or company and how the target audience connects your product or service with them. This data allows companies to monitor brand recognition research to pinpoint target demographics to measure growth potential and brand retention.
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Campaign Research
Research involves reviewing past campaigns to google analytics and their efficacy with your target audience and experiment to understand which parts resonated and reached your desired goal audience. Doing this research will assist future campaigns by providing key data points on which to base decisions.
Let's examine how to conduct Primary market research yourself step-by-step.
How To Perform Market Research
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Define Your Buyer Persona
Buyer Personas (also referred to as Marketing personas) come in handy in understanding customer purchasing habits and discovering why customers make certain decisions. These fictionalized generalized representations help visualize target audiences while streamlining communication; additionally, they inform your marketing campaigns strategy by including key traits within these personas, such as:
Age, Gender, And Location to Major Challenges Personas help you understand who your audience members are and how best to reach them. While more than one may fit your company, that is perfectly fine - when optimizing and planning content and campaigns, each one must be considered!
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Pick A Persona
Utilizing the information gathered, use this to select groups to target in market research. These should represent your ideal customers so you can better understand their wants, challenges, and purchasing habits, specifically those who have recently purchased or have decided not to. Here are a few more guidelines to assist with finding participants for your study:
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Market Research: How To Hire The Ideal Individuals
\When conducting market research, selecting individuals with similar characteristics will allow for the greatest chance of success with any given project. Furthermore, make sure the individuals choose to meet all these requirements: Every participant should engage ten others. If your research covers multiple personas, ensure each has its own sample group.
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Opt For People You Have Interacted With Recently
In particular, when working within niche markets or having lengthy sales cycles, targeting people recently evaluated is ideal, as their answers should provide enough detail for interview questions to be effectively answered.
Mix Up Participants
It is key that when gathering participants, it includes customers of your products and individuals who have tried something from competitors or decided not to purchase any item yet. While customers are most likely to come forward, volunteer information they already own can provide more of an overall view of the market than just recruiting customers directly.
Please refer to the following details to select participants for your activity.
- Make a list of recently purchased customers - this will likely be your main target group. Use a CRM with segmentation features to run reports on recently closed deals within six months and filter by criteria of choice; alternatively, work with the sales team to provide their list to you.
- Your team should create a list of customers that were active during evaluation but did not complete purchases, including customers that may have purchased from your competitor and customers that did not purchase from either of you. In order to access this information efficiently, you may use CRM or any sales tracking systems available in order to compile this information.
- Invite participants to social media. Reach out to those who follow you but have yet to purchase; perhaps they would be open to speaking about why they did not purchase from you.
- Utilize Your Network. Advise former coworkers and LinkedIn connections that you are conducting a research study; even if they don't qualify, they could know of coworkers, friends, or relatives who qualify and could make great resources for conducting it.
- Simply provide participants with exclusive content access as an incentive and offer them free rewards once your study has concluded; an alternative approach may include writing them a handwritten "thank you" note as soon as the research project has wrapped up.
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Identify Key Competitors
Listing your competitors doesn't become an exercise of simple comparison between companies X and Y. Divisions within businesses may directly compete with your main service or product offering, even if its brand focuses on another direction. Apple, for instance, is well known for its smartphones and laptops; however, Apple Music faces strong competition in Spotify's music streaming service. Competitors for website traffic may include blogs, YouTube channels, and publications offering products that differ dramatically from yours. An oral care company might compete against Health.com and Prevention magazines on specific blogs about hygiene or health despite these publications not selling actual products directly.
Read More: A Successful Method Of Conducting Market Research
Locating Industry Competitors
Determine the industries or sectors your product/service falls within to quickly and effectively identify any competitors you might encounter in education, construction, media, health care, retail financial, agricultural, telecom telecommunications. Continue your list, but expand upon it by researching an industry that interests you and then creating one using that term as your focus. These lists can be created in several different ways:
- G2Crowd quadrant: When starting secondary research in certain industries, G2Crowd offers an effective starting point. Utilizing social and user data from millions of sources worldwide, this platform aggregates social, user, and company profiles in "quadrants," with each industry represented accordingly. G2 Crowd specializes in digital marketing services as well as IT. They also offer HR support, eCommerce storefront development, and other business-related offerings.
- Companies such as Forrester and Gartner provide gated and ungated reports about leading vendors across various industries annually. On Forrester's website, you can select "Latest Research" in its menu bar to search for their latest material using various criteria. These reports can then be saved onto your computer.
- Social media provides an ideal avenue for searching for market research companies, once you master its use, social networks like LinkedIn provide an incredible tool. Simply select their search bar, type in their company or industry of interest, then choose "Companies" under "More." to narrow your results only to those containing that term or something similar on their profiles.
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Identifying Content Competitors
Search engine optimization will be your most invaluable ally when conducting secondary research in this area of content competition analysis. Combining industry-specific words found during primary research with specific terms will enable you to locate online publications targeting specific niche markets. Catering businesses such as food service companies often specialize in "cake catering," "bakery goods," or other related offerings.
Once you've created the list, follow these steps:
- Google: Don't underestimate the significance of searching Google using terms related to your business - doing this could reveal product developers and blogs, magazines, and other sources that may help expand it further.
- Comparison to your buyer persona effectively ascertains if the information being received matches your expectations. Keep the persona you created earlier during the research phase in mind when using Google publications as indicators that they could take visitors away from your website - this content needs to reflect what would interest them; add them as competitors if possible!
Locate website domains that repeatedly appear after conducting multiple Google searches with similar terms. Start with the top two or three results on every search page, paying particular attention to those websites renowned for their content in your field.
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Your Findings Need To Be Summarized
Do you find yourself overwhelmed by all the notes taken? To better organize them and communicate their message, look for themes to develop as story arcs within them, creating action item lists. Create reports quickly and easily using your chosen presentation software - easily including quotes, charts, and call clips in one streamlined report! Your summary doesn't need to be boring: this outline can help you craft an impactful and concise one!
- How Are You Planning To Conduct the Study?
- Here you should outline your purpose and list of interview participants and easily break them up by customer/prospect and persona using tables.
- What Was Most Valuable From this Exercise and Next Steps Are Plans.
- Explain what motivates individuals to undertake assessments. Quotes can have a powerful effect.
- As part of your evaluation, include details regarding the sources used and any key people or features which could support or impede a sale - for instance, data that might influence decisions and sales strategies.
- Have You Deliberated on Launching Campaigns That Enhance Brand Visibility Earlier and/Or Improve Its Effectiveness?
- Have You Set Priorities, Schedule Events, and Determine Effects Associated with Implementations Plans to Bring About Change in Business Operations and Performance?
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Conclusion Of Article
Market research can be an eye-opening experience. Market research services can also be an extremely helpful tool, even when you already know who your audience members are; when understanding audience needs makes providing solutions easier, any experience gaps between what your offering provides and their expectations are reduced significantly, reducing potential experience gaps between offerings made, and expectations met can reduce significantly teaching you how to conduct market research.
