Businesses can only release items or content carelessly and hope for the best, saving time and effort while incurring unnecessary marketing expenses. Now, with more tools and data at our fingertips than ever, businesses can use market research as an insight to form data-driven plans to guide company choices.
As conducting market research can set you apart from competitors and gain greater insights into consumer purchasing habits, this blog covers everything you need to know about market research and how its completion could expand your business.
Market Research
What is Market research? Market research is an indispensable method for gathering customer and target market insights that will determine the success of your products and can aid your team in addressing existing product shortcomings or enhancing brand perception, helping communicate more efficiently with clients and building customer relations.
Market research services are expanding quickly as 2024 approaches, showing an overwhelming interest from all corners of the business world in this analysis. Market size estimates show an expected rise from $75 billion in Covid to an anticipated $90.79 billion market size in 2025 at an anticipated compound annual growth rate of 5% compound.
Why Is Market Research Important?
An effective business relies on understanding customers' likes, dislikes, needs, and messaging responses to ensure its products and services stand out. Companies also must analyze competitors to discover opportunities to distinguish themselves in comparison.
Modern business leaders face endless decisions related to target markets, pricing strategies, promotions, distribution channels, and product features and benefits. Market research studies can be invaluable in providing relevant data that helps inform these choices; nevertheless, they can often prove daunting tasks. Market research allows companies to make data-driven decisions to drive both growth and innovation within their company.
Global Advanced Visualisation Market Research
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Types Of Market Research
Not every market research effort serves the same goal. While some may seek greater insights into their target audience or competitors' activities, others might need an overview. Therefore, depending on your end goals, you could conduct various forms of market research depending on what research goals they represent. Here are some types of market research:
Interviews
Interview-based market research allows for one-on-one interactions, making the dialogue flow naturally and making context easy to add. Be it conducted physically or virtually, interview-based market research will enable researchers to collect more comprehensive qualitative data.
Buyer Persona Research
Conducting buyer persona research allows you to take an in-depth look at who forms your target audience and discover their needs, challenges, and pain points to understand better what each of their buyers needs from your business - this enables you to tailor products or campaigns that resonate better with individual buyer personas.
Pricing Research
Companies using pricing research typically examine comparable products or services with an eye toward pricing strategy to become more cost-effective with their plan for selling them. By studying what prices similar products usually sell at, this analysis allows brands to gain insights that will enable increased competitive pricing strategies in future sales of similar items or services.
Competitive Analysis Research
Competitor analysis offers an accurate picture of where you stand in the market, along with how well competitors are faring. Use it to discover what's working within your industry or who may pose potential threats; plus, it indicates whether these competitors are meeting consumer needs effectively or not.
Your research can become as granular as needed with different competitor analysis tools. For instance, LivehelpIndia allows you to analyze competitors' social strategies. Here, you can see what content your rivals publish and compare growth against them.
Brand Awareness Research
Brand awareness research allows you to assess your brand's presence in the market and measure how familiar and associated it is among your target audience. Conducting such a study can also provide invaluable feedback regarding people's reactions toward your product or service and whether adjustments must be made through redesign or repositioning measures.
Competitive Analysis
Competitive analyses provide valuable insight into your industry and market competition, giving you a deeper understanding of their landscape and making you aware of any gaps between themselves and you in terms of products offered to target audiences and what's doing well in your sector; keeping up and surpassing certain rivals; as well as finding ways to distinguish yourself from them all clearly.
Where To Carry Out Market Research
Are you feeling overwhelmed with research? Market research methods exist in abundance; in this section, we highlight those most pertinent to small and large-sized companies.
Google's daily average search volumes stand at an astounding 8.85 billion searches, making this the ideal starting point to kick off market research efforts. A quick Google search could answer many of your initial market research inquiries, for example, who ranks for keywords relevant to your industry or product trending topically today, who runs ads pertinent to my company, etc.
Email has quickly emerged as an aggressive and effective marketing channel, as evidenced by 44% of shoppers listing email as the main influence in their purchase decisions. Examining industry and competitor emails provides great opportunities to understand your market - for example, what types of offers or deals competitors are running and when they send emails.
Industry Publications, Reports And Blogs
Be aware of the significance of conducting thorough market research when making marketing strategies or exploring channels and tactics for your brand. Researching marketing resources such as reports, blogs, and industry journals should provide invaluable assistance when planning out strategies and tactics for growth.
Being on top of new trends and technologies is vitally important to any successful business, which is why websites like Statista, Marketing Charts, AdWeek, and Emarketer provide invaluable data for marketers.
Social Media
Are you searching to gain knowledge about your target market on social media? Social is an excellent place for discovering customer expectations or which brands are doing particularly well, with so much data now accessible. Therefore, it has become even more vital than before in business decisions and planning processes.
Social media is an enormous database of real-time data and insights that is instantly accessible. Brand monitoring and social listening are effective approaches for conducting social media research; you could even take an indirect approach by directly asking questions of your target audience or conducting polls to gather an in-depth view.
Read More: Mastering Market Research: The Key to Unlocking Business Success
The Five Stages Of Conducting Market Research
Now that we understand why and where market research should occur let's address its practical components. Here are five steps for conducting market research effectively.
Determine Your Research Topic
Start by considering why and what exactly you are researching. Focusing on one specific research topic allows for easier focus when beginning research activities. This way, you know exactly where and what to search for when starting research activities.
Example: You should gain insight into whether your product features adequately satisfy existing users' needs, which may lead to feature updates and improvements or new feature introductions.
Select Your Buyer Persona For Engagement
If your research will center around one specific audience segment, select which buyer persona you would like to focus on, as it will serve as a representative sample of that target group. Engaging a specific target group allows you to streamline your research efforts, creating more organized and successful results than looking into thousands or millions of individuals simultaneously.
Your research may focus on existing users of your product or service. For greater detail, however, consider narrowing in on users familiar with it for at least 12 months as examples of users you want to interview further.
Launch Data Collection Efforts
Step two of any research project should involve gathering all the required data for analysis and interpretation. Before initiating, ensure you select an approach that can uncover exactly the information needed based on your topic and goals for this effort. Remember that you don't necessarily have to select just one research method; alternative approaches like qualitative interviews could supplement survey data, or insights gained through social listening could also work.
As is usually the case, let's use our example from earlier as a basis for discussion here. Sending out a survey with multiple questions of existing users- for instance, which features they use most and when- and asking them to select an answer between one and five can provide quantitative data collection.
As part of your qualitative insights-gathering strategy, why not include some open-ended questions for customers with the option for written responses? For instance, ask them whether they would change anything about your product.
Analyze Results
Once you've collected all the data needed for analysis, the final step will be analyzing the results with your research topic in mind. Interpret the information to discover its meaning beyond simply fulfilling research goals.
Say a high percentage of responses received on your satisfaction rating scale were four or five; this indicates your current users are generally content with its features. On the other hand, if the majority of answers received were one or two, look for improvement opportunities. At the same time, open-ended questions can further explain why people may have disappointed you.
Make Decisions Regarding Your Business
Now is the time to use your findings as actionable insights for your business. In this final step, you must determine how best to act upon this new market intelligence. What have you discovered through your research that requires action to take? How can these findings be put to good use?
Primary Vs Secondary Research
Market research can take many forms; qualitative or quantitative approaches could be employed depending on its purpose and study criteria. Qualitative research examines public opinion to understand market sentiment surrounding existing products, while quantitative analysis concentrates more on data.
They look for relevant trends within public records collected during data mining exercises. Your business can conduct two main forms of market research to gather actionable insights about its products: primary and secondary research. Let's dive in.
Primary Research
First, research involves gathering firsthand information about your market and its customer segments. It can also assist when segmenting markets and creating buyer personas. Research falls under either exploratory or specific analysis.
- Exploratory Primary Research: Primary market research should go beyond tracking customer trends to uncover potential problems worth solving together. It often happens as an initial step before any specific research efforts are completed; open-ended interviews or surveys with small numbers of participants might also occur during this market analysis phase.
- Specific Primary Market Research: Specific primary market research typically follows exploratory market research. It allows businesses to gain more insights into issues or opportunities they've already identified as significant. A company may employ specific market research on smaller or more precise segments of their audience to gather answers for suspected problems that they know exist.
Secondary Research
Secondary market analysis involves gathering as much data and public records as possible - like trend reports, market statistics, industry content, or sales data from your existing business - as evidence against competitors. Primary and secondary market research falls under different buckets. Here's what they all look like.
- Public Sources: Your first stop when performing secondary market research should always be public sources, which are accessible and often cost-free - great value. According to Entrepreneur, government statistics are among today's most reliable public sources. U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor & Statistics offer useful market data that provide essential insight into various industries nationwide.
- Commercial Sources: Market reports issued by research firms can serve as valuable industry insight reports that can be downloaded and obtained at minimal expense. Because this data can easily be distributed throughout an organization's operations and distribution chains, its dissemination typically incurs download fees or subscription costs.
- Internal Sources: It is easy to forget how important internal sources can be when conducting market research - they hold all the market information already existing within your organization. The average revenue per sale, customer retention rates, and historical account health indicators provide insight into what customers desire today.
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Conclusion
Doing marketing research for your business can be an eye-opening experience, even for entrepreneurs who think they know their customers well. Even though conducting this study may reveal new channels or messaging tips that give your interactions with clients the edge over the competition. Utilize our steps and market research services to develop an effective market research strategy and find success.
