Rashida
Market research is an important part of any business. You can’t grow your business if you don’t know your target audience. When you don’t know your target audience, you can’t make decisions for your business that are best for them
Okay, so you know you need market research to get your marketing right.
But how do you actually run good market research?
Let’s take a closer look at different aspects of marketing research and how to use it to create a winning marketing strategy.
Are You Currently Doing Market Research?
There is a lot of confusion surrounding market research. It can be a large time-suck if you don’t know what you are doing, but it doesn’t have to be.
Market research is the backbone of a successful business. If you’re not using it, you’re probably losing money. The problem is that most companies don’t know how to use it effectively.
To understand how to get the most out of market research, you first need to understand what it actually is. Market research is a way to assess the needs and wants of your target audience. It’s a way to gain insight into what people are thinking and what people want. Market research is used for developing products and services, launching new products and services, and improving existing products and services.
Start by Defining Your Market Research Needs
Market research is an integral part of any business model. It is a broad term and there are different methods of performing market research. However, the one thing that remains constant is that you need to define your needs before you can get started.
What are you trying to achieve? What questions are you trying to answer? Start by defining what you are trying to achieve from the research. Examples of market research goals may include:
- Assassing new business opportunities
- Avoid business pitfalls
- Measure brand loyalty
- Understand your buyer persona
- Find new content ideas
- Test marketing strategies
How to Perform Market Research
The first thing to remember is that there is no such thing as the perfect market research. Because you are trying to measure the behavior of customers, you can never be 100% sure that your data is accurate.
With this in mind, here is a list of the various types of market research, plus some insights on what to look for in each method to ensure your research is effective and efficient.
Online Surveys
Online surveys are a fast, simple way to perform market research. They are very easy to incorporate into your website, email marketing, social media marketing, and more. You can also directly send out digital surveys to your target audience.
You can leverage them in many ways including:
- Polls on social media
- Asking a question and allowing them to respond
- Post-purchase survey on your website
- Survey automatically sent via email
- Include a short survey in email newsletter
Paper Surveys
For some businesses, paper surveys make sense. For example, these may be most effective for dentists, doctors, and auto shops where customers must sit in a waiting room and fill out paperwork. You can include a brief paper survey with the necessary paperwork. One way to get more people to fill out the survey is to have them drop it in a box for a sweepstakes.
In-Depth Interviews
While surveys are helpful, in-depth interviews can help you get to the bottom of the “why” behind your audience’s answers. For example, in a survey, you may ask how likely the person would be to shop again. In an in-depth interview, you can ask why and reveal some of the common pain points.
Keep in mind that in-depth interviews require more from consumers. Therefore, you may need to provide greater incentives (like gift cards or paid interviews). Furthermore, you’ll be more limited in how many interviews you can conduct compared to surveys.
Using software to collect your data
Thankfully, there are also many software solutions available for collecting data. One example is A/B testing. You could test two different email headlines to assess the effectiveness of each for future marketing. Software can help you collect and analyze this data automatically.
Making Sense of Your Data
Don’t try to make sense of your data before you’ve collected enough of it. Be sure to collect everything you can before trying to find meaning. Of course, market research is an ongoing process that requires continual collection and assessment of data.
Remember, clearly defining your goals ahead of time makes it easier to make sense of the data. Your goals should dictate the kinds of questions you ask and the data you collect, which then facilitates a more straightforward data analysis.
If I were trying to find content ideas to resonate with my audience, I may give them 5 general topics to choose from. The data I get would be the % of votes for each category. I should then prioritize creating content in the most popular categories.
Will Market Research Work for My Business?
Market research is a funny thing. You can spend a lot of money on it, but sometimes it doesn’t work out the way you want it to. It’s no surprise that people get scared of the idea because of the potential cost.
However, proper market research has many key benefits. It is something that businesses in every industry and niche should implement.
Here are a few tips to ensure market research works for your business:
- Start small. Before committing to a huge, expensive market research project, start smaller. Start with a short survey you include in your email newsletter or on social media. Ramp up the efforts as you nail down the process.
- Define your goals. Clearly define your goal for the specific research project. What are you wanting to learn? At first, stick to one goal per campaign. The goals should define your market research process.
- Make it convenient for your audience. The easier you make it for customers to respond, the more who will. Keeps surveys short and simple. Opt for multiple-choice or ratings over open-ended questions.
- Offer incentives. To get even more people to respond, offer incentives. This is even more important if you want to conduct more in-depth surveys or interviews. You could offer sweepstakes entries, coupon codes, a small prize, etc.
Leverage Market Research for Better Marketing
When done right, it can help you make informed decisions about your business. You can use it to gather data that shows you how to make your business better. Marketing strategies often focus on trends and what the competition is doing. If you want to be successful, you need to focus on what your customers want.
Once you know your buyer persona more, it’s time to implement your findings into your marketing strategy. That’s where our B2B content writing service, Content Cucumber, can help. Our B2B copywriting services help you get content written for your buyer persona. Another one of the main benefits of content writing services is that they save you time, so you can focus even more on market research.
Want to see how a dedicated Content Cucumber writing team can help you get compelling marketing content? Schedule your demo today!
