Marketing research is often dismissed as an unnecessary waste of time and money by both large and small companies, yet it can be one of the most powerful tools when it comes to creating or editing a marketing plan.
Marketing research provides direction and clarity when choosing your target audience, selecting your ideal product offerings, and identifying new challenges, opportunities, and trends. Finding the right people to target, offering them a product that meets their needs, and incorporating current trends can effectively increase sales, while also building a loyal customer base.
What Types of Research Do You Need?
If you have a limited budget, then you must pick and choose the types of research that will provide the most value to your business. As a general rule, investing in research that helps identify your target audience and their needs, wants, and opinions on current trends is almost always beneficial to help tailor you’re advertising and products more effectively.
Additionally, collecting opinions on your product or service on important details like price, performance, packaging, and others can help you identify potential improvements to your products, or even suggest a complete change in direction.
Finally, researching your audience’s opinions on your competitors is crucial to ensure that your brand stays relevant and that you are not falling behind.
How Do You Conduct Research?
Conducting in-depth marketing research yourself can be daunting and even impossible unless you set a realistic goal for the type of results you want.
If you plan to conduct research yourself, you can utilize free tools like Google Forms for surveys. However, it is much easier to outsource marketing research to a specialized marketing research company.
To analyze more complex data such as responses from an open-ended interview, companies like Research America perform “perceptual mapping” to graphically display how consumers feel about certain products.
Choosing a marketing research company can offer you many more useful data interpretations such as this one, which often makes them a superior choice to performing research yourself.
However, just using low-cost methods like Google Forms can provide invaluable insights into deciding who to target or how to update your product to better please customers.
How Do You Utilize Your Research Results Effectively?
After spending the time and money to conduct research (or to outsource it to a specialist), it is finally time to turn that research into tangible results.
Look for trends in your data and customer responses to decide if you are targeting the right audience, if you can offer a new product that capitalizes on your customers’ new interests or trends, or if you have a new competitor from a different industry you hadn’t even considered before!
After identifying data trends, then you can make marketing and product decisions based on actual, concrete results. It is important to stay up to date with your research to make sure that your customers respond positively to your changes. If not, you can respond to negative feedback quickly and effectively, which will ultimately boost customer trust in the long run and thus increase sales over time. You can also use your results to create effective content for your company website or social media page.
Wrap Up
Overall, performing even limited marketing research can help you increase sales for your business by better discovering and meeting customer needs. Choosing the most important results to achieve, utilizing low-cost surveys or outsourcing research, and effectively incorporating results into your business strategy can greatly help set your business apart and ensure your long-term success.
Disclaimer: This is a collaborative post on behalf of ResearchAmericainc.com, but then again as always, we are devoted to providing content that is supportive and valuable to the readers.