A question worth a billion dollars. How can you make a key business decision that disrupts the industry and make your consumers respond?
As a business runner, you need to know some things that can impact your venture's performance
- What your customers like
- What your customers dislike
- What they dislike
- What they need
In the current environment, you need to find a way to provide your audiences with personalised services. They have grown more sophisticated and pay more attention to the customer service brands offer.
As a business leader, you face an endless stream of decisions around the products you should create, the benefits they must provide, prices, promotion, distribution channels, and target markets. Each unique decision is based on a variety of factors, and market research can help you capture meaningful data to inform your decision.
What is market research?
Market research is a process of gathering information about market requirements and preferences. It affects all business aspects, from product development to customer service, brand identity, and marketing. By understanding how your prospects behave and feel, you can take the needed steps to mitigate the risk of an experience gap and deliver exactly what they need.
The good news for brands is that market research has the potential to make them look like a rock star because it helps them avoid mistakes, create a message that meets the public's preferences, and predict the audience's needs.
Your job is to leverage the research results in the best way possible and implement solutions that deliver what the market is looking for. Market research focuses on three aspects
- The customer
- The competitors
- The company
So, research should answer a couple of questions.
- Who are my clients?
- How should I segment my audience?
- How can I prioritise my customers?
- What are people looking for within my sector?
- How much are clients buying?
- What are their purchase triggers and buying habits?
- Is my brand healthy?
- Do my marketing and communications efforts resonate with my clients?
- Is my service ready to launch?
- Are my services optimised?
When should you use market research?
At this point, market research can serve you no matter what your needs are because if you want to find something about your company, clients, market, or competitors, it's most likely that market research to provide you with the needed information.
Here are some of the most common reasons why companies are using market research.
Product development
Have you ever wondered what the secret to developing a great product that disrupts the market and attracts all eyes to your brand is? A combination of research and testing always does the trick.
Conducting market research allows you to determine how the target audience perceives a product, how they use it, what they like and dislike about it, and what it needs to secure lasting success. Market research allows you to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and focus your resources on ideas that have the potential to grow your business.
You may create a great product, but it's nothing if people don't buy it because it doesn't match their preferences. Market research provides you with the needed insights to develop a product that is not only great but also pleases the audience. One of the most popular tools to use during product development is the conjoint analysis that allows you to identify the perfect features and price your product should have to satisfy your clients.
Buyer segmentation and profiling
After you develop a product according to the needs of the market, you need to identify the ideal client to sell it to. By identifying buyer personas, you can improve products and communications, so you cater your services to different audiences. By understanding who your ideal client is, their motivations, needs, pain points, and other preferences, you can optimise your products and the marketing materials to reach and retain them. It would help if you made sure that the right message reaches the right people via the proper channel.
Brand tracking studies
The brand is one of the most important assets a company can have in the present context. However, unlike other metrics, you cannot clearly measure how your brand influences your success. There's no tangible product to evaluate because you cannot pull the brand from a system. But market research can help you track the customer perception of the brand and allow you to monitor and optimise your strategies in real-time so that no real damage can affect your business. When you respond to your client's feedback and maintain a consistent brand, you create the image of a reliable company interested in its customers.
Your marketing team can use market research to boost brand awareness and the company's performance in the industry. Being able to identify the impression your brand leaves on the audiences can prove a competitive advantage in today's markets.
Communications and advertising testing
Advertising campaigns aren't the most affordable endeavours, and without market research and testing, you venture into a risky process that can spend your money for nothing. By researching the market and testing each advertising campaign, you ensure that the message you develop is the one your consumers respond to. It's useless to deploy a communication material without first asking for market feedback to evaluate its performance and effectiveness.
Competitor analysis
Another important task that requires market research is competitor analysis that helps you identify your brand's position on the market and figure out how your consumers perceive you compared to your competitors. You may look at their website and products, but you have no idea what the public thinks about them until you conduct market research to have an accurate view of where you stack up in comparison. Understating their position in the industry and identifying their weaknesses and strong points can help you create a strategy to compete better and attract more clients.
Your brand goes beyond the logo and name; it's the emotions your customers experience when they use your services. Market research can assist you in identifying the emotions they associate with your brand and help you provide them with the products they expect you to deliver.
