If you want to grow your business, the first step is to understand your customers’ needs and how they think about your product or service. That’s where marketing research comes in. Marketing research is the process of collecting, analyzing, and using data from various sources to inform business decisions. These data can help you identify new opportunities, reach new markets, improve your products and services, reduce risk, and avoid unnecessary costs from mistakes.
The Basics
Marketing research is a huge umbrella term that encompasses any data collected by an organization. Marketing research can range from a simple customer survey or focus group to more complex methods like in-depth interviews or ethnographic studies. The point of marketing research is to uncover facts about your customer base, which can be used to guide business decisions. Although it seems straightforward, marketing research has many layers of complexity.
Marketing Research Online
There are a variety of marketing research options available online, including free research tools like surveys, polls, focus groups, user interviews, and market size estimators. While these tools aren’t comprehensive enough to give you all of your answers, they can help you get some general insights from potential customers and can be used in conjunction with more formal research methods for a better picture of what’s happening in your target market.
What are outcome metrics?
Outcome metrics are a type of performance metric that indicates whether a specific action was successful or not. This can help you make crucial decisions about whether to continue, scale up, or change directions with your marketing efforts. Outcome metrics also give you an idea of what actions need to be taken to achieve specific outcomes. For example, if you run a pop-up shop in a mall but don’t get any sales, that may indicate to you that perhaps mall traffic isn’t where it needs to be.
Other Uses for Marketing Research
One of the best-known ways to use marketing research is to find out what consumers are thinking, feeling, or doing to shape a company’s product or brand. But marketers can also use marketing research for numerous other purposes. Here are a few examples of how marketing research can be applied outside of consumer insight
Examples of Marketing Research in Action
Typically, an organization can use marketing research to answer one of two broad questions. First, they can gather intelligence to better understand their customers and market. This can include polling people who have bought a company’s product or completed its survey, as well as observing customers in their natural environment to gain insights into how they act when using a certain product or service. Secondly, companies use marketing research to explore opportunities for growth within their industry by uncovering new ideas, innovative solutions, or untapped markets.
The Future of Market Research
In today’s competitive business world, companies are constantly looking for ways to gain an edge over their competition. One of those ways involves effective market research; effectively researching your target audience allows you to cater to their needs, which in turn makes you more competitive in your marketplace. But how do you find what they want? Let us break it down for you.
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