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Marketing research is a process most businesses and marketers do on a regular basis. The challenge is determining how to strategically conduct marketing research that will help guide profitable business decisions. While many marketing efforts begin with hopes of improving the business, the result can render an overwhelming amount of data that might not be relevant to the primary business objective.
Understanding how to conduct marketing research must first start with knowing the types of research methods available. This article will teach you core marketing research methods and how to use them in a way to help your business win.
What is marketing research?
Marketing research is the process of determining the success of a product or service based on direct research with consumers. Marketing research can benefit every aspect of a business. Data and analysis collected from marketing research can help a business better position itself in terms of its product, branding, marketing, and customer service.
A great deal of the marketing research process is based on consumer buying behaviors. Consumers’ perception of your brand or service can reflect in the data collected. With proper analysis, this data can help you strategically deliver your business in a way that meets consumer needs.
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Why is marketing research important?
Marketing research can help define business goals and your primary business objective. With the right marketing research methods, you’ll discover any problems within your business, the industry, learn marketing trends, and be better equipped to predict future sales. Marketing research also helps you discover gapped information that affects the administrative, social, and economical aspects of your business.
Three objectives of marketing research
The purpose of conducting marketing research is to develop a better understanding of your industry. Acquiring keen insight on trends, consumer buying behaviors, and reactions to certain products or services will help develop a savvy marketing strategy to boost business. This type of information will offer valuable insights into how potential customers might respond to a new or existing product or service. Overall, there are 3 main objectives of marketing research: administrative, social, and economic.
- Administrative - Administrative research deals with the internal operations of an organization. Assessing the planning and upkeep of workflow processes, management, and human resource can outwardly affect the success of an operation.
- Social - Social research relates to customer satisfaction. Ensuring a product or service meets consumers’ expectations is a great way to determine how well your business fares in the marketplace.
- Economic - Economic research gives you the ability to assess how well your product or service will succeed in your industry. In other words, is there a demand for the business your proposing to sell?
Using the right market research platform will help you optimize your business within these 3 objectives. Through AI-powered insights, you can conduct a strategic market analysis that will help you make informed business decisions based on real-time industry trends and customer feedback. Advantages of marketing research
The benefits of marketing research can significantly enhance business operations on a marketing and operational level. This type of research also feeds the 3 main administrative, social, and economic objectives. Marketing research provides you with key information to make decisions based on qualitative market research and quantitative market research collected from a targeted audience who is most likely to buy your goods or services. The following lists the different advantages of marketing research:
Discover valuable information and insights
Valuable market research helps gain relevant insights to assess what your business's strengths and weaknesses are. You’ll be able to reduce investment risks and make informed decisions giving you a winning advantage.
Improve your customer centricity
Customer-centric research reflects data analytics that helps you target and retarget consumers through desktop and mobile applications for advertising efforts.
Develop forecasts
Forecasting research helps you project the amount of sales your business can make based on marketing trends and customer demand.
Get competitive advantages
Competitive advantage research helps you create a unique consumer market based on their buying behavior and industry shifts.
Learn about customer preferences
Customer preference research provides key insights into a target audience's buying habits and preferences to position your business to meet their needs.
Understand brand perception
Customer perception research reveals buyer awareness and levels of customer satisfaction. Learn more about how the market and customers perceive your brand with our Brand Tracker Solution, or get a quick pulse with this brand awareness survey template.
Analyze customer communication methods
Customer communication methods can reveal useful demographics to provide a better understanding of your buying audience. Momentive, the maker of SurveyMonkey, can help you build a customer experience program that not only helps you analyze customer communication, it helps you optimize it.
Types of marketing research
The type of marketing research you’re looking for depends on the approach. It’s important to know your objective before embarking on the marketing research process because there’s more than one kind of research. Understanding the types of marketing research will help you focus on exactly what type of information you’re trying to collect based on your primary business objective. The following is a list of different types of market research and the survey templates to help you measure it:
- Brand awareness - Brand awareness measures how familiar, or not-so-familiar your brand is in the market.
- Brand association and perception - Brand association is similar to brand awareness but relates more to product imaging and packaging. It refers to the psychological connection a customer has with your business.
- Marketing effectiveness - Marketing effectiveness evaluates the performance of a marketing campaign—including ads and copy—and tells you whether your campaign would effectively reach your target audience.
- Sales forecasting and brand conversion - Sales forecasting helps you project future sales based on current sales and collected data that’s analyzed.
- Trendspotting - Trendspotting identifies business phenomena associated with an unusual spike or drop in sales that need explaining.
When to use marketing research
When to conduct market research is relative to understanding the types of marketing research available to you. How often to do market research is also contingent on your marketing budget. However, it’s worth noting the more frequently you conduct marketing research, the more informed you’ll be about your industry and any shifts in market trends that could affect your business.
Market research methods can be conducted on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, or annual basis. These options will correlate with the type of product or services you provide and your primary business objective. This will consequently affect your marketing strategy.
Product development
Create a demographic audience to test your product and receive high-quality responses to help validate your product. You’ll also be able to explore the methodology behind the conc