How to Leverage Market Research for Better Business Decisions
Digital Marketing
Apr 20 2023
Market research is a much-needed window into how your customers, your key competitors, and your own business operations. In the age of fluid brand loyalty and fierce competition for user attention online, it’s important that marketers recognize the value of effective market research.
Here’s an overview of market research’s critical role within the advertising landscape, the major challenges awaiting brands looking to redouble their market research efforts in 2023, and why every business can benefit from better-leveraging market research and insights.
What Makes Leveraging Market Research So Hard?
Good market research practices are essential for any business looking to better understand its customers (read: all of them). In this era of brand digitalization, marketers can access a range of tools capable of gauging audience interest with extreme precision, so long as these tools are used properly. The challenges surrounding market research data acquisition and application generally fit into one of the following categories:
1. Siloed data prevents organizations from drawing a complete picture. It doesn’t do much good for your brand’s customer data and relevant contextual information about industry trends to be broken up across a half-dozen teams. Piecing incomplete data into a cohesive picture is an inefficient use of your hard-earned insights.
2. The wrong tools make applying market research needlessly difficult. There’s a reason more companies are investing in digital transformation, innovative technology, and industry tools. Tech built for your organization’s vertical, be it company-wide cloud tools, communication apps, task managers, or campaign dashboards, serves to benefit all facets of organizational efficiency (including and especially your market research initiatives).
3. Inexperience can create bottlenecks. Marketing teams are responsible for keeping pace with the innovations in technology and machine learning driving the industry — but doing so creates a steep learning curve consisting of increasingly complex hard skills for advertisers to master. One recent poll discovered just 12% of marketers rated themselves experts at data and measurement, representing an alarming skill gap that risks preventing your brand’s market research from making its full impact.
How to Use Your Market Research Data
The real value in market research goes beyond simply accounting for customer activity. Brands need to understand why their customers think, act and shop the way they do in order to anticipate potential trends in demand. This helps brands step into the customers’ shoes to avoid tone-deaf messaging and product decisions that depart from what people love most about their business.
The tools and strategies marketers use to gather a complete picture of customer attitudes surrounding their brand are vast. We’ve previously detailed the science of social listening to deduce valuable user insights, but market research strategies can encompass an array of different approaches including traditional surveys, focus groups, and all manner of relevant social media data analysis.
How Companies Benefit From Market Research
The days of guessing which marketing channels, platforms, and messages are driving the most success are well behind us. The ability to pinpoint where things are going right or wrong in a campaign is foundational to growing an efficient business, regardless of industry — but many brands still get stuck seeking ways to apply data and make more impactful, research-driven decisions.
The advantages of market research are clear. Understanding what makes your customers tick boosts the volume of your traffic and the reach of your campaigns, guides important decisions about product pricing and promotion, and can even uncover unique experiences your brand can offer within its target market. Seeing your business from various angles through market research can also help you mitigate potential risks and identify connections between campaign performance and your brand’s digital presence.
Connecting with users through positive market research practices ultimately adds perspective to your business from the very customers fueling your company’s growth — and with that perspective comes smarter marketing moves with better business outcomes.
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