With the fast-paced digital marketing world, sometimes marketers and content creators end up churning content after content without proper marketing research. It is understandable because users demand to have something new and more engaging all the time.
In competing for users’ attention, however, marketing research is often bypassed, which is ironic since marketing research is key to bringing success to your digital platforms and improving modern businesses.
When a brand or website takes time to invest and do marketing research correctly, it means they are in it for the long haul. It signals their intent to gather long-term and more stable growth strategies and bring their brand to the top.
Whatever product or service your brand is producing, marketing research helps you provide optimum value to your consumers and establishes your brand as a leader in your niche. You also build your reputation and trust rating steadily as you invest in marketing research that hones every success strategy.
But what is marketing research?
Marketing Research Defined
Market research evaluates the feasibility of a new service or product by researching with actual customers. Formal market research helps a business find a target market and gets input from customers on their need for their product or service.
Marketers can do in-house marketing or get a third-party contractor for market research. Various methods can be employed, like surveys, focus groups, and product testing.
You can also utilize existing networks through engagements or email marketing to serve as a testing ground for new products and services.
Market research is critical in getting accurate and relevant data for the research and development (R&D) of a brand’s product or service. It will be a hit-or-miss product launch if there is a lack of market research.
Marketing analysis lets you understand not just what your customers want but how good your company is in reaching and engaging with them. It helps you recognize challenges and opportunities, optimizes your systems, and assess your marketing strategies’ effectiveness.
Market research methods you can use today include brand research, campaign effectiveness, competitor and consumer research, customer segmentation research, product development, and usability testing.
5 Reasons Why Marketing Research is Important
1. Properly Identify Market Needs
Businesses or brands come in all shapes and forms. There is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy since brands have unique goals and target markets.
It is why market research is critical. It helps you identify your target market’s unique needs and expectations and create solutions to meet these requirements.
Research must precede all product or service development. Customer needs also keep evolving, and a strong foundation of market research helps your brand quickly adapt to market trends.
2. Creating Sound Business Decisions
In such challenging and changing times brought by the pandemic, many businesses are closing down or decreasing operations. The businesses that still thrive were able to adapt to the changes quickly. Most businesses moved their operations online, adapted touchless solutions, or worked through remote teams.
Because of this, businesses should be more strategic and careful in starting business ventures. Market research will help businesses make wise decisions in what products or services are needed at this time. It helps them focus on making a profit or temporarily pause the ones causing losses for the company.
Business decisions must be based on accurate data. Market research produces relevant data to assist business owners and marketers in the best strategies for growth and come up with new normal business strategies.
3. Discover Business Opportunities
When your business has vital market research to back it up, it will help you maintain your business growth and discover new ways of doing business.
Innovation is an asset that modern businesses must possess. It will be hard to do if you don’t know your target market and what problems currently need solutions. When you know your target market well, you will also identify which marketing channels to use, so you get the most engagements and conversions.
You can also collaborate with peers, like other businesses who serve the same demographics with a complementing product or service. Businesses can also optimize influencer marketing or advocacy marketing to expand brand positioning opportunities and get more customer insight.
This valuable customer insight helps you with product development and upgrades, like product add-ons, bundles, and upsells. It also enables you to identify new demographics and locations to serve and sell to.
4. Reduce Business Risks
Most business startups actually do not survive more than five years. You do not want your business to be part of that statistic. It is why you need to invest and take time with market research because you give your business a fighting chance to succeed.
It ensures that you will survive your startup years, reach the point of ROI, and experience business growth. You want a steady rise in leads, sales, and conversions, which takes insightful planning through market research.
For instance, doing A/B testing is a simple marketing strategy that helps you determine the best version of your promotion. Sadly, most marketers do not employ such simple strategies and waste marketing investments on unsuccessful methods.
A business performs market research to identify competitors’ strategies and see what works and what does not adjust your strategies accordingly.
5. Smart Marketing Strategies
When you know your target market’s pulse, you will equally know what kind of promotions and content will work with them. Through market research, you can pinpoint problems they have and what part of the solution your brand or business can provide.
In addition, you will be able to harness your promotions to put those solutions in the spotlight instead of putting all your goods in front of them.
Smart marketing strategies help businesses reduce promotion and acquisition costs and instead harness data from market research to their best advantage.
Market research allows you to be a step ahead of trends as well, so instead of being on the tail end of trends, you’ll be able to set them and be a thought leader in your niche.
Moreover, you will create content, branding, and promotion materials to click with your target demographics. For instance, if you are serving the younger generation, you will prioritize social sharing, trendy designs, and compelling imagery. And because this generation values transparency, inclusivity, and other involvement in social issues, you will be able to touch on topics that they are passionate about, love to be involved with, and would not hesitate to share.
Suppose your market research shows that you are trending with professionals and businesses. In that case, you will have to change your content and design to a more corporate look, dealing with topics such as business, remote working, startups, employee management, and the like.
In the digital space where competition can be stiff, it is impossible to stand out and be on-point with your marketing strategies through marketing research.
Conclusion: Market Research Promotes Business Growth
Because market research helps you perform all these things, it is safe to say that market research helps your business grow.
It allows you to bring your business to a higher level by making sound data-centric business solutions. Do not forego market research because it is one of the smartest business decisions you will make.
In this new normal economy, even small businesses or startup brands can compete on a global scale, even with more prominent brands, through careful planning, smart strategies, and constant innovation, all with the help of market research.
Mayleen Meñez worked for seven years in TV and Radio production, and also as a Graphic Artist/Editor. Finding her true passion, she devoted 15 years to NGO and community development work, where she experienced being a coordinator and teacher, traveling both in the Philippines and countries in Asia. She homeschools her three kids and reinvents Filipino dishes in her spare time. Writing has always been a hobby and pursuit, and she recently added content writing with Softvire Australia and Softvire New Zealand up her sleeve, while preparing for her next adventure in the nations.
