What is market research? It’s the process of gathering information about your target market and clients. It helps to verify the success of a new product and enables your team to iterate on an exciting product. It also helps organizations understand brand perception to ensure that employees effectively communicate the businesses’ value.
If your organization has conducted market research before, you possibly understand the role market research companies play. Partnering with these companies is part of the market research process. Organizations carry out this process after identifying their business problem and writing a research brief.
There’s a definite “relationship” side to partnering with market and research companies. That’s because market research is usually ongoing. When you get a b2b marketing research company that understands your business, you’ll want to stick with them for some time.
The firm will conduct consumer research to help build a knowledge bank about your clients. This is one of the things that will cause you to trust their expertise and way of working.
The best thing about market research facilities is that there are many options to choose from. If you start working on it, you’ll end up with a list of possible partners. The challenge might be narrowing down the list to find the best research company to meet your needs.
A Guide to Conducting Market Research
New ideas for products are conceived every day. But most of these ideas fail due to a lack of proper introduction to the market. Market research ensures that your product’s launch hits the “right buttons” with the target audience.
It helps to ensure that the product idea addresses your client’s desires. For that to happen, organizations need to follow the right guide in the market research process. Below is a guideline to help you ensure the successful marketing of your products or services.
Source: Pexels
- Deciding on Market Research Tools and Partners
Will you emphasize the product, or would you instead focus on the business while a market research company does the heavy lifting? Or could it be that you want to keep everything in-house?
If the latter is the case, you’ll need to be in charge of deciding what market research tools you need. Note that there’s a tool for every part of market research.
However, it is important that you use user-friendly tools to collect the data you want. That’s especially if you’ll be talking directly to your consumer. You need tools that will be easy for you to use as well as your consumers.
Deciding to partner with market research facilities will make your work easier. But remember that these facilities have different strengths, services, and focuses. You must also consider the attributes you’d like to see in an outside firm you choose to partner with. Such attributes may include reliability, timelines, and deliver value.
To guide your decision-making process in choosing a market and research company, you need to:
- Find out if they have expertise in your industry and category
- Find out whether they have a history of success with businesses like yours
- Find out if the company has knowledge of your particular geographic region
- Find out if they conduct the kind of research best suited to answer your question
- Exploratory Research
Exploratory research is about researching what you specifically want to research. This is important because sometimes, you may not even know your research goal. You may not even know how to get there, and that’s where exploratory research comes in.
You’ll begin by gathering secondary data on different aspects. Identify the aspects that stand out about your business and the developments you hadn’t thought of on the things you’d like to know more about. With that information, you can begin defining what’s more important for your business at this stage.
You’ll get to know the knowledge gaps and understand how to ensure you get the relevant data to make better decisions.
This isn’t just about gathering as much data as possible because you want to keep it manageable and relevant. You also need to identify what questions you can’t answer immediately, then focus on exploratory research.
- Define Your Market Objectives
It’s essential to pinpoint what you’re supposed to know to move to the product development process.
Would you rather focus on your client’s needs or how to get a competitive advantage in the marketplace? Should your market analysis focus on market demand or pricing? Or could it be that there’s still a lot of ground to cover in the physical product and usage habits? You must have a good understanding of what you’ll be researching.
Find actionable insights you’ll need to win in this market segment and make your objectives as concrete as possible. That will help to ensure that your answers are focused and that you can confidently use them to base your next step on.
- Define Your Buyer Persona
You must understand who your clients are before diving into how they make their buying decisions. That is how buyer persona comes in, in market research.
A buyer persona is also referred to as a marketing persona. These are fictional and generalized representations of ideal clients. They help businesses to visualize their audiences and streamline communication. It also helps to inform your strategy.
Here are some of the important characteristics to include in your buyer persona:
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Location
- Job titles
The personal guideline helps identify how you can effectively reach and learn about the real audience members in your industry. You may also realize that your business lends itself to more than one persona, which is okay. When optimizing and planning your content, you need to be thoughtful about the different personas.
- Test Your Product and Overall Approach
You need to ask yourself how your products will fly once clients have them. Ultimately, your client’s response will determine which features to focus on. It will also help identify the marketing approach to use, making product testing important.
Product testing can be as simple as having a research participant test a product. They can then fill out a survey on key performance indicators such as the possibility of purchase.
Product testing can also go into the various sensory qualities, such as flavor and appearance. So you must make use of sophisticated video recording and observational techniques.
It’s also crucial that you test your messaging and marketing material. With all the investment put into advertising, it’s worth ensuring that your ads, graphics, and packaging are received well in the marketplace.
Conclusion
Carrying out market research can be eye-opening for businesses. That’s because even when you think you know your clients well, complete market research can help you uncover new channels and messaging tips. It will help improve your interactions and boost your competitiveness in the marketplace.
