When it comes to understanding your market, research is vital. While you may have some pretty solid assumptions about who your target audience is and what they care about, research can confirm it so that you aren’t just going with your gut. Additionally, market research can provide new insights that can help you to build even greater customer loyalty and drive revenue.
Market research is indeed big business, with the global revenue of the industry exceeding $76.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, a twofold growth since 2008. Market research is especially helpful when businesses:
- Are considering ways to improve or expand on existing products, or launching a new product or offering
- Are entering new markets
- Want to understand their customers’ motivations and pain points more fully, or want to create a thorough buyer persona
- Need an honest assessment of what customers really think of their brand and/or its user experience
Market research is considered key business intelligence that can and should be conducted and utilized prior to making any pivotal decisions.
Types of Market Research
There are multiple ways to collect data from your target audience, with surveys being the most common. Electronic surveys work in that they can reach a lot of people quickly and inexpensively.
One-on-one interviews, however, let you take a deeper dive into your target audience’s thoughts and opinions. While they’re much more time-consuming, you can gather far greater insights in this manner—plus, they’re more personalized since it puts someone from your business directly with the customer or prospect.
Expand from one-to-one to a one-to-many format and you have a focus group, which brings a number of customers or prospects together. They’re also personal but results can vary, such as when some participants are more dominant and overly influence the discussion. This means that you might be getting only a few opinions and not the true feelings of each one in the group. Still, they’re a way to poll multiple people at once and require less effort and time than one-to-one.
The biggest difference between surveys and personal interviews/focus groups is quantitative data collection versus qualitative. One is based on numbers, while the other is based on spoken or written words.
Market Research Steps
The preliminary steps to conducting market research is determining your objectives and deciding what questions to ask. From there, you’ll need to select the method for collecting responses from your audience—survey, interviews, focus groups, or some combination. This decision can be impacted by both budget and time requirements.
Next, you’ll go about conducting the research in the manner that you’ve chosen. While it might seem fairly simple and straightforward, it’s crucial that your objectives for the research are clear, the questions are designed to get the data you want, and that you have a way to analyze and interpret the results.
Read how Carabiner Communications helped its client Digital Element to plan and conduct a survey of the Location Based Marketing Association’s global membership here.
If you’re considering conducting market research to help drive your company’s next big business decisions, contact us today. We can handle all aspects of market research, from strategy and planning to execution and reporting results.