How Is Marketing Research Done

How Is Marketing Research Done – Marketing research is a popular topic that is much in demand in the market for its potential benefits. In fact, demand increases when the business community realizes how crucial it is for making informed decisions. With marketing research, you can ensure that your marketing efforts meet customer needs and therefore drive successful business results. Yet, in spite of its important role in a company’s success, a lot of companies do not conduct marketing research. They might spend time in having a database of one kind or another but they aren’t sure who they are going to provide it to. One major reason responsible for this is the lack of understanding on what marketing research is all about.

Marketing research is the most important part of any business. Without marketing research done right, many businesses will fail miserably in their search to achieve success. But enough talking about why marketing research is important and how it works. Instead, focus on learning more about how marketing research can be conducted and completed.

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering information about your business’s buyers personas, target audience, and customers to determine how viable and successful your product or service would be, and/or is, among these people.

Why do market research?

Market research allows you to meet your buyer where they are. As our world (both digital and analog) becomes louder and demands more and more of our attention, this proves invaluable. By understanding your buyer’s problems, pain points, and desired solutions, you can aptly craft your product or service to naturally appeal to them.

Market research also provides insight into a wide variety of things that impact your bottom line including:

• Where your target audience and current customers conduct their product or service research
• Which of your competitors your target audience looks to for information, options, or purchases
• What’s trending in your industry and in the eyes of your buyer
• Who makes up your market and what their challenges are
• What influences purchases and conversions among your target audience 

These sources often come in the form of market reports, consisting of industry insight compiled by a research agency like Pew, Gartner, or Forrester. Because this info is so portable and distributable, it typically costs money to download and obtain.

Internal Sources

Internal sources deserve more credit for supporting market research than they generally get. Why? This is the market data your organization already has!

Average revenue per sale, customer retention rates, and other historical data on the health of old and new accounts can all help you draw conclusions on what your buyers might want right now.

Now that we’ve covered these overarching market research categories, let’s get more specific and look at the various types of market research you might choose to conduct. 

Uses for Market Research

The following paragraphs mention some of the primary uses for market research. Useful data collection methods are associated with most of the items in the following list.

1. Identify opportunities to serve various groups of customers.

Verify and understand the unmet needs of a certain group (or market) of customers. What do they say that they want? What do they say that they need? Some useful data collection methods might be, for example, conducting focus groups, interviewing customers and investors, reading the newspaper and other key library publications, and listening to what clients say and observing what they do. Later on, you might even develop a preliminary version of your product that you pilot, or test market, to verify if the product would sell or not.

2. Examine the size of the market – how many people have the unmet need.

Identify various subgroups, or market segments, in that overall market along with each of their unique features and preferences. Useful data collection methods might be, for example, reading about demographic and societal trends in publications at the library. You might even observe each group for a while to notice what they do, where they go and what they discuss. Consider interviewing some members of each group. Finally, consider conducting a focus group or two among each group.

3. Determine the best methods to meet the unmet needs of the target markets.

How can you develop a product with the features and benefits to meet that unmet need? How can you ensure that you have the capacity to continue to meet the demand? Here’s where focus groups can really come in handy. Conduct some focus groups, including asking them about their preferences, unmet needs and how those needs might be met. Run your ideas past them. At the same time, ask them what they would need to use your services and what they would pay for them.

4. Investigate the competition.

Examine their products, services, marketing techniques, pricing, location, etc. One of the best ways to understand your competitors is to use their services. Go to their location, look around and look at some of their literature. Notice their ads in newsletters and the newspaper. Look at their web sites.

How to conduct market research (in a lean way)

The following four steps will give you a solid understanding of who your users are and what they want from a company like yours.

1. Create simple user personas

A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on psychographic and demographic data from people who use websites and products similar to your own.

How to get the data: use on-page or emailed surveys and interviews to understand your users.

How to do it right: whatever survey/interview questions you ask, they should answer the following questions about the customer:

• Who are they?
• What is their main goal?
• What is their main barrier to achieving this goal?

Pitfalls to avoid:

• Don’t ask too many questions! Keep it to five or less (preferably three), otherwise, you’ll inundate them, and they’ll stop answering.
• Don’t worry too much about typical demographic questions like age or background. Instead, focus on the role these people play (as it relates to your product) and their goals.

How Smallpdf did it: Smallpdf ran an on-page survey for a week or two and received 1,000 replies, which revealed that many of their users were administrative assistants, students, and teachers. Then they created simple user personas like this one for admins:

• Who are they?Administrative Assistants.
• What is their main goal?Creating Word documents from a scanned, hard-copy document or a PDF where the source file was lost.
• What is their main barrier to achieving it?Converting a scanned PDF doc to a Word file.

2. Conduct observational research

Observational research involves taking notes while watching someone use your product (or a similar product).

Overt vs. covert observation

• Overt observation involves asking customers if they’ll let you watch themuse your product. (Smallpdf did this with administrative assistants.)
• Covert observation means studying users ‘in the wild’ without them knowing.This only works if you sell a type of product that people use regularly, but it offers the purest observational data because people often behave differently when they know they’re being watched. (Smallpdf did this with university students.)

Tips to do it right:

• Record an entry in your field notes, along with a timestamp, each time an event occurs.

3. Conduct individual interviews

Interviews are one-on-one conversations with members of your target market. They allow you to dig deep and explore their concerns, which can lead to all sorts of revelations.

Tips to do it right:

• Act like a journalist, not a salesperson. Rather than trying to talk your company up, ask people about their lives, their needs, their frustrations, and how a product like yours could help.
• Listen more, talk less.Be curious.
• Ask ‘why?’ so you can dig deeper. Get into the specifics and learn about their past behavior.
• Record the conversationSo you don’t have to take notes and can focus on the conversation. There are plenty of services that will transcribe recorded conversations for a good price.

Pitfalls to avoid:

Don’t ask leading or loaded questions.

• A leading question reveals bias on your part and pushes them in a certain direction (e.g., “Have you taken advantage of the amazing new features we just released?).
• A loaded question sneaks in an assumption which, if untrue, would make it impossible to answer honestly. For example, we can’t ask you, “What did you find most useful about this article?” without asking whether you found the article useful in the first place.

4. Analyze the data (without drowning in it)

The following techniques will help you wrap your head around the data without losing yourself in it. Remember, the point of lean market research is to find quick, actionable insights.

Conclusion

Now a days, nobody likes to read a dull research report. What the business leaders and managers want is a report containing a lot of visual content so that they can have a clear idea about the research done. The importance of marketing research lies in helping businesses understand what customers think about their products or services, how they view the strengths and weaknesses of the firm’s current offerings, and how these could be improved by investing in new technologies. Conducting marketing research requires expertise in market research methods and its implementation.