How To Master The First Step Of Your Marketing Strategy- a guide to successful market research
In addition to identifying problems and answers, market researchers must also find ways to improve, forecast how the market will evolve, and assess what a business can do to stay one step ahead of the changes. This technique will not only bring new clients to your company, but it will also increase customer loyalty to the brand over time. Whether you perform the research in-house or hire a third-party specialist, this ability should be part of any marketer’s toolkit. In this article, we’ll break down our top market research recommendations to help you enhance your business’s market research.
Define your user persona:
A user persona is a semi-fictional user based on psychographic and demographic data from customers who use comparable websites and products to yours. Before you can grasp how clients in your sector make purchasing decisions, you must first know who they are. This search, as stated in a previous article, focuses on identifying users’ wants, interests, common problems, and lifestyle trends rather than age, background, and income.
Research your competitors
If you’re in business, you almost certainly have competitors. Think outside the box when carrying out research. Don’t limit yourself by focusing solely on your major rivals, such as those in your industry. It is also critical to detect those that are not in your business but have overlapping interests with your product, services, content, or audience. Although they are not offering the same product, your competitor’s article, social media material, and so on may be outperforming all others. You can bet that is the content your users want to view, and you can proceed from there to win back engagement. A key component of successful market research is understanding how to deliver excellent, relevant content to your audience.
Understanding types of market research
Once you’ve developed a strategy and a hypothesis, it’s time to decide what kind of research you’ll require. Surveys, customer observations, focus groups, and interviews are the most prevalent methods of market research, although this is not an exhaustive list. With our digital world constantly evolving, it is crucial to know where your audience is spending their time online via website traffic, social media interactions, search queries, and so on. Gathering this data and identifying possible areas for improvement is an important first step in analyzing the current market and identifying prospects for business strategies, promotion, and goods.
Let’s boil it down into the two broad types of market research that you will want to focus on- primary and secondary research. Primary research involves conducting your own research about the products and services that you plan to offer. While secondary research looks at published data and can be used to create benchmarks and understand the competition. While there is no fixed sequence in which to collect your data, we have found that completing secondary research first can provide you with the background knowledge you need to design a better targeted primary research project that yields more effective results
Now comes the meat of your market research: going out and gathering data! There are two approaches to data collecting: qualitative and quantitative. Google Analytics and Google Data Studio are two examples of quantitative research that may be used to complement or inform market research surveys. There, you can look at where your leads are coming from, how long people are staying on your pages, or maybe where they are exiting your site. This should offer you an idea of what to improve to guide users down the sales funnel. The numbers don’t lie and they’re crucial to the research process but don’t get lost in them. Your consumers are real people, and their quantitative answers allow you to identify broad trends within the data that you can act on. Qualitative and quantitative data are most effective when used together, for example, you can use Google Analytics to see how potential customers are reaching your page. To find out why those referrals are more effective than others, use qualitative research.
Summarize data and draw conclusions
Data collection is a vital component of the process, but even more importantly it is the ability to evaluate that data and identify patterns and changes that are already or will soon affect your business. Data gathering and analysis must be a continuous process that occurs throughout all stages. Even if you conducted thorough research before introducing your latest product, you must then follow up and continue to collect consumer feedback and market data following the launch. Measuring the efficacy of your present campaign can assist you in driving future campaign effectiveness.
To analyze the data without drowning in it, Boston Digital creates a custom customer journey map. After in-depth research we begin mapping users’ journeys starting at discovery and going all the way beyond consumption of the product, ensuring not to exclude the steps in between. Custom mapping lays out critical information, enabling a better customer experience from beginning to end, by intercepting the user’s journey with digital campaigns at key points. Targeting a highly primed audience with messages that meet the moment drives users directly down the funnel and allows you to lay out your research in a visual way that you can easily digest.
Research is not just an academic exercise; it is an essential first step toward digital marketing—in all its forms—that meets your company’s needs and addresses your challenges head-on. Building your brand is an investment, and it is your job to make sure you are getting the most out of your efforts. Thorough and well-executed market research acts as insurance that reduces the risk of such investments by helping you truly understand the problem at hand before falling in love with a proposed solution. After all, it’s impossible to be entirely sure that you are committing to the right solution if you don’t really know what’s at the crux of the issues you’re trying to fix. After conducting your research, being able to analyze and execute it properly will create a recipe for success for all future campaigns
