June 12th 2023
In order to build a successful business, you always need to be a step ahead of your competition. Every business is fighting for the spotlight in their respective vertical. While your products may sometimes speak for themselves, it’s always good to understand what you can be doing better to truly capture the hearts and minds of prospective customers.
Using market research, you can unlock the potential of your business by taking a closer look at who those customers are, and what they’re seeking from you, to ultimately increase your sales.
Today, we’re going to give you a rundown of how effectively leveraging market research can give you a leg-up on your competitors, how it can guide the direction of your business and help you to avoid possible business faux pars.
Branding and Brand Management
It’s rather obvious nowadays that strong branding can elicit positive responses from a consumer-base. Projecting a powerful image of your business should always be at the forefront of your mind, and utilising market research, you can gauge how your customers truly feel about your brand.
Surveying customers and conducting focus groups can be critical in the early development of new product lines, as they can give you valuable feedback from real people who may purchase from your business. Focus groups allow you to analyse your brand awareness and how you’re perceived when pitted against a close competitor, allowing you to make incremental changes to address any negatives, which is critical to ensuring business growth.
You’re able to get feedback on your branding, logo, colour schemes and any other imagery associated with your brand, which gives insight into how they make customers feel. Do your customers consider you a friendly brand? Do they associate you with quality products or services? These are the sorts of questions you’re looking to answer.
Knowing how people see you in the wider picture is invaluable information to have at your fingertips. Always make sure to send out a survey after a customer has purchased from you, because even a small number of replies over time can make a world of difference.
Understanding Your Target Audience
From understanding your brand, to understanding your audience. Market research is invaluable when used to properly gauge who interacts with your brand. The easiest way to do this is to devise a questionnaire which asks a broad range of questions to break down your audience into set groups, which can consist of:
- Age – filtered down to age ranges, or groups (millennial, Gen Z, Gen X etc.)
- Gender – Helpful when creating gender-specific products.
- Marital status/Children – Understanding the household, and where your products may go.
- Geographical Location – If running an international business, or one that ships worldwide.
- Education level or current occupation – Do they have a degree? Are they working from home?
When you have enough information about your customers, you’re able to craft advertising campaigns which appeal to them. This helps you to extend the reach of your business beyond what you were able to achieve before. It also allows you to adjust your brand positioning to appeal to a wider audience too. Letting your customers know where you stand on certain issues can be a huge benefit, as it will aid in creating a bond between you, ensuring their return to purchase from your business in the future.
Informing Product Development
From branding, to audience, to your products themselves. Conducting market research with the hope that it informs the creation of better products is always going to be important. By now, you know what your customers want, and have a clear picture of who they are. You now need to find out exactly what kinds of products they’re likely to want from you, and what they think of your current offering.
You can use market research to evaluate the viability of your new products, what people are willing to pay for them, and how much demand there is likely to be for it. You always want your products to be desirable, and effective market research is the only way to find out how you can make them so.
One of the easiest ways to conduct this research is competitor analysis. What are they doing, that perhaps you’re not? Are they offering variations of the product that appeal to different groups of people? It’s all about identifying these opportunities and striking while the iron is hot. If you’re able to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry, you’re likely to find trends that can help you to market your products more effectively.
Measuring Market Performance
Finally, when you’ve carried out your initial market research, you’ve surveyed your customers, and you’ve set the wheels in motion for your new products to fill a gap in the market, you’ll want to measure how this all went down.
Sit down and evaluate how well your campaigns did at engaging your customers, and whether you saw an increase in sales. Conduct another survey or group to get feedback on what worked (and what didn’t), so you can address this in your next marketing effort.
Measuring the performance of your campaigns is vital to your business, as it helps you to allocate marketing budgets to the areas which worked most effectively. If you find out that your campaign worked best on 18 to 29-year-olds, but your product was intended for a slightly older demographic, look at why this could be. This kind of data helps you to fine tune the language, imagery and overall feel of your brand when crafting your next marketing campaign, so that your messaging resonates with the right people.
Market research is incredibly important in the business world of today. It not only allows you to understand your audience but helps point you in the direction of success.
We hope you’ve taken something away from what we’ve discussed today, and that we’ve convinced you to up your game when it comes to market research and marketing prowess.
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