Valuable insights derived from good market research provides a basis for knowing how your business is performing and also what you should focus on in your marketing.
A great marketing and communications strategy is always research driven. Smart businesses use insights to be more competitive in their market. Here's how:
A decent strategy includes getting valuable insights into your competitors and what they offer. Not only does this improve your overall marketing strategy but also the quality of your products and services.
Having access to reliable market research means you can set your prices competitively, but, more importantly, learn from your competition. What are they doing well and what could you be doing better?
Solid competitor insights help you identify and expose opportunities to know where to focus your efforts, to gain maximum pay-off.
By getting the right insights, you’ll have the knowledge you need to keep your business from falling behind and instead lead your market.
Here at Perceptive, we investigate the competitor landscape for our clients and enable transparency of where they’re placed in the market, uncovering profitable and tangible opportunities. We uncover the SWOT (strengths/weaknesse/opportunities/threats) of our client’s business, to ensure they can adopt qualified strategies to capitalise on areas where the competition is weak.
You might have just launched a new product or are planning on launching one, but unsure of how the market will react. Conducting market research is the most effective way to test out ideas before you decide to go live or spend lots of money on marketing them.
When you’re tracking the right metrics, you can quickly (or in real-time) see which products, concepts, campaigns and messaging are resonating best with your target customers.
In essence, insights derived from good market research saves you money and ensures you’ll set off on a good foot.
It could also be a good idea to do some secondary research before even conducting a survey with your market. An idea is to search the web for existing studies and research and why not contact industry trade associations and publications to gauge the response of the market.
By getting the most up to date market data and insights (real-time, preferably), you’ll already be way ahead of the game. And you’ll need to be relevant to ensure that you’re still appealing to customers.
Sure, it’s a cliché but oh-so-true: change is the only true constant. This is especially true for marketing. If you want to remain a profitable business you need to anticipate and react to change in order to stay relevant.
By researching the evolving needs of your target market and consumers, and analysing your competition’s reactions in depth, you ensure you’re always relevant and will remain a key player for the long term.
You’ll need to change with the times to be relevant at all today. You can do this by tracking your company’s progress on an ongoing basis, by real-time brand monitoring and reporting.
It is an obvious point, but nonetheless too important not to mention. The biggest benefit of analysing your market and the performance of your product or service is that it helps you understand your customers.
Who are they? What do they want? What do they expect? One you know this, through your collected insights, you can have a two-way conversation with your customers to really understand their needs so that you can tailor your products and services to meet them.
The best way is to collect customer feedback by using an online survey, preferably through a third party to enhance credibility. Don’t forget to segment your responses to ensure you’re marketing the right messages to the right people.
You can also collect customer feedback directly from your survey emails. For Customer Monitor, we have an easy feature that allows our clients to do this by the click of a button. They can then post direct testimonials by their promoters from the surveys to their social pages.
We also have a widget that feeds through testimonials or NPS directly to their website.
If you’re in charge of your company’s P&L or of growing a revenue line you might be unsure of where to start. It can all be a bit overwhelming. By using research for any type of product development, launch, or business expansion you will be able to keep track of trends and future markets and also identify areas for expansion.
When you have the right research at hand, it will be easier to set realistic targets for your business and create effective strategies for your marketing campaigns.
Research can really help you grow by helping you anticipate the evolving nature of the market.