There are over 32 million small businesses in the United States. Unfortunately, many of these businesses don’t emphasize market research the way they should. Proper research will serve as the backbone for every solid marketing strategy, and it’s crucial to understand the key benefits it provides.
We’ve put together a brief marketing guide full of marketing tips that you can leverage in the future. Let’s dive in.
Opinions on Your Brand
Researching your target market will shed light on how your customers feel about your brand. Although this may seem like a superficial detail, it will play a large role in how your company performs over time.
For example, let’s assume that your company was involved in a minor scandal that you were unaware of. You also happened to notice that your quarterly earnings had recently dropped significantly.
Once you gain insight into this problem, you can begin to take the appropriate steps to repair your reputation. In contrast, you might find that your brand perception is overwhelmingly positive. This will let you know that you can double down on the strategies you currently implement.
Growth Opportunities
Leveraging growth opportunities is crucial when it comes to maximizing performance. These can come in many different forms, such as introducing a new product or service to the market. However, you should also thoroughly research the potential that these opportunities have.
In some cases, they may not be worth pursuing. A common example could involve a small business that simply does not have enough resources to take advantage of an opportunity for growth.
Doing so could cause the company to stretch its resources too thin, resulting in performance issues elsewhere.
Insight Into Your Audience
You can’t expect to reach your target sales metrics if you don’t have a comprehensive understanding of your audience. The truth is that businesses should never stop learning more information about their target audience.
People’s opinions, interests, etc. change over time, and it will influence their buying decisions. So, it’s in your best interest to regularly conduct market research on your audience. This will help you avoid mistakes that you may have otherwise made.
Details on Your Competitors
Understanding your competition is something that you simply cannot neglect. This will provide you with info on why certain customers choose alternative options over your brand.
You can even learn more about what strategies your competitors use, allowing you to reverse engineer them for yourself. Entrepreneurs should avoid making the mistake of assuming they don’t need to conduct this type of research. Put simply, the heavy hitters in every industry are looking at everyone around them so that they can stay on top.
Partnership Opportunities
Market research can easily lead you to develop a lucrative partnership. An opportunity many businesses pursue is influencer marketing. This involves creating a campaign that leverages individuals who have a strong presence and their industry.
This could be something as simple as a brief endorsement. Or, it could be more involved (such as a product review). As long as the individual or brand you partner with has a good reputation, it will likely be worth the investment.
Industry Trends
Similar to how your audience’s key attributes may change over time, industry trends will also fluctuate.
These will heavily dictate what strategies are most effective. Unfortunately, complications can sometimes arise. Industries that are prone to rapid change (such as tech, healthcare, or finance) could cause previous strategies to become obsolete.
Even something as simple as a newly imposed government regulation could disrupt an entire marketing strategy.
Conducting Market Research
To get started, you’ll first need to understand what type of marketing research you’d like to focus on. These include the following:
- Brand research
- Competitor research
- Customer segmentation
- Marketing strategy evaluation
- Product development
- Usability testing
After you decide which is most appropriate, you then need to choose between primary research and secondary research.
With primary research, your company itself (or an industry expert) will collect data. You can think of this as field research, as it involves using exploratory, open-ended methods.
Its main focus is to gain insight into specific issues or questions. On the other hand, secondary research leverages data that already exists. Common examples include industry data reports, statistics, government census data, etc.
Many people choose to start with secondary research since it is less involved. They then move on to primary research once they narrow their focus.
It’s also worth noting that working with a professional marketing agency can help you get started. You can check out what the professionals over at www.iseb.com.mx have to say to learn more.
Research Methods
There are a handful of different methods that you can leverage.
Interviews are one of the most notable, as they provide a large amount of data in a short period of time. However, you can’t conduct these on a large scale. This will significantly limit your sample size.
Focus groups, on the other hand, gain data from discussions with numerous people at once. Although focus groups are often small, they can provide a large amount of information.
Surveys tend to reach the most people simultaneously. They often simply ask consumers to answer a handful of questions, something that only takes a few minutes. Although the sample size here is notably large, the depth of the data is less noticeable.
Get Started Today
The best time to implement market research if you haven’t already is right now. Keep the above tips in mind so that you can help your brand reach its full potential.
Our blog has plenty of other useful articles on how to run a successful business. They’ll serve as great resources in the future. Be sure to check them out today!
