Starting a business without doing market research is like driving without a steering wheel.
Running your business on assumptions about your industry, target audience, and competitors can lead to a waste of valuable resources, time, and money.
To create a sustainable business, you need to do your research.
What Is Market Research?
Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets and customers: know about them, starting with who they are.
It is an important component of business strategy and plays a large role in sustaining competitiveness. Regardless of whether you are a B2B or B2C company, market research gives you the tools to make decisions based on data to support your growth.
For your business’s success, it’s crucial to actively research trends, understand your audience, and reach your overall business goals.
What Are The Types Of Market Research?
There are many different types of market research that cover different types of areas within your business.
Keep reading to learn about a few of the different types of market research!
Competitor Research
When crafting your overall strategy, analyzing your competitors is an invaluable part of market research. A Competitive Analysis will help you learn from businesses competing for your potential customers.
This is key to defining a competitive edge that creates sustainable revenue.
Your competitive analysis should identify your competition by product line or service and market segment. It should help you determine the following:
- Market share
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Opportunity to enter the market
- The importance of your target market to your competitors
- Barriers to entry
Once you have your competitive analysis completed, you will then be able to learn the ins and outs of how your competition performs and what you can do to surpass them.
Brand Research
Brand research helps companies create, manage and maintain their overall brand.
This relates to the tone, branding, images, values, or identity of the company.
Although many use brand research when they are getting their company started, this type of research can be used at any stage in a business’s life cycle.
Here are the different types of brand research you can conduct:
- Brand advocacy – How many of your customers are willing to recommend your brand?
- Brand awareness – Does your target market know who you are?
- Brand loyalty – Are you retaining customers?
- Brand perception – What do people think of as your company’s identity?
- Brand positioning – What is the best way to differentiate your brand from others?
- Brand value – How much are people willing to pay for an experience with your brand over another?
Customer Segmentation
Having a full view and understanding of is your target market is one of the most important things when doing market research.
Not every customer in your target market is going to be the same. It’s up to you to determine how you can target each member of your audience.
But it’s not easy to personalize marketing messages to every single customer in your target market.
This is where customer segmentation comes in!
Customer segmentation helps divide your audience into smaller groups or personas with similar characteristics that will support your targeted marketing efforts.
These are the four characteristics market researchers use to segment audiences:
- Demographics
- Geography
- Psychographics
- Behavior
The better you understand each persona, the easier it will be to focus on delivering tailored marketing, building loyal relationships, successfully pricing products, and forecasting how new products or services will perform in each segment.
Consumer Insights
Research on consumer insights gives you more than just information on who your customers are and what they do. It helps you understand your customer’s behaviors and why they react in certain ways.
But why should you care how your customers behave?
Understanding your customer’s behaviors can help you anticipate their needs, spark innovation, personalize your marketing, solve business challenges, and more.
As you conduct your consumer insights research you should be able to uncover the following about your customers:
- Purchase habits
- Interests, hobbies, passions
- Personal and professional information
- How they consume media and advertising
Campaign Effectiveness
Marketing is all about testing, testing, and more testing.
Many people think that if they advertise their product or service, they will immediately have 100 new leads knocking down their door throwing money at them.
But that’s not always the case. If ever.
Tracking a campaign will determine if the ads have effectively increased awareness, purchase intent, and improved reach of the target audience.
Here are a few ways you can measure your campaign’s effectiveness:
- Set a specific goal and track the results
- Analyze site traffic
- Review lead quality
- Analyze your key metrics before and after the campaign
Researching your campaign’s effectiveness will give you the tools to evaluate whether your advertising messages are reaching the right people and delivering the desired results.
Whether your business is just starting or you’ve been in it for 10 years, there’s never a wrong time to conduct market research.
Looking for a helping hand? Ajax Union has you covered! Schedule a FREE strategy session with us and we’ll give you personalized insights on your B2B Strategy.
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