5 Ways to Get Ahead in Market Research

To get an understanding of who you should sell your products to is not just about having the right tools, but about recognizing that, as you gain an understanding of your audience, you can take a deeper dive into who your customers are and what they really want. Market research is not just something that you can do upfront to help you figure out who you should be promoting your products to, but it also helps you to make informed decisions. So if you want to excel in market research, you should consider some of these approaches:

Develop Strong Data Analytics

Developing strong data analysis skills is essential when it comes to market research because you will need to not just have data, but extract meaningful insights from it. There are a number of ways to do this, for example, data visualization tools and statistical software, but there are also other ways to extract information from people in a meaningful way. Having the best quiz software for lead generation can generate a far more human response, rather than just using certain results to inform metrics, and this is a very critical distinction. We need to build up a personalized approach to how we promote ourselves, and while having strong data analysis skills is all well and good, if you don’t have the ability to understand the intent behind those answers you won’t ever understand who your audience is.

Use the Right Mix of People

You need to understand who your customers are, which is where a buyer persona can help you identify users’ pain points and motivations so you can figure out the gaps in your knowledge but also their expectations of your product or service. While the information you collect from creating these buyer personas is an ideal example, you’ve got to have a wide sample of loyal customers as well as existing buyers and those from six months ago. When it comes to getting the right sample size, approximately 10% of the target audience should be enough. But smaller businesses can benefit from going even further if you have a very limited customer base. In-depth interviews such as the aforementioned quizzes, but also something like a phone call can also give you a far greater insight.

Choosing the Right Questions

To ensure that you are identifying opportunities, you’ve got to straddle the balance between observing and asking the right types of questions beyond the traditional yes/no answers. Open-ended questions are one effective approach but we also should consider scales from 1 to 10, but also allow them the opportunity to put across their opinion. If we give our customers the opportunity to speak their minds, we have to make sure that it’s in a very comfortable setting. Usually, email surveys are the best approach here because it allows them to think about feedback in their own time. But if you want to conduct interviews, you’ve got to have the right person asking the questions. It shouldn’t be a pressurizing affair, but needs to be something that will ultimately create a very trusting environment. Simplicity is key.

Research Your Competitors

If you are trying to get an understanding of what you can do differently, one approach to conducting effective market research is by understanding your competitors and what they do to attract customers. Simple keyword research can help here because you can understand which keywords are actually driving traffic to your competitors rather than yourself and also helps you to figure out what type of content is working well for your competitors. There are tools that can help you see what your competitors are doing, for example, Ahrefs, and should be used in the right way to position and strengthen your abilities.

Revisit Your Results

Market research is a lengthy theme undertaking. We might think that once we’ve got the results we need we can then implement this and not revisit it for a long time. Once you’ve shared the insights with our marketing team and planned out the next course of action to make a positive impact on the business, we need to remember that the dynamics of the market will change with very little warning. This is why conducting market research regularly is pivotal because you will be up-to-date with your industry trends as well as your customer expectations and help you to understand your customers better.

The goal of market research is to identify new opportunities and needs, which is why we need to understand that market research is not just something that we do semi-regularly, but should inform every aspect of our promotional prowess.