With every passing year, businesses are witnessing a rapid shift in consumer behavior. This change in perspective can be based on several factors, such as the introduction of newer tech tools, refined user experience, or price fluctuation in the economy.
Marketers today are exploring innovative ideas to make their content and campaigns viral. However, this might not be the only effective way to make an impression on the audience, especially when it concerns the long-term perspective. To cater to these changing demands, businesses need to formulate a plan worthwhile for the marketing spend while driving decisions based on the current market scenario. For the ship to sail, businesses need to steer their efforts in the right direction. And this can be made possible when they have the right compass for accurate information.
And this change in dynamic has made market research a necessity for small businesses.
Market research forms the crux of averting all kinds of risks - from decision-making to planning and designing methods to market a product or service. It enables businesses to build efficiency for their brand's value by offering them a direct approach to developing a better presence across social platforms. By investing in market research, brands lower their chances of witnessing failures
What is Market Research?
Before understanding the significance of market research, it is important to know what it is. Market research is not just a specific method or activity; it is a driven approach that enables businesses to learn more about their target audience.
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Market research assists businesses in gathering relevant insights on the target market, along with buyer persona, competitor analysis, and economic market shifts. It guides them to create a blueprint that yields desirable results for their marketing team.
From marketing managers to researchers, everyone takes part in discovering relevant information that could eventually benefit the business. These insights can then be used to design unique advertisements, to achieve the goal of gasping for customers' attention.
A business can choose different means to conduct research and gather relevant information to design a unique marketing strategy and launch it. While primary data accumulation may seem reliable for their existing customers, for a brand to grow, it is important to tap into new audiences. And for that, understanding the customers' thoughts is vital. The ultimate idea is to create a standard decision-making process that is bulletproof and goal-oriented.
While tasks, including surveys and focus groups, can help businesses, they do not always provide the necessary information. Some of the tasks that businesses can undertake as a part of their market research include:
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Engaging in short conversations with the consumers who are part of the target market. This will help businesses understand the consumer's perspective and their requirements.
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Search relevant social media groups within the target market. This will provide businesses with a free, low-effort way to connect with their target customers online. This will eventually help in promoting the business in the groups.
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Integrating survey forms on the website. If you have a website for your small business, it will enable you to offer your potential customers discounts in exchange for filling in a survey.
The above tasks can be included as a vital part of a market research strategy, enabling businesses to know the requirements of their target markets as well as their behaviors and preferences.
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Role of Market Research
Market research offers a systematic and objective approach to analyzing relevant information. This implies that businesses create a detailed and carefully designed research plan in which every stage of the research is specified. The research plan helps specify
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the research problem in concise terms,
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the data required to address the problem,
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the approaches to be employed to gather the information
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the analytical techniques to be used
Market research (MR) facilitates organizations with relevant, accurate, reliable, and current information. Market research also enables the marketing manager to link the marketing variables with the existing environment and consumers. It helps in removing some of the uncertainties by providing relevant data. Owing to the competitive marketing environment and the ever-increasing costs, businesses are transitioning to market research to accumulate sound information.
Importance of Market Research
Let us explore the significant reasons why market research is important for smaller businesses:
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Spot Potential Business Opportunities
A thorough market research presents a clear understanding of whom to reach out to in the targeted customer base, which marketing channels to use to reach them, and their interests. Once these parameters are defined, marketing managers will be able to spot business opportunities like-
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Forming partnerships with other businesses. By learning about the customers and their demographics, businesses can identify other small businesses that serve them. They can also approach other businesses for joint promotions to gain mutual benefits.
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Create profitable upgrades. Understanding other products and services that customers tend to buy can help in adding or creating new product bundles or upselling to increase the average value.
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Identifying new locations to sell to. Knowing the geographical areas of the target customers will help in creating compelling, targeted campaigns.
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Lower Risks
Around half of the businesses with employees are not able to survive past the fifth year, as per the data issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To ensure that the business survives for longer, it is important to gain a steady stream of sales and customers. And to do that, market research is vital. Regular market research offers a way to check in with existing and potential customers. Here's how a business can apply this:
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Testing modern designs and products before launching them in the market. Businesses can test new launches on a smaller subset of their audience to see if the change would be welcome.
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Find out why customers discontinue any product. Ideally, small businesses have recurring customers. But if the customer is not returning, they can conduct a survey to focus on a specific group and identify why they are not making any repeat sales.
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Get insights on different problem areas. If the hot-selling product experiences a drop in sales, businesses can conduct research to explore ways of fixing the crisis before it ruins the profits.
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Create Relevant Materials for Promotions
It is important to plan the text or images that are put on fliers, websites, or social media accounts with thorough market research. As target customers have already expressed all their needs and frustrations, as a business, you will be in a better position to address the concerns and present new ways to create marketing materials.
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Knowing what the customers see in the products and services - if it is a necessity or a luxury - will help in designing product labels, brochures, and websites that fit their perception.
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Identifying the age range of customers to understand the type of language to be used in promotional materials.
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Simplify Decision-Making
The need for market research arises when making tough business decisions. Instead of relying on arbitrary criteria for the decisions, businesses can undertake market research to discover relevant insights. While not all decisions can be based on market research, many of them can include the following:
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where to spend the advertising budget?
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identifying the demand for a new product
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which products should be discontinued, and which ones can be improved
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how to price offers for specific products
Businesses need market research as it offers them solid facts. Through market research, they can make more informed decisions rather than basing their decisions on intuition or guesswork.
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Conclusion: The Significance of Market Research
Customers today live in an era where Search Engine has answers to the silliest of questions one can imagine. They hold the power to buy products/services that aren't based on guesses but on thorough research and review. Similarly, for brands to make an impact on their target market, they need to integrate an effective decision-making process. It also depends on how well the marketing managers explore the market trends along with practices and technological shifts while doing market research. However, after gaining a deep understanding of the need for market research, it is important for businesses to commit a dedicated budget to focus on extensive surveys for market research.
New businesses today are exploring ways to boost their sales and customers as soon as possible. And market research can ensure that the incoming traffic of sales and customers doesn't stop coming. By creating elaborate plans to identify the factors that would drive the efficacy of a marketing campaign, marketing managers can include different marketing variables in the brand's strategy.
With a presence in New York, San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, Toronto, London, Zurich, Pune, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad, SG Analytics, a pioneer in Research and Analytics, offers tailor-made services to enterprises worldwide.
A leader in Market intelligence consulting, SG Analytics enables organizations to achieve actionable insights into products, technology, customers, competition, and the marketplace to make insight-driven decisions. Contact us today if you are an enterprise looking to make critical data-driven decisions to prompt accelerated growth and breakthrough performance.
