Today’s customers are smarter than you think. They are capable enough to research your product and make buying decisions on their own. With this in mind, you have to adopt new technologies and learn market trends. You have to understand your customers’ preferences, feelings, and attitudes. For that, you need to do market research. Market research is the core of your every successful business strategy. It’s the one and only way to get a deeper knowledge about your customers, competitors, and most importantly, your employees.
And market research is the answer to all your business issues. This will help you to test new products, launch a new service, and identify potential leads. To make your research efforts more accurate, we’re sharing different market research types to make sure you have all the information. Read on to learn more about them.
What is Market Research?
Market research is one of the essential treasures of any business. It takes you closer to your customers by helping you understand them better. Several businesses use market research to identify their target market, improve the overall experience, and craft a strong marketing strategy that attracts new leads and retains the old ones.
Why is Market Research Important?
A popular electronic brand falls from grace within the business world. Everyone blamed the new CEO, business strategy, their products, and whatnot!
But, the real reason behind the loss of their popularity was the lack of market research. For this reason, the brand failed to understand the new market trends, customer preferences, and advanced technologies. Well, I’m telling you the story of Nokia. Back in 2013, Nokia’s lack of market understanding and innovation was one of the many reasons behind its failure.
There’s no doubt that market research is one of the most important parts of a successful business. Without conducting market research, you can’t understand your customers, identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business, or can’t create a solid marketing strategy that works effectively.
As a business owner, you have to analyze what your customers want, what their expectations are. And without marketing research, you can’t understand them accurately. Yes, you’ll have a rough idea about their needs, but if you want to dig deeper and win your customers forever, then market research is vital.
Here’s why market research is crucial for the good health of your business:
Who will purchase my product? What do they expect from my product? Who are my ideal customers? How often will they purchase from me?
I know you ask yourself these questions a lot! Because your business’s success depends on the answers to these questions. The more answers you’ll get, the better understanding you’ll get about your business. The answers will help you to know your customers better than your competitors.
Conducting market research will allow you to get the full buyer’s persona or customer profile. From the customer profile, you can identify the market size. You’ll get insights on customer demographics, like their age, gender, location, Income, etc. You can use this valuable insight into different marketing, advertising, or pricing campaigns.
Stay Ahead of Your Competitors
Your competitors have already done their fair share of market research to stay ahead in the game. If you want to win back your customers from your competitors, market research is the ultimate solution.
You can identify the key players in the market with the help of market research. Moreover, you can gather knowledge about competitors’ business approaches, strengths, and weaknesses. These will help you to create effective strategies with more deep knowledge about the market. You can analyze your business gaps, which will be crucial to the growth of your business.
Test Your Product
While launching a new product on the market, you can’t be sure about its success. You can never know whether your customers will connect with your product or not. That’s why testing is vital before launching your product or services in the market world. Don’t make decisions in haste, and look well before introducing your business to the potential customer.
With market research, you can identify what strategy is best for your product, What resonates with your potential buyers, etc. This will save you from making any bad decisions or delivering a bad product to the market.
Observe Closely to win Trust
Getting closer to your customer will ensure your business’s success in the long run. You have to care about your employees deeply to get better results and improve customer experience.
Also, gathering information can tell you the reason behind your customers’ behavior. For instance, suppose your customers often leave your website after visiting the service page. You can identify the reason after conducting market research.
Now you know what market research is and why it’s valuable for businesses. So, let’s move on to the next point- the different types of market research.
Different Types of Market Research
There are mainly two types of market research that you’ll come across often- primary research and secondary research. Secondary research means third-party information within the market. In this kind of market research, the research is done by another business or organization, not by you. Some good examples of secondary market research are:
- Articles
- Books
- Videos
- Infographics
- White papers
Secondary market research is essential to understand your industry. But, if you want to collect deep knowledge about your industry, then primary market research is more crucial. And the examples of primary market research are:
- Online survey
- Interview
- Focus groups
Primary market research can help you collect insightful information directly from your potential customers. With this information, you can strengthen your business strategy.
Online surveys and polls are great ways to conduct market research successfully. With online surveys, you can get 40% more responses than any other survey method. If you are not sure about your product’s performance or want feedback about service, always ask your customers first.
Learn more about the importance of online surveys in our next point- “How to conduct market research with online surveys?”
How to Conduct Market Research with Online Survey
Online survey is an important part of market research. It lets you analyze your customers’ feelings about your products\services. If you want to get a clear idea about their characteristics, requirements, feedback, and expectations, market survey tools are the answer to all.
The primary purpose of online market surveys are:
- The purpose of the customers’ feedback survey is to gain valuable customer information so that you can retain your old customers and obtain new customers quickly.
- Surveys will give you a clear understanding of your customers’ purchasing behavior. Whether they’ll buy a specific product from you? Will they spend a certain amount on your new product or not? What do they think about the new feature of your app? You will get answers to all these questions by using an online market survey. Another purpose of market surveys is to gain insightful data. Gathering market data is essential to make major business decisions. You can avoid business risk by making well-informed decisions and marketing strategies.
- The most important purpose of market surveys is to get feedback and analyze your customer satisfaction levels. This will help you to keep your customers engaged and obtain loyal customers.
Different Types of market research surveys:
There are multiple types of market research surveys used by companies to gain insightful data. The information collected by market surveys will help you to identify new market trends, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, employee experience, competitors’ research, etc.
As we mentioned earlier, there are multiple types of market surveys used by companies. But here will talk about the top five most valuable market research surveys you can run to ensure good profits.
1. Market Segmentation Survey
With online market research surveys, you can determine the market size, segment your customers. Segmented campaigns can increase revenue by 750%. By conducting such market research, you can get key information on market growth, competitive positioning, etc. You can also use this type of survey to explore your target market and gather information about audience demographics—for example, age, family income, gender, etc.
2. Purchase Process Tracking Survey
How do your customers decide to make a purchase? What factors transform product awareness into sales? You’ll get these answers from conducting a purchase process tracking survey. These types of surveys will give you knowledge about market awareness, market information, inclination, etc.
3. Customer Analysis Survey
Customer analysis surveys are extremely important for understanding your customers’ expectations, attitudes, and loyalty. Also, you can measure customer loyalty and engagement based on these online surveys.
4. New Product Analysis Survey
If you want to launch a new feature of your product in the market, a product analysis survey will ensure success. You can measure the likelihood of the new feature or product. This market research will help you in the feature development process properly in the future.
5. Market Survey for Competitors Analysis
Competitors are always vital for any organization. When you maintain healthy competition with other businesses in your industry, you create opportunities for growth. And market surveys for competitor analysis will make you realize the market view you have relative to your competitors. In addition, you can gather information about their marketing strategist, strengths, and weaknesses.
You can use SurveySparrow’s online survey software to conduct market research smoothly. With SurveySparrow, you’ll get myriads of survey templates that will help you create engaging surveys based on your own requirements.
Tools for conducting market research
Here we’ve compiled a list of tools you can use to conduct online and offline market research surveys. These simple yet powerful features of these tools are extremely popular among several businesses all over the globe.
Engaging Survey Software
There’s nothing better than using engaging survey software to conduct your market research efficiently. Surveys are one of the best methods to gather information from your customers and employees about your business services and products. Having clarity about your potential customers, buyers’ persona, and solid feedback will make your marketing strategy stronger.
Survey software is popular for creating personalized surveys and increasing brand awareness. With survey platforms, you can get Insights from your website, social media platforms, webinars, and emails.
SurveySparrow’s survey software is a great Typeform alternative. It allows you to create engaging forms and surveys without a hassle. These surveys are conversational and easy-to-use. Most importantly, it offers features like multiple question types, dashboard, customization, embedded surveys, recurring surveys, etc. So, if you are looking for ways to conduct hassle-free market research, SurveySparrow is definitely a great Typeform, Zoho, and SurveyMonkey alternative.
Chatbots for Website
Chatbots are the future of market research. As per a study, by 2024, the global market chat is projected to be over $994 million. Several brands are implementing chatbots in every business task. From doing market research to tracking employee service, chatbots are almost everywhere.
A chatbot for a website has the power to make your customer journey or employee journey more enjoyable. It is an automated system that’ll guide your target audience via text and voice-based conversation. Using the ability of natural language processing, AI programmed intelligence, you can gather insights deeply resembling a human employee.
In addition, a chatbot will never feel tired to ask a follow-up question to your customers as your human employee. And market research is not a one-day work task! You have to make sure your research results are always up to date. That’s why you have to communicate with your target audience constantly. Chatbots are the best solution to engage with your customers without disturbing them frequently.
SurveySparrow’s no-code feedbot is exclusively made to gather Insightful market data without any programming knowledge. Here we can give you an example of Deloitte Digital. This San Francisco-based marketing and advertising company de-cluttered its data collection process using SurveySparrow’s chatbot feature.
The company was facing challenges while collecting market data with the traditional paper questionnaire. However, the chat-like experience and sleek UI of this chatbot helped them gather 804 survey responses out of 1200 surveyed people. That means a total of 67% completion rate. Profitable, isn’t it?
360 degree feedback software
You can spend every bit of your penny on your customers to make them stay, but without your employees’ help, you’ll fail miserably every time. When we talk about market research, the first thing that pops into our minds is customers. We want to conduct market research to gather knowledge about customer preference. But, employee research always remains like a neglected treasure. The reason why your business competitors outperform you is their focus on the development and betterment of their employees. If you want to make a stellar marketing strategy, you can’t ignore your employees.
In recent days, employee engagement and satisfaction have both become very popular topics. Businesses all over the globe realize the value of employees. Because, no matter which industry you belong to, people like to do business with people. And happy employees are the most real, relatable, and simple people to attract customers and keep them engaged.
That’s why it’s important to use a 360-degree feedback tool like SurveySparrow. With this software, you can conduct an employee assessment to increase productivity and drive growth. From insightful review reports, customized reports to assessment tracker, you can do all at once with this tool.
Let’s Wrap it Up
Aall things said and done! Here we’ve broken down the importance of market research. Also, we’ve shared our take on the importance of market surveys. From getting a more focused target audience to loyal customers, online and offline surveys are great approaches to collect insights. Asking market research questions not only improves customer satisfaction but also gives you authentic information.
So, have you conducted your own market research before? If yes, share your experiences in the comment below. Till then, keep surveying, and keep asking the right questions!
Previously published at https://surveysparrow.com/blog/what-is-market-research/