Why it's important to consider Research as part of your Marketing

When starting off a new marketing campaign do you know the answers to questions like; who is my target customer? What new type of customer do I want to attract? What are my competitors doing to attract customers?

All of these questions can be answered with research!

In order to plan a successful marketing campaign, or even create a successful marketing strategy, it’s important to gain market insight to help you identify what your customers and prospects want and how they might view your business to help you identify gaps in your marketing planning. 

Having good market insight helps to minimise risks when making key business decisions, here are some examples of where market research can help with your marketing:

1. Identifying your customers

You probably know who your current customers are and have an idea why they want to purchase from you – but do you know the similarities between your customers? Ensuring you’ve carried out some thorough market research and looked at your customer profiles it'll be clear to you who you want to reach out to (your target customers), where you can reach them (your marketing channels), and what they're interested in.

2. Making sure your product or service is still ‘up to scratch’

Carrying out regular market research is a way to check in with your current customers and potential customers to ensure that you are still meeting their needs. Asking for feedback from your customers you can check general customer satisfaction, ask opinions on new products, or even find out why they might leave you – all this valuable feedback can help ensure you are meeting your customer’s needs.

3. Creating relevant marketing materials

If you’re stuck on what images to use in marketing materials or how to word a brand strapline, checking back to your market research can help with these processes to guide you as to how to position your marketing so it’s relevant to the audience you are wanting to attract. For example, knowing whether customers see your product or service as a necessity or as a luxury, or knowing the age range of your customers. 

4. Knowing where to advertise

Your market research can help ensure that you are reaching your intended audience in the channels where they’re most likely to see your message.

5. Staying ahead of your competitors

If you can stay ahead of your competitors in terms of knowing your customers’ needs and you can then do a good job at meeting those needs, you've got a better chance of standing out from the competition. As mentioned above, you can use market research to help you identify and then target dissatisfied customers or identify unaddressed customer needs.

6. Keeping up to date with what your competitors are up to

By monitoring your competitors’ movements with market research, you can ensure that you staying competitive in your market in terms of price, product, marketing and even spotting new product or service opportunities.

7. Reacting to market trends

Staying up to date with your industry news, research and market sizes and trends can help you to identify any potential risks you might need to address, such as competitors taking higher market shares or new industry standards.

8. Support business planning 

Without market research it may be difficult for you to know if your goals are achievable or even how to achieve them in the first place. Additionally, when making business decisions where you might be making changes to your product or distribution, for example, being able to refer to a market research report for guidance may help with those tricky decisions by telling you things like if you will be able to reach more people who are likely to buy from you, or where to spend your advertising budget.

The better-informed your strategic marketing decisions, the more likely you are to succeed in achieving your business objectives.

How can LCM help?

Don’t know where to start? Our team acts as your partner to find out what is most important to your targets so you know how to make your marketing as effective as possible. We can help with research services such as commissioning research reports, analysing findings within research reports and mystery shopping.