Research is an essential tool when it comes to
planning the most effective marketing campaigns and keeping your business one
step ahead of the competition. When you are planning growth and are considering strategies such as
launching into new markets, or selling more in your existing markets for example, research gives you the
information you need to make confident decisions.
Here are five ways market research can help make
your marketing more successful:
Better understanding
of brand perception
Market research helps you find out exactly what customers and
prospects think of your brand and how they perceive it compared with your
competitors. The results might surprise you and challenge assumptions that you
had, giving you new insights to make brand improvements.
Research could explore a number of areas around
brand perception, via a questionnaire, interviews or a survey carried out among
your customers. For in-depth feedback you could potentially hold a focus group
to find out what a select group of sample customers really think.
Topics could include: how aware they are of your
brand, what traits they associate with your brand, how customers compare you to
your competition, what kind of perceptions the brand gives them about your
products and pricing.
Understanding the brand perception will help you to
improve marketing literature and assets to better meet customer needs.
Improved knowledge about
your customer
How well do you really know and understand your
customers? The more you
know, the easier it is to target relevant communications and materials
to them, and the more effective your marketing is likely to be.
A market research survey or questionnaire can find
out all sorts of valuable insights, for example, it can give details of age,
demographic, family status, educational background, hobbies, media consumption,
type of job, income etc.
All of this information can help create a strong
picture of what your target customer looks like, enabling your marketing and
communication to be targeted far more precisely.
Proper effectiveness
measurement for campaigns
There is no point stressing over a marketing
strategy and tearing your hair out to implement it all if you don’t then
measure the effectiveness. Research is the key to finding out what impact your
marketing campaign had on would-be customers and how effective the messaging
was.
Market research can gather specific information
from customers about key aspects of your marketing so you could find out how
they react to the tone, the messages, the images, and then you will have a
really good idea of what needs to change and what works well.
New Business
Development Planning
When you have growth plans for your business, market research
is invaluable to work out where new market opportunities might be and to spot
areas for potential expansion. You can also use it to test new products prior
to an official launch, to test market reaction and so on.
Research can provide information about the
potential size of a new market, key competitors within it, the demographics of
the new audience and the major suppliers within the area. This type of
information can help a new business plan become based in reality rather than
guesswork.
The data gathered will also then be invaluable when
generating a market strategy to begin targeting the potential new audience with
marketing and communication materials.
New product audience
insights
When developing a new product it’s hard to know if
you are on the right lines for your potential audience which is where research
such as a focus group, is really invaluable. You can get feedback on the look
and feel of the product, the name, the features and even the packaging, all
before you commit to an expensive launch.
This research is invaluable if you are developing a
new product for a new market and don’t have any former data to compare with.
Focus groups allow for in-depth data to be gathered on the product, providing
an invaluable insight into how consumers might react once it reaches the
market.
Research allows you to go away and make changes and
improvements to the product so that when you are ready to launch it to the
market you know the product stands the best chance of being well-received.
From learning more about your audience, to testing
products and potential new markets, research has a great role to play in
helping to shape and improve your marketing activity. Feedback from customers
can produce amazing insights which you might not have thought about, taking
your marketing in completely different but effective directions.
Research should be an integral part of every
marketing strategy.
Telephone
01489 891870 or email info@lcm.co.uk
