Every decision you make, whether it is for product creation, marketing, or even the prices you charge, is guided by what your customer needs. If you don’t offer a product that your target audience needs, it won’t sell. If you don’t market it in a way that is appealing to them, they won’t proceed to the checkout cart. Lastly, if you don’t charge a price they can afford, you won’t make sales.
All the efforts toward business success are triggered by customer data. That’s as straightforward as it gets. If you want your business to be successful, you need to follow the needs, preferences, and expectations of your target audience.
How do you do this?
The answer is simple, too - through market research. Market research is the one and only way to learn more about your customers. It’s what helps you build products in demand, find new opportunities, and reach a bigger audience.
Businesses today use market data for everything from their website content to their SEO strategies. However, this is a continuous work that doesn’t end at any stage. The needs and trends in your market change, so you need data all the time.
It may sound challenging and very time-consuming but in this article, we will teach you how to make it simpler. And of course, we’ll tell you why it is all worth it and how you can benefit from market research.
Fast and effective solution for market research: AskAttest.com
Researching the market requires many steps. You need to find out more about your audience by conducting surveys, profiling and segmenting your consumer, testing prototypes, researching your competition, and much more. Doing this regularly is time-consuming and tiring, but did you know that there’s a tool that makes this very fast and much simpler?
The answer to your problems is AskAttest.com, the speedy way for businesses to reach millions of consumers in 49 markets. Businesses use this tool to grow without guessing what their audience needs. It combines an intuitive interface with amazing research capabilities, reaching 110 million respondents in a very short timeframe.
On the platform, you can customize surveys and send them out, get reports that are generated automatically without effort, and watch campaign insights that will help you make informed decisions. Businesses use this tool for market analysis, competitor analysis, to develop and test their new products, and to profile the target consumer.
Now that you know how to do market research easily and more effectively, let’s move on to the why.
Why is market research good for your business?
There are many types of market research. For starters, you need to take action to find out who your target buyer is. Next, you are looking for information about that target buyer. You do the latter consistently because the information changes with time. This can also be done through competitor analysis.
But, why should you invest time and effort into doing research regularly? Here are the top reasons why market research is not just good, but vital to your success.
Creates a pool of opportunities for your business
Let’s say that you did your fair share and found out more about your audience. You know what they like and dislike, what they prefer, what mediums they use to find products, and what they’d be willing to pay for the right item or service.
All this information at your disposal equals opportunities for your business. Here are a few ways that you can use that data to grow your brand:
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When you know who your target buyers are and where they’re based i.e. their demographics, you can localize your strategies and your website. This way, you will appear in the search results of those that look for a product in their area.
As a matter of fact, research shows that approximately 75% of buyers prefer to make purchases in their native language. This gives you an opportunity to reach the audience that is most likely to buy from you i.e. those near your business.
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Your odds of making a sale are much higher if you are offering the right thing to the right person. That’s what market research data is most useful for. It gives you information about what your customer needs.
Based on the data you’ll collect by doing surveys, checking customer behaviors and tracking their purchases, you can make a personalized offer based on their preferences and needs. This is far more likely to result in a conversion.
Look how Amazon uses data to personalize its offers:
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Research of your competition and your audience’s likes and activity will tell you what are the successful companies that offer similar products or services as your business. With this information, you’ll know who to reach out to and partner up with. Many companies work together to increase their reach and widen their audience.
The information about these businesses will tell you who to call when you want to join advertising strategies, do link building with, and even form a long-term partnership. There are plenty of benefits from partnering with your competition, starting with access to more people in your audience.
Helps you handle problems and minimize risks
Most businesses don’t survive the first 10 years. As a matter of fact, 20% of businesses fail in the first 2 years, followed by 45% in the first 5 years. In 10 years, this percentage goes to 65%, research shows.
These numbers are concerning, but they shouldn’t discourage you from starting your own business. What they should do is convince you to prepare better and stronger.
Research can help you beat many of the problems and barriers that businesses face in their first years since opening. You can use the research data to anticipate problems and prepare solutions before they happen. This data can also help you greatly when a problem arises. Having tons of useful information in hand in critical moments for your business can save it from failure.
For starters, this can reduce the risk of error when you’re trying out new things. If you are very informed about something, you can make better decisions and decide if that something is worth the investment.
For example, if you learn more about the programs you buy for your team to use, you will eliminate the risk of investing in a costly program that doesn’t work for your brand.
Informs you about the content you need to produce
Marketing today revolves greatly around content. This is the core of your marketing strategy - your social content, your website content, your blogs, guest posts, etc.
If you want to get your business to a bigger audience, you need content that captivates and possibly even goes viral. But, how can you create such content if you don’t know what your customers respond to?
The answer to this is market research.
Market research will tell you where to invest and what to invest in when it comes to content. This will save you tons of money. Apart from that, the data will tell you what to create to reach and attract your audience.
You can use the information collected through research to build strong content strategies and personalize your offerings. By segregating your audience, you can use their preferences to create content that engages the audience.
Helps you put your information on the right channels
Promoting your business on every platform you can find can be costly, not to mention very time-consuming. You can’t post the same thing all over the internet. You need to tweak your content to fit the social platform’s style. You can’t repost your website content to Facebook, not to mention Instagram or Twitter.
To save time and money and maximize your chances of success, you need to figure out what are the relevant channels for marketing your business.
Research data will tell you what platforms your audience uses most commonly. It will also show you at what times they use the platforms so that you know when to publish your content. Knowing the demographics of your target audience will guide your ad investments, and you can choose the right advertising modes based on where you get most of your customers.
Assists you in beating the competition
You can’t join forces with all of your competitors - and you shouldn’t. Knowing more about the other businesses that target your consumers is the best information you can have. Market research will tell you how to outpower your competition.
How does this work?
By researching your competition, you can find what flaws they have. You can eliminate those flaws and figure out how to attract the customers that your competitors lost.
You can also learn useful things regarding what you should fix about your business. Tracking the successful competition will show you what works for your audience, and you can use that insight to enrich your offers and products.
No time to spare! Start market research today!
Now that you know how important market research is for the future of your business, you should start working on your strategies to collect data. The golden rule of business success is to only invest in things that data confirms will work. Even though you can never be absolutely certain, proper research will show you the best opportunities and give you the most chances for success.
WRITTEN BY
Daria Brown