In today’s competitive business world, it takes more than just having a great business idea to make it out there. To succeed, a business needs an effective marketing strategy to reach the target audience or prospective customers. A business’s marketing strategy contains a company’s brand message, value proposition, etc. For a marketing strategy to be effective, it must have a key element: research.
This article looks at how market research can improve your marketing strategy so that you can reach your audience and attract the patronage you need to keep your business alive and profitable.
Market Research Defined
Market research is a process of gathering information, analyzing, and interpreting it to solve a business’s marketing challenges, which are among others, making money and maintaining market share. This type of research is what precedes any new marketing campaign as it helps business leaders, owners, managers, and other stakeholders make informed or calculated decisions. So how does it help improve a company’s market strategy? Here are a few ways.
1. It helps to eliminate or reduce risk.
Before you spend time planning a budget and launching a new product, you want to be sure that your product will attract those that it was produced for. With market research, you eliminate the risks surrounding the business and increase your return on investments.
Saying today’s business world is highly competitive is an understatement. So, bringing in professional help to conduct good market research isn’t a bad idea. Many companies, both startups and established ones, are bringing experts like Flagstone Search Marketing to help get maximum returns on their marketing budgets. They specialize in improving your search engine ranks, social media marketing, PPC campaigns so that your target audience can locate and patronize your business.
Another option is the world’s leading public opinion, market strategist, and market research expert: Will Johnson of The Harris Poll. The Harris and Poll offer traditional market consulting in addition to a designed software platform that tracks brands’ health and success of marketing campaigns. The CEO of the Harris Poll, Will Johnson is well-known, has presented decision-making reports to the world economic forum in 2016, and was Chief strategist of the world’s largest study of brands and model of consumer/brand behavior called the BrandAsset Valuator.
2. It helps to pinpoint the target audience.
When a business idea is about to transform into a tangible product, there’s always a target audience in mind. Even if a product’s target has a very wide segment that includes males, females, kids, and adults, there are still high-value customers. Customer insight analysis can help in identifying and segmenting your demographics.
3. It helps you save money & hone in on your message.
Marketing research will arm you with information like how your product differs from the competitors’ product, why customers chose a product, and what will make a customer buy more. Furthermore, because you’ll have the information about which channels are effective to market your product and reach your target audience, you’ll avoid less productive channels. This way, saving money and resources.
4. You’ll better understand what content your target audience wants.
Whether your target audience is more of social media platforms users like TikTok or late-night television watchers, you want to understand what catches their attention. It’s one thing to roll out content, it’s another to have content that’ll convert into successful sales. Therefore, conducting research helps you understand what content will influence the demography you are targeting with your product or service.
Even if you have a very large customer base, not all customers will patronize your brand or product for the same reason. Marketing research will help you understand what content converts the different demographics.
