Refine Your Marketing Strategy Using Research!
When was the last time your company evaluated the needs of your customers and prospective customers? Do you know what messaging resonates best with potential customers? What product or service features do they care about the most? What are trending topics top of mind for them? What do they think about your brand in comparison to competitors?
If you don't have answers to these questions, that's a good sign that it is time to conduct market research to inform your company's new business and marketing strategy.
Understanding the Market & Competitive Landscape
The first step is to do secondary market research to understand market trends and the competitive landscape. In your market analysis, you will want to consult various secondary sources, including industry reports, marketing intelligence, trend forecasts, news and press coverage, competitor marketing materials, and social media to create a wide lens of the competitive environment.
The goal here is to create a well-informed understanding of your company, your competitors, and the future of your industry. This type of market analysis and competitive analysis can also help you find previously overlooked target markets and ways your company can leverage its competitive advantage to reach your target customers.
You can also use secondary market research to estimate your company's market share and understand the market potential or size of the total market. By understanding which areas of the market your company succeed in and which areas are proliferating, you can better target your sales and marketing efforts toward those market segments.
At Elevate, our Market Research offering leverages secondary research to help companies understand opportunities and challenges in their market, evaluate how their brand compares to competitors and identify opportunities to differentiate their brand from competitors.
Gathering Information from Target Customers
Now that you have done a market analysis and have a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and opportunities in your industry, the next step is to get information directly from your target market through primary research. A market research survey of individuals meeting the profile of your potential target customer is a great way to gather data from a broad set of individuals.
We often recommend following up quantitative research, like a survey, with qualitative research, such as a focus group or in-depth interviews. While quantitative research helps gather information from many people, qualitative research is beneficial for obtaining deeper information. Qualitative research helps us answer questions like "why?" or "how?" and allows brands to speak directly with key target audience members. Focus groups are also an excellent way to speak with difficult-to-reach audiences. Using both research methods in combination will yield greater actionable insights than using one alone.
Using these primary market research methodologies, you can explore prospective customers' path-to-purchase journey, understanding the most critical touchpoints. You can also gather customers' perceptions of their experience with a particular brand and its competitors to find strengths and areas for improvement.
Surveys and focus groups are also excellent research methods to gather customer feedback, understand customer needs, learn about customer experience, and identify ways to improve customer service. All that information can give your company the insight you need to help you better serve your existing and future customers.
You can also use Message/ad testing to help organizations uncover what their customers or potential customers think about their corporate communications, messaging, and advertisements. Using message/ad testing can help you determine what messages or ads resonate best with prospective customers. This information can be beneficial to your marketing team in understanding how to target potential customers most effectively.
Similarly, you can conduct product or service concept testing using primary research methodologies. This type of research helps organizations discover what their customers or potential customers think about possible new products or services. You can learn what features or attributes are most important to a target customer, what they care most about, and what their pain points have been in the past. We recommend conducting this type of research to gather critical information before entering the product development phase or promoting a service to potential customers. Collecting this information at the front end will help your company refine its product and service options based on prospective customers' preferences and priorities.
Exploring Audience Insights Tools & Technology
At Elevate, we have access to a suite of audience insights tools that combine psychographic, demographic, and social media data. These tools give us great insights into who is interested in a particular brand. We can also use these tools to learn more about a group of people that a brand might want to target in its sales and marketing efforts. For example, if it's a footwear brand interested in targeting Gen Zers, we could use our tools to investigate what influencers Gen Zers are commonly engaging with, what websites they often visit, what podcasts they listen to, and more. The footwear brand could use this information to focus its marketing efforts on that audience by honing in on the websites, podcasts, and influencers that are of interest to Gen Zers.
Segmenting Your Target Market & Creating Buyer Personas
Using all the information you've gathered through the research methods listed above, you can begin the process of market segmentation. Market segmentation involves creating and investigating high-level classifications of groups of people or groups of customers within your target market. Market segments could include pet owners, female Millennials, and single parents. Market segmentation can give new business and marketing teams a sense of what categories their existing customers fall into or what groups might be most interested in the company's products or services.
Personas, on the other hand, are examples of specific types of people to illustrate details that might speak to a particular person's experience. For example, you might create an ideal buyer persona based on the known characteristics of your best existing customers. The buyer persona would dive into their experiences, motivations, and goals in addition to demographic or firmographic elements. Personas can be helpful to give sales and marketing teams an idea of the types of individuals they might be reaching or speaking to along the purchase journey.