INTRODUCTION

Consumers today wield enormous power. Consumers can conduct their own research on your goods or service and make their own purchasing decisions.

Furthermore, rather than speaking with one of your sales representatives, they are more likely to seek referrals from members of their networks or read internet evaluations.

With this in mind, have you modified your marketing plan to accommodate how today's consumers study, shop, and buy?

To accomplish so, you must first understand who your buyers are, your specialised market, and what drives your target audience members' purchase decisions and behaviour.

Enter Market Research.

This blog will provide you a roadmap for doing a complete analysis of your market, target audience, competition, and more, whether you're new to market research.

What exactly is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering information about your target market and customers in order to validate the success of a new product, assist your team in iterating on an existing product, or understand brand perception in order to ensure your team is effectively communicating your company's value.

Market research can provide answers to a variety of questions regarding the condition of an industry, but it is far from a crystal ball on which marketers can rely for customer insights. Market researchers explore a variety of market segments, and it might take weeks or even months to paint an accurate picture of the company landscape.

Nevertheless, examining just one of those topics might help you become more intuitive about who your buyers are and how to provide value that no other firm is currently doing.

You can certainly make smart judgement based on your industry experience and existing consumers. Yet, keep in mind that paid market research has advantages that go beyond those tactics. There are two things to think about:

Your competitors also have experienced individuals in the industry and a customer base. It's very possible that your immediate resources are, in many ways, equal to those of your competition's immediate resources. Seeking a larger sample size for answers can provide a better edge. 

Your customers don't represent the attitudes of an entire market. They represent the attitudes of the part of the market that is already drawn to your brand. 

Primary vs. Secondary Research

Consider that market research can be either qualitative or quantitative in nature, depending on the studies you do and what you're attempting to learn about your sector.

Qualitative research is concerned with public opinion and investigates how the market perceives the products currently on the market. Quantitative research is concerned with data and the identification of meaningful trends in information acquired from public records.

Primary market research and secondary market research are the two main types of market research that your company can do to gather meaningful information about your products. Let's look at them.

Primary Research

Primary research is the acquisition of firsthand information about your market and its customers. It's useful for segmenting your market and creating buyer personas. Primary market research is classified into two types: exploratory research and targeted research.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is all of the data and public documents available to you to draw conclusions from (e.g. trend reports, market statistics, industry content, and sales data you already have on your business). Secondary research is very helpful when analysing your competition. Your secondary market research will fall into the following categories:

What to keep in mind when conducting Marketing research for your business?

Consider the competition

Businesses can always scrape information about their rivals if they are at a loss of info for where to begin.

Market research and competitive analysis can serve as a barometer for future performance and serve as a source of ideas for product, pricing, and marketing development.

PPC competitor analysis in SEO entails monitoring indicators including keywords, website traffic, sales volume, and advertising cost-per-click as well as competitor content analysis.

However, conducting competitive research may entail examining the web reputation, product costs, or any other factor of your competitors.

We advise spending money on the relevant tools, such as SE Ranking, Ahrefs, SpyFu, Moz, and Buzzsumo, to enhance your competitive research.

To be more specific, the majority of the tactics and resources we discuss in this guide may be applied to rival businesses.

Brand Attitude

How well your brand is regarded by consumers is measured by brand sentiment. Typically, your brand's sentiment will include anything from its

Brand awareness: How well-known is your company's name?

How devoted are consumers to your brand?

Advocacy: How likely are consumers to suggest your product to others?

Penetration: How well has your brand penetrated its specific market segment?

Brand value: How valuable is your name in pure currency?

Once more, technology is your best friend. We advise using programmes like Hootsuite or Sprout Social that track your online activity.

Once again, technology is your best friend. We advise adopting applications like Hootsuite or Sprout Social that track consumer opinion about your business on social media and elsewhere online. Reading reviews and getting consumer comments are other excellent ways to gauge how people feel about your company.

Choose the appropriate metrics to monitor based on the size and age of your brand, and then visually compare it to your rivals to see how well it compares and where its flaws are.

Customer Decision-Making 

Consumer decision-making or customer journey research explains why consumers buy products and why they don't.

This study focuses more specifically on their media preferences, purchasing patterns, demographic data, and interests and hobbies.

Being aware of these behavioural, demographic, and psychological factors enables you to

By having an understanding of these behavioural, demographic, and psychographic factors, you can develop individualised marketing initiatives and incentives that can boost sales.

Gather information first using a CRM that supports customer journey mapping, such as HubSpot or Salesforce. In order to comprehend what motivated a consumer to make a purchase, examine your statistics using software like Google Analytics or Search Console, which provides on-page behavioural reporting and attribution data.

Once more, primary research instruments like questionnaires and direct feedback can be of great use.

Furthermore, traditionally, technologies like Meta's Audience Insights have been a gold mine of data for constructing the best audience lists for your organisation.

Client segmentation

This brings up market segmentation, another crucial factor. To create a buyer persona based on demographic, psychographic, and geographic information, you can utilise many of the same tools from the preceding point. For finding a lot of this data and creating audience lists you can export to other programmes, for instance, check out HubSpot and Meta's Audience Insights.

Use surveys to help you discover more detailed information about audience behaviour and interests to save time testing with different audience segments.

Building customer personas is an exercise that will reap long-term benefits for your business. Learn how to leverage them for your business here.

Market Communication

For monitoring campaign messaging from any advertising/marketing efforts you are currently conducting, surveys and customer feedback are also crucial. This study demonstrates how effectively your company communicates with its target audience through messaging impact and reach

On the organic side, tracking keyword rankings, on-page traffic, CTR and conversion rates can tell you if your marketing messaging is driving people to your site and whether they are making purchases.

Product Pricing

Finally, the last two forms of market research involve product pricing and development. Pricing is fairly straightforward and measures what customers are willing to pay for a product based on its utility.

To accurately test product pricing, conduct A/B tests with special plans, including tiered pricing that restricts some features or by scaling pricing based on different customer segments, such as separating plans between administrators and users.

Run tests and compare data with competitors to reach appropriate product pricing.

Product Development

Product development research tests how well a product is perceived by its intended audience. Sometimes this may incorporate usability testing, which tests how effective the product is for customers.

However, most product development research involves primary research via focus groups, surveys, one-on-one interviews and direct customer feedback. The idea is to hear how customers perceive the product directly to improve innovation and development.

The key to proper product development research is to account for every variable, such as:

• Customer research (interests, hobbies and perspectives)

• Market share (existing competition, product lifecycle, market risks, growth potential)

• Business case (problems solved, unique selling proposition)

• Marketing (promotion, pricing, proper messaging)

By harnessing the power of technology and improving your market research processes, you can position yourself to compete better and achieve more success within any given marketplace.

The secret is to concentrate on the analytics that aids in return on investment. Additionally, it is simple for a business to pursue every number in the book and proceed downstream.

Checking all of your numbers to make sure they are correct is not an issue, but it is really difficult and demands a lot of work with little reward. Here are the top 5 digital marketing metrics that match your objectives and give your company useful information.

Traffic

To be completely honest, traffic does not appear to have much of an impact on your company. However, it might be useful for developing your marketing plan when broken down.

Let's first know more about the various traffic channel types.

Organic visitors are those who arrived at your website via a search engine results page.

Direct: Visitors who typed your website's URL to access it.

Referral: Visitors who arrived at your website via a link from another website.

Paid: Individuals who arrived via sponsored content or an advertisement.

Social: Visitors who found your website through social media.

Because organic traffic is the most crucial kind of traffic for a business, companies put a lot of effort into SEO (SEO). Separating your website's overall traffic can help you uncover fresh chances for your business.

You can use it to decide whether you need to boost brand awareness or social media engagement.

So, content management systems are necessary if you want to analyse the traffic to your website. Additionally, Google Analytics also offers this data.

You must also look into details like how long visitors stayed on your website, whether they were returning visitors or newcomers, and how many pages they browsed.

This is the case since you can then identify the material that generates the greatest visitors and their interactions. As a result, it provides you with the chance to optimise your consumers' journey.

Engagement

Increasing website traffic alone is insufficient because some visitors may only visit your site as a result of an advertisement or a link, while others may have completely overlooked it. Engagement can therefore be used to measure digital marketing metrics more effectively.

Engagement describes the user engagements with your material, such as likes, shares, comments, and reviews. Visitors that interact with your material are more likely to become customers, thus visitor engagement is vital.

As a result, monitoring your traffic and engagement can help you get a clear picture of your market presence and provide guidance on whether and how to grow it.

Conversions

Conversions are the actions we want website visitors to take, such as purchasing a product, downloading content, or completing a contact form. This is another crucial digital marketing analytics because it facilitates the user's communication with you.

From here, the goal is to make them a regular customer. And, here is how you can do it.

The fundamentals of customer acquisition are Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight. However, in order to make it more impactful and relatable, We will break it down for you.

You can build a relationship with your potential client in the following ways:

• Creating content that engages potential consumers and is beneficial.
• Developing authority and confidence.
• Helping the potential customers identify their needs and problems.
• Providing them a solution.

You will recognize the actions visitors usually take once you start tracking conversions. Once you understand this, you can identify the common themes and develop content accordingly.

Site Load Speed

I'm sure everyone has experienced the frustration of visiting a website and having to wait forever for it to load. Additionally, we bet a lot of you gave up and exited the website without taking a look.

According to statistics, more than 40% of visitors will leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. That is a lot of lost viewers, to be honest.

Google PageSpeed Insight can assist you if you want to measure the loading speed of your website. While this page aids in determining your website's loading speed, it is ultimately up to you to increase it if necessary.

Don’t worry, there are ways in which you can speed up load time. Here are some basic yet effective ways to do that:

• Image Sizes: There are ways by which you can compress the image size while still keeping it crisp and clean. So, you can compress the images according to the size that it will be displayed on the site.
• Content Distribution Networks: Be sure that you are using Content Distribution Networks or CDNs because they house your content closer to the end user, reducing the time the server takes to load the requested data.
• Site Code: Try to minimize the HTTP requests and keep your code compact. One way to do this is by combining your CSS as well as JavaScript files into one.

Click Through Rate 

Customers of your company want to believe that you are aware of their needs. Targeted paid campaigns are one method to give them that impression.

Your brand will become more well-known, and the click-through rate is a crucial sign of relevancy.

To improve your competitive research, we also suggest investing in the right tools, such as:

• SEO Ranking

• Ahrefs

• SpyFu

• Moz

• Buzzsumo

Conduct Market Research to Grow Better

Conducting market research can be a very eye-opening experience. Even if you think you know your buyers pretty well, completing the study will likely uncover new channels and messaging tips to help improve your interactions.

Book your Intro Call with us to better understand how you can leverage Market Research for your business.