Today, I bring you a guest post from Ray Nelson.
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Conducting proper market research is vital to optimizing your company’s marketing strategy. By conducting marketing research, you can ensure that your marketing campaigns are placing your brand in front of potential customers in the most efficient way possible.
With the vast amount of information available for your business, performing research is easier than ever. Whether you are unsure of where to start or looking for ways to streamline your existing marketing strategies, these tips are sure to help.
Benefits of Market Research
Marketing research offers a number of ways to help you develop the best marketing strategy for your brand or business. Key benefits include:
- Improved efficiency: Whether the cost is time or money, most marketing campaigns come at a significant cost for your business. By improving the precision of your target audience for each campaign and utilizing the best possible marketing platforms, you can reduce costs while improving conversions and ROI. By conducting research before launching your marketing efforts, you can create a more focused and comprehensive plan for your product, brand or service from launch to long-term support to ensure that you are always sure of what the next step will be.
- Connecting with your audience: Market research once involved relying on third parties to gather data and interpreting pages of data. These days, market research is more accessible to the average business. Thanks to social media and other online tools, it’s easy to connect with your audience, ask questions and get information directly from customers. In addition to getting valuable information, this helps you build a relationship with your audience as well.
- Discovering hidden potential: Analyzing trends and research can shed light on possible marketing strategies or opportunities that might not have been immediately obvious. From tweaking your start up or product launch to expanding your business into a new market, these discoveries hold obvious benefits.
Market Research Tips
Once you have determined the need for marketing research, the next step is to create a plan and get started. These market research tips can help you to make the most of your research plan.
1. Set goals.
One of the most important and neglected steps to establishing a market research plan is to establish goals. Whether you are simply looking to get to know your target audience better or want to uncover ways to expand your products or services, setting goals provides a simple way to keep your research focused and helps to quantify results.
2. Use the appropriate platforms.
With so many options for how to conduct market research, it might be tempting to just use them all. This is an easy way to get lost in the process. There are many inexpensive ways which you can conduct effective market research:
- Google’s Keyword Research Tool is a free tool that can help you figure out which keywords you should be targeting with your marketing strategy and give you an a better idea of untapped keywords that competitors in your industry might be using.
- Social media is great for interacting directly with customers to get instant feedback. For instance, Twitter works well for quick questions and real-time communication while Facebook excels at visual media and on-going discussion.
- Polls and surveys are great for gaining information from an existing audience.
- Google’s New Consumer Surveys are a great free tool for gaining insights from people outside of your network.
3. Never quit optimizing.
Once you have conducted market research, continue to analyze it and refine your methods. Even the best methods will need tweaking as trends and markets change over time.
Market research offers powerful tools to help your brand develop a marketing strategy. Through market research, you can reduce costs, improve results and connect with your market with greater efficiency.
What about you? Have you conducted market research as part of your strategy development? How has market research helped your marketing efforts?
Author Bio: Ray Nelson writes about qualitative market research and market research geared toward women.
Ray enjoys writing on a number of different marketing and branding topics as well.
