Knowing what your customers really think is vital for any business. Organisations that make decisions based on their own assumptions about what will and won’t work are likely to miss out on opportunities or fail to fully meet the actual needs of their target buyers.
This is where consumer market research comes in. Whether you’re developing a new product or drafting a new marketing campaign, clear insight into who your customers are, what their drivers are and what they think of your brand will help guide every step of the process to make sure your activities are as closely targeted as possible.
But how should you go about this? In this guide, you’ll learn about the key steps that every consumer market research process should include, as well as what benefits you can expect to see when this is done correctly.
Consumer market research refers to a range of activities designed to learn more about a brand’s target audience in order to gain deeper insight into their drivers, preferences and interests. It helps businesses understand their buying behaviour, but also why they make the decisions they do.
Conducting this research is vital for many brands. If you’re a startup, it plays a key role in spotting any gaps in the market that you may be able to take advantage of and helps set the initial course of your operations. Meanwhile, for growing companies looking to enter new markets or develop additional products or services, it can be useful in learning more about customers’ existing perceptions of you.
Elsewhere, these activities can be used to assess how you compare to competitors, both in terms of product or service offerings and the way in which you’re perceived by customers. It can also help you gain insights into the different customer segments that interact with your brand and whether or not they are satisfied – and if not, why not.
There are several methods for conducting consumer market research, each with its own advantages to be aware of. In order to gain a complete picture of the market and what potential customers really think, it’s essential that your efforts contain a good mix of techniques.
The main practices that you should consider include:
No matter what methods of market research you’ve opted for, there will be a few key steps you should follow in order to get the most out of these activities. Here are a few essential tips that should be considered in every consumer market research effort.
Define research objectives
The first step should be to set out as specifically as possible what you want to achieve from the project. Are you looking to identify any unmet needs in the marketplace? Identify a key problem that needs to be solved? Find out about the typical buying journey of your audience? Being clear about this early will ensure you’re choosing the right methods and asking the most appropriate questions in your research.
Identify your key customers and competitors
While consumer research can help you define and create customer segments, you still need an ideal buyer persona to ensure you’re talking to the right people. At the same time, knowing who your key competitors are and what they are offering is vital in determining their strengths and weaknesses, as well as any gaps you can exploit.
Select the best research strategy
The next step is deciding what type of research you’re going to do. Each method will have its own pros and cons that may make it more suitable for certain objectives – for example, online surveys and social listening can reach a wide audience, but primary sources such as interviews and focus groups can give more in-depth answers. Understanding the difference between qualitative research and quantitative research is also important in making the right decisions here.
Choose the right tools
Selecting the right tools is the way to quality results. This may involve teaming up with a specialist provider with access to resources that might otherwise be beyond your reach. They will be able to help with drafting research materials such as questionnaires and providing the distribution tools necessary to ensure swift, accurate responses.
Collect and analyse data
The data collection itself is a critical part of consumer market research. It’s important to focus on getting high-quality information. Incomplete, duplicated or inaccurate responses will skew any analysis and lead to poor results. Once this is done, data should be effectively cleansed before being input to analytics solutions. Individuals with data science skills are highly useful in managing this process and interpreting the results – which again can make it worthwhile to turn to the help of experienced market research professionals.
Present findings clearly
Once data has been analysed, it’s equally important that the results of the research are presented in as clear a format as possible. Data visualisation tools to highlight key points and help readers make connections between findings ensure that professionals are able to extract key takeaways from the data and turn insights into action. Making sure the results tell a clear story is crucial to ensuring everyone in the business is fully informed.
Make data-driven decisions
The final step is to put the learnings from consumer market research into action. To do this, it’s important that the conclusions are distributed to the right people, with marketing, sales, and research and development professionals top of the list.
Ultimately, the findings from consumer market research should be used to make better, data-driven decisions to improve your business. It helps make sure that the products or services on offer actually meet the needs of customers and address their pain points. It also feeds back into areas such as marketing, to ensure you’re reaching out to customers with the most relevant messaging and in the best places to reach them.
Some of the key areas of businesses strategy that can be guided by market research include:
When done correctly, consumer market research can deliver a wide range of business benefits. Taking the learnings from these activities and using them to guide future strategy and make better-informed decisions can lead to higher sales, better brand recognition and happier customers.
Improved customer targeting
Market segmentation helps split your customers into key groups based on shared interests, desires or other drivers and groups people who display similar consumer behaviour together. In turn, this helps you tailor your products and marketing messaging accordingly to more closely address their concerns and showcase the benefits of what you have to offer.
Enhanced product development
Hearing direct feedback from customers about what they like and don’t like can help guide the development of future products or services, from adding features to address a particular pain point to retooling aspects of an item that are not working as intended, or are proving less effective than hoped in real-world environments.
Better marketing strategies
It’s not enough to know who you should be trying to reach with your marketing. You also need to know how best to go about this. For example, what online platforms or offline publications do they engage with? What times of day or week are they most active? Are they likely to complete a purchase on their first interaction or will more conversations be required? These are all essential questions that can be answered with effective market research.
Increased market share
Market research that compares your brand to your competition can help identify any areas they’re missing that you could take advantage of, spot any new and emerging trends before they become widely noticed, or help you speak to consumers in new and unique ways. In turn, this allows you to grow your share of the sector and position yourself better as a market leader.
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Reading Time: < 1 minutes Free to download, this report offers a valuable glimpse into how people of all ages view AI. It contains important insights, actionable advice for brands and researchers, and core questions to encourage curiosity and divergent thinking around the future of AI.
