Identity Business Opportunities with Research

Identifying areas of opportunity is essential for growing business and meeting goals. Marketing research is a powerful tool to find and discover information about your company, product/services and customers. Results allow us to examine goals and find the best way to reach target audience. Here are two types of marketing research we recommend, and the best ways to utilize each.

Cost-effective quantitative research:

Quantitative research is an important but often underutilized tool to help find and develop business opportunities. By using raw data, and information about our individual customers and groups, we can make better-informed decisions. As marketing managers, we should always be looking for ways to better understand who are customers are, and see if we can evaluate our current marketing efforts to see if they are meeting our target’s end needs.

How do we go about this? First, start by examining your current pool of customers. Who is coming to your business, what is their motivation for buying your products? Does this audience fit into the perceived market of your company? Are there other segments of the market that could be reached? Improving and discovering methods to better understand your customer base and potential markets will be extremely helpful when making decisions.

A popular method of quantitative research is the use of surveys, questionnaires, or polls. Many companies give their customers a reward for filling these out, providing details regarding who they are, purchasing habits, and overall satisfaction. Through proper analysis, this data can be extrapolated to provide information regarding trends within different demographics.

Detailed qualitative research:

Qualitative research provides a better understanding of our customers, and their motivation for purchasing our product. If a targeted market didn’t do as well as you were expecting, you can go directly to them and find out why. Was your messaging off? Did you overestimate the need and desire of the product? Is there a competitor who is doing a better job selling to this audience? Collecting and analyzing this type of information is essential when measuring the success of a campaign, areas of failure and areas that need improvement.

There are numerous methods to collect this type of information and much of it is easily accessible. Google Reviews, Yelp, and Amazon Reviews are a popular way to see feedback from customers about your business. Social media is another great tool to gauge feedback on your business, and because you are interacting directly with your customers, you get the side benefit of increased brand identification as well. Other qualitative research is more involved and expensive. However, using these methods can yield very important information about your company and help identify areas of improvement. Some additional examples of this include focus groups and interviews directly with customers or members of our target market.

Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative marketing research will provide a wealth of information and help find opportunities for business. Especially, since it allows for us to examine our current efforts, see where we can improve, and then make these necessary changes. By doing so, we will be well on our way to reaching our goals.