Table of Contents
A proper market research survey is the first step for a successful business, and it’s a no-brainer. A survey gives you a detailed insight into your product or services. Whether you are doing the research survey before launching the product or you plan to get feedback after releasing your product, it’s always helpful to scale your profits and increase your customer base.
Due to the growing number of businesses and startups today, the market is more competitive and uncertain than ever before. As a result, we witness volatile market trends that are coupled with varying customer behavior.
Why is a market research survey important?
Market research is the heart of every business strategy. It enables you to have an in-depth understanding of various aspects of product, service, customers, and competitors.
Moreover, a detailed research survey can help you plan a better business strategy by uncovering all the ground realities. Larger corporations use these surveys regularly to understand the weakness and strengths of their business strategy.
It’s crucial to understand your customer before you could build your product. The consumer has different pain points and preferences. Find out how your product is going solve the customer’s problem, and how is it going to address his pain point. So it’s always worth having detailed research before you come up with a final product.
Moreover, a detailed insight survey can save a huge amount of cost and time before it’s too late. You can save your effort by arranging research surveys about the business.
7 Types of Market Research
Below are the 7 important types of marketing research surveys to improving your business research:
1. Target Audience Research
Not everyone is your customer, and you cannot deny that.
Before launching your product or service, you need to find out your target audience and ideal customers. Dig deeper into the demographic, geographic, and psychographic characteristics with the help of market segmentation.
Ask yourself some questions:
- Whom am I serving the product to?
- Who needs my services and products to get the benefit?
- What elements inspire their purchasing decisions?
- Why do my current customers select my industry over competitors?
Before you introduce a new product to the market, you must recognize your ideal customer. You must know what features of your products meet the needs of the customers.
Conduct surveys and create questionnaires for that. You can use free tools like Google forms to create a survey. Ask detailed questions about the important info you need in order to build and launch your product.
You can launch social media campaigns and email campaigns and ask your audience across many platforms including your website, social media pages, email, etc. It will enable you to gather the right data set that is geared towards your target audience.
Be precise about the questions you ask. You can include both open-ended and close-ended questions in your survey.
2. Market Segmentation Research
As discussed earlier, customer research is the first part of market research. In market segmentation research we segment target audiences into different groups and study their behavior and preferences separately.
You can segment them on the basis of various parameters including age, gender, location, income level, marital status, etc. The data sets will give you more insights and a better understanding of ideal customers.
The questions in the market segmentation help you understand the needs, wants, and behavior of your target audience.
You can use this data set while running campaigns on Google or social media. Campaigns based on data segmentation are more successful than otherwise.
Market segmentation aims to recognize diverse groups among your target audience, make sure you do it well.
3. Product Development Research
Detailed development research is required, when presenting a new product or brand.
As you introduce a new product, you must know how to design and develop the product according to the market needs. Adding a new feature to the product will attract your target audience.
A great way to do market research includes knowing what is going around you and in the industry.
Before you develop the product, ask customers:
- What type of product do they want?
- What they would love to see in their new product?
- What price will they be willing to pay?
Apart from that, you can do detailed research about the development cost of the product. You can also estimate the profit and overall ROI based on your overall research. Determine the feasibility of a quality product.
1. Pricing Research
Pricing research helps you identify the impact of change in the price on the demand of your service/product.
Price research evaluates the elasticity of demand and displays the best price options, including the too high and too low price of the product. This research can help you to determine how much your customers will be willing to pay for the product. What will be the profit margin?
Pricing research is quantitative in nature. I am going to cover two basics of pricing approaches and you can decide which one is best for your business:
Cost-based Pricing
It essentially incorporates the product manufacture costs. Add the profit margin to its original cost, and you will get the product price.
Value-based pricing
It is the significance of the better choice and this is value-based pricing. This pricing is influenced by the marketing, design, packing, and service delivery of the product you are selling. It is the price you charge for proving the value.
2. Customer Satisfaction Research
Customer satisfaction reveals consumer loyalty and purchase intentions. Your raving fans could only be changed into permanent customers if they are satisfied with your product.
In this type of research, we study different aspects of customer satisfaction which include:
- Identifying which aspects can affect the customer behavior to repeat purchase.
- Define what factors result in reliability, replication purchases, and encouragement including price, customer deal, and industry success, and product qualities.
Incorporate customer feedback during the customer satisfaction research. In order to increase customer retention, you can improve your services as per customer feedback. You can monitor the overall defection possibility in your product and the recommendations of the customers to increase satisfaction over time. Find areas of the service or product that need progress to meet replacing or changing needs.
Improve customer service to guide the customer about your product. Arrange online and offline sessions about customer loyalty and retention programs.
3. Competition Based Research
Competition-based research is a type of market research that studies your competitors and their marketing strategies, sales, and products/services. It also finds out the strengths and weaknesses of a competitor’s method of marketing.
This allows you to make your business products/services that are unique.
First of all, find out who your competitors are? The next step is to:
- Identify what services your competitor’s deals.
- Know your competitor’s benefits and pricing strategies they offer.
- Find out their marketing methods and effects.
- See and learn how they encourage marketing content.
- Observe how they sell their products and offer their services.
- Make sure you are meeting their shipping costs.
- Find their platforms where they drive their campaign. Identify social media channels they are using to promote their brand awareness.
- Learn what content strategy and technology your competitors use.
- Analyze to study your competitor’s opportunities, threats, weaknesses, and strengths.
After research work, you will be able to know the gaps in the sale or market and grow new services and products.
1. Campaign Effectiveness Research
Campaign effectiveness market research survey aims to assess whether your the ROI of marketing campaigns is great or not? Identify if you are able to achieve the goals you set for the campaign initially. Connecting revenue with campaign attributes is a major challenge for B2B marketers and revenue marketing solves it with campaign effectiveness research.
Successful campaign effectiveness research can help you sell more and reduce customer acquisition costs. Quality campaign research helps you sell more and meet an exact goal.
In this market research, you should find out your exact audience. Then use perfect channels both offline & online and give them quality messages to promote the new products or services.
An effective business campaign is all about telling your brand story to your potential customers. In this type of campaign, you are exclusively showing your services and products in action to your potential audience.
Final Thoughts
Think of the changing aspects of your market that can change quickly and frequently without considerable warning. That’s why it’s essential to make sure you’re leading the market research often. This will help you stay up-to-date with your industry, customers, and competitors at all times, which will, in turn, help you create stronger marketing strategies.
Whether it is researching the target audience or learning the buying behaviors among current customers, a marketing research firm will work with you to decide what methodology is most beneficial for an organization. In doing so, you will also need the best marketing tools so that you can boost your business to the next level.