subject: What you can discover from Marketing research [print this page] Be conscious of your audience Be conscious of your audience
Whilst it is true that 'if you don't know your customer, you don't comprehend your business' in the tough trading conditions we face today this is not enough. You may need to learn their motivations, attitudes and beliefs otherwise it is almost impossible to predict their behaviour. And if increasing your profitability is important, then the ability to foresee behaviour is really the only thing you need to know.
Otherwise you will not recognize how to respond if you see changes in your customer acquisition patterns. As it's so difficult to retain customers, if you can't respond quickly, you might have to resort to increasing your budget for new customer acquisition. Unfortunately, though most business owners like to think they appreciate their customers, many are really only guessing, using their instinct and experience to make commercial judgements. And when it comes to forecasting sales -- whilst this strategy is fine, when things go right or badly it becomes impossible to analyse, so an empirical understanding beats gut instinct almost every time.
Research for marketing combines the best of both Qualitative and Quantitative.
The market research profession typically divide their work into qualitative research (interviews and focus groups, with free-flowing and open-ended discussions) and quantitative research (usually surveys). Yet this may not help you with some of the important decisions you'll have to make about your marketing - the style and content of the commercial, radio script, direct mailshot, leaflet, phone call or sales pitch used to get new customers. Should you want research that can be methodically applied to suggest, guide and measure the style and content of your marketing material then traditional research just isn't the answer. In order to be able creat meaasges that your audience may respond to then the best starting point is to take their needs, beliefs, desires and wants and distil them into your marketing. To do this you may need advertising research to give you the best combination of the traditional research methods. That's because it uses qualitative style research to provide the 'content rich' behavioural information which is then processed using a more traditional, rigorous quantitative analysis. The conclusion is detailed information that is ranked for importance - similar to the way that tag or though cloud software is used to prioritise themes on a website.
Research for marketing enables you to distil the most important and relevant consumer themes and replay them back to the audience. And the result? This process although simple can have a dramatic effect on return on investment with many companies reporting 15%-30% increases in response rates.
Consider marketing research to foresee response rates - and save a fortune
Not only does research for marketing help to increase your return on investment, it can help you to avoid making expensive mistakes. That's because this form of research can be used to surmise the effectiveness of a communication even before you have to make a commitment and put into production. This type of pre-testing of creative styles and messaging can save not only money but time and may provide rigorous, metrics to convince others that things need to change to ensure increased response rates.
