
Creating products and services that meet the stated needs and implicit wants of customers is critical to achieve market success. Obviously, to accomplish this, companies must deeply understand their target audience. This is where consumer research comes in. Google has previously reported that 40% of marketers use consumer research to drive their business decisions.
This blog will dive into why consumer research is crucial to influence effective marketing decision-making and how it can help businesses achieve their goals.
Why Is Consumer Research Important to Marketing Decision-Making?
1. Identifying the Target Audience and Gathering Insights
The first step towards realizing a successful marketing strategy is to identify the target audience most likely to respond positively to the product or service offering. What are their needs, wants, and purchasing habits? Consumer research is essential in answering these questions. In essence, companies can gain invaluable insights into their target audience’s likes, dislikes, and purchasing behavior by conducting research.
For instance, let’s say you run a high-end athletic shoe business. Through consumer research, you discover the specific segment of the wider target audience comprising health-conscious individuals who value performance and style who are most likely to respond to your product’s value proposition and story. With this knowledge, you can create products that cater to their needs. You can also tailor your messaging to resonate with them. Also, you can place the messaging in a place and context that’s just right for the segment you’re targeting. This way, you can increase sales, bolster brand reputation, and improve brand loyalty.
2. Designing Effective Marketing Campaigns
The next step is to develop a marketing campaign to interact with the target audience. But how do you know what messaging and media channels will be most effective? This is where consumer research becomes viable, for it provides valuable insights into the audience’s preferences.
Suppose your research shows that your target audience spends considerable time on certain social media channels. In that case, you can invest in a social media advertising campaign to reach them. The content for this campaign can echo customers’ pain points, personalizing the interaction on the back of the knowledge about the relevant buyer personas.
3. Improving Product Development by Validating Product Concepts and Identifying Areas for Improvement
By gathering feedback from potential and existing customers, businesses can ensure that their products meet the needs of their target audience.
For instance, let’s say you’re developing a new line of running shoes with some specific features. By conducting consumer research, you can gather insights into what aspects of those features potential customers are looking for in a running shoe. This information can help refine the existing product and increase its chances of success in the marketplace.
4. Enabling More Sales Through Marketing Activities
Marketing campaigns are ultimately designed to drive sales. Consumer research can help businesses achieve this goal by identifying the most effective marketing strategies to reach their target audience. For instance, you can use consumer research to determine the content formats that can potentially resonate more with the target audience.
By customizing the messaging across channels as per the audience’s perceived preferences, businesses can improve the effectiveness of their marketing activities and increase sales.
5. Efficient Resource Allocation and Channel Focus for Promotion
Consumer research can also help in making informed decisions about resource allocation and channel focus for promotion. By understanding the preferences and habits of the target audience, businesses can invest in marketing activities more likely to yield a positive return on investment.
For example, if your research shows that the target audience rarely reads print magazines, advertising in print publications may not be a viable strategy. Instead, online advertising can prove effective and lower costs.
So How to Ensure You Get the Best Customer Insights from the Market?
One easy way to ensure you get the best customer insights from the market is to use a comprehensive consumer research platform like Ask 1. It can help in gathering detailed information about the target audience, their preferences, and their behaviors.
In essence, Ask1 is a consumer insights tool that enables businesses to gather detailed information about their target audience, understand the drivers and barriers to customer action, and take actionable steps to improve the product or service.
The platform offers a wide range of survey templates and question types, enabling businesses to design relevant and engaging surveys for their target audience. More profoundly, it helps businesses understand:
- What would consumers like or dislike about the product or service?
- How have the marketing campaigns performed over time?
- What are the creatives that best speak to the target audience?
- Which channels will be most effective in delivering customer messages?
- What do customers expect from the respective product category going forward?
Such insights (when delivered in a matter of hours) can be instrumental in helping businesses make the right marketing decisions. In fact, it can solve a number of challenges that are often faced in the marketing decision-making process.
Here’s a rundown of the many problems that Aroscop Ask1 solves:
Limited Understanding of the Target Audience
Information overload and lack of time often result in poor research that provides little value. Ask1 solves this problem by helping organizations launch and get responses to their online surveys within 48 hours. Marketers have the facility of choosing from over 400 prebuilt audience segments or creating their own custom segments. The segmentation enables them to focus on highly-specific audiences, thus saving time and delivering better results.
Inaccurate and Incomplete Data
Marketing success depends a great deal on knowing the right insights. But many organizations find that the data they collect is not completely accurate or even comparable. Ask1 provides a solution to this problem by giving marketers a complete picture of how consumers feel about their products and services. Using survey templates that have been tested and validated over time, businesses can very well drive marketing decisions – be it for product launch, expanding to a new location altogether, or revamping a product category.
Inefficient Use of Resources
Without the right insights, businesses may invest in marketing activities that are not effective. Ask1 wards off this challenge by helping businesses identify the most effective marketing strategies, ensuring they allocate their resources efficiently.
Conclusion
Consumer research is a critical component of effective marketing decision-making. By understanding the target audience’s needs, wants, and behaviors, businesses can:
- Design more effective marketing campaigns
- Tweak products to meet the customers’ needs
- Allocate resources more efficiently
Investing in consumer research can position your business for success in today’s fast-paced, hyper-competitive marketplace. Fortunately, you don’t have to go through a lot of hassle to get the right insights. A consumer insights platform like Ask1 will help you engage with your target audience and put your business on the road to growth. Connect with us for a personalized demo.