What is Market Research? And How to Find the Right One?

When you are into marketing business, never believe in the theory of continuing to do those things, which are always done till now. If you do so, either you may fall behind or your brand will be forgotten soon.

Before starting a business or project, a study is very much necessary. As every business has its own taste of users, therefore it is not easy to understand their behaviour, habits, expectations and without tracking them. Here market research comes in.

The process of collecting information, doing the verification, analysis and  interpreting the information about the market is defined as Market Research. When you are doing market research the things you will take into account are demographic figures, geographic and psychographic data about past, current, and potential customers along with competitive analysis to evaluate the product offer viability. In simple language we can say it is the process of understanding the market, your business, and to research who you are targeting to get a better position for your marketing strategy. Let's delve into the marketing research definition, its types and why it is important for your business.

What is Market Research?

It is a systematic process to gather, analyse and interpret qualitative and quantitative data about potential customers, competitors, existing users and the target market. The research result helps businesses to attract and maintain a solid customer base. And the base includes here things like gain competitor insight, gauge customer sentiment, fix brand perception, create marketing strategies and many more.

Why Does Market Research Matters?

Market research helps in clearing the picture of potential customer's values, aspirations, goals, and needs. This strategy is crucial to understand the business aspects, connecting with customers, planning promotional campaigns and beating the competition. Here are some compelling statistics to understand the importance of market research:

• 72% of businesses find market analysis helpful for making their strategic decisions. 

• 50% promotional growth is experienced by companies, who prioritise market research. 

• 76% marketers use analysis to find better market opportunities.

Here are few points those describe about why companies give importance to pomotional research:

• Get opportunities to improve average order value, form business partnerships to design targeted campaigns.

• Track on customers' buying behaviours, to investigate new products, gain actionable insights into customer churn rates to find potential product glitches.

• It helps in promoting strategies to create brand awareness, boost brand perception to buy ads.

• Collect competitive intelligence to work on underserved market segments, mitigate external business environment challenges along with addressing customer needs, those are unfulfilled.

• Help in preparing informed business decisions by addressing potential problems and strategizing operational alternatives.

What are the Types of Market Research?

Find Out varied types of marketing research for a better understanding of your business market:

Primary Research

It is the process, where you conduct analysis yourself. In this method you are going directly near your resource to collect original information. It helps to discover first-hand data about a particular problem or issue. The result could be exploratory or conclusive, depending upon your types of primary research you are conducting.

• Focus Group Discussion: Gather data either from your particular subject experts or from a small group of participants. The group can be based on characteristics or demographics. The interviewer facilitates the discussion and engages in conversion to get product, service or promotional insights.

• Face-to-Face or Telephonic Interview: It is a two way conversation between researchers, and participants. It is an open-ended series of questions to gain insights into respondents' perceptions. As per the complexity of the subject, the question's length or the depth of the interview is determined through the subject's complexity.

• Surveys: Conduct surveys with open and close ended questionnaires to collect larger population responses. These types of online surveys are very much cost-efficient primary research across different geographies. The survey analysis helps researchers to understand respondent's opinions and preferences.

• Observations: It is not a direct interaction method, here trained observers record subjects' reaction and make further study to analyse user behaviour.

• Field Tests: It evaluates product or service's real-life environment functionalities. Though these are risky tests, these are very much helpful to check people's reaction to your product when other viable options are available. Field tests help in adjusting factors that might motivate users to take their businesses elsewhere such as packaging and prices.

Secondary Research

This research  analyses information from the previous analysis and publications. Researchers use other researchers' reports as their source of information for conducting further analysis. The other types of secondary researches are:

• Internal Research helps in discovering data which are available within your organisation. The internal data like website database, user-generated content, and previous analysis findings and campaign results.

• External Research adds knowledge through public libraries, government agencies, competitive analysis, newspapers, and journals.

Qualitative Research

This research focuses on "why" factors instead of "what". It collects primary and secondary non-numerical data to generate new analysis ideas in-depth into a problem. Qualitative research works on interviews, observations, surveys and FGDs to collect and interpret data. The qualitative analysis approaches follows:

• Grounded Theory that collects rich data on a topic of interest to develop theoretical approaches from observations.

• Ethnography lets you understand a group or community's shared culture, beliefs, and conventions.

• Action Research connects action and analysis to drive transformative changes.

• Phenomenological Research  investigates an event with participants' live experiences.

• Narrative Analysis depends on storytelling to understand the participant's event's perception.

Quantitative Research

This research analyses numerical data to experiment on different patterns, generalise results to make predictions. The quantitative techniques help researchers to find historical benchmarks for study. This method includes experiments, surveys and interviews.

Find Out different techniques to execute different kinds of marketing research:

• Product/Service use for target audience analysis helps in discovering what and why of product and service usability.

• Buyer personal research discovers your target market size, characteristics, challenges, aspirations, their pain points, needs and motivations.

• Market Segmentation helps in categorising your group of target audiences into different sections as per their unique goals, pain points and the ultimate needs.

• Studies on Pricing Research help marketers to keep eye on competitor's price points to set a fair pricing point.

• Competitive analysis lets you be aware about competitors' strengths and weaknesses on their services, products and promotional activities.

• Brand Awarenesses analysis helps brands to display their market position and improve brand preferences.

• Campaign Research includes previous campaigns to discover which method worked well.

• Brand Association Research works on desirability of a brand to boost positioning accordingly.

• Demand estimation analysis focuses on customer demand for a product or service.

• Marketing Effectiveness evaluates the go-to-promotional strategy potency in maximising revenues.

• Mystery shopping lets independent auditors as customers to evaluate service and sales quality.

• Sales Forecasting analysis on potential unit sales to predict future revenue.

• Trendspotting helps in identifying global, regional, and local trends before entering into the mainstream.

• Feasibility Studies give insights of the success or failure of business concepts, product development, business expansion plans or service launches.

Market Research Process

Systematic inquiry is the most professional exercise for a market analysis. Though the process may vary as per budget, resources, deadlines, methodologies however, at the end it will follow sequential stages:

1. Define the problem

A half defined problem is like half-solved. Researchers need to reach at the roots of the problem. Because a clearly defined research problem helps researchers to establish accurate research objectives by collecting relevant data. 

2. Research objective statement

Start an investigation with a set of research questions. For the promotional  analysis, experts need to create a hypothesis only when they have sufficient evidence to support that claim.

3. Research Design

Specific design needs a specific plan and for it you need to collect and analyse data. Here research design is like a framework that identifies sources like data collection strategies, analysis costs, and sampling methodology.

4. Develop a Sampling Plan

Understanding the characteristics of population help researchers to define a sample population, population size, and collect sampling method. The two commonly used sampling methods are:

5. Probabilistic sampling

Collect samples from the population with probability theory. Ideal for quantitative analysis but may get errors after data collection.

6. Non-probability sampling

Depends on the researcher's subjective judgement to select data. For qualitative analysis it is a very ideal strategy.

7. Collect Data

Collecting information on variables every researcher needs to use a wide range of data collection methods. This primary or secondary data further helps them to study and analyse the analysis problem.

8. Process and Analyze

Researchers take help of data editing and coding to identify and remove data classification. The analysis part helps in discovering similar data patterns and their logic.

9. Conclusion

Market research's final process describes data analysis and presents findings through a report. The reports ease executive decision-making with concrete data-backed evidence.

Customise Your Market Research with Teldrip

Every marketer depends on the data driven marketing trends to get the best and deliver the best. That is why, it makes all marketers use different types of market analysis at their disposal to make informed decisions. 

There are many consumers who still prefer to connect companies through phone calls. Because they want to get reassurance from an informed person before purchasing complex and expensive decisions. 

Teldrip's conversion intelligence analysis provides valuable data collection from the targeted market through recording and analysing each phone call in real-time. The AI utilisation as a solution helps in identifying patterns and trends, so that you can take your marketing campaigns to new heights.

Final Thought

Market research is a kind of must to do exercise for every company. Because it is an eye-opener and a fact checker to deal with every changing marketing norms in this competitive world. You may think you understand your target audience in and out, however a detailed study will give opportunities to uncover new channels and ideas. Conducting a market analysis is always the best choice to conduct market research in the initial phase so that you will get a lot of room for improvement.