In this post, Business Blog would like to explain why marketing research plays such an important role in any business establishment, growth and audience grabber. Marketing research is an essential practice that all businesses must do before starting out. A successfully implemented marketing research should establish several major points, such as: establish the appropriate target audience using demographics and other criteria, determine required approach, determine the right message, determine the design of the whole message and your company. There are multiple steps in creating marketing research.
First of all, you have to determine what you need to find out, whether it is finding out if you chose the right place for your store, is there a potential for your product or even who your competition is. Marketing research is one of the most important practices that you should perform as it is going to give you an open field to whether you have to start what you are planning or not.
Marketing research encounters multiple practices and tools, it can range anywhere from doing a simple survey, mass email distribution, conducting forums, group meetings, and any other things that might help you gather information to provide the needed data for your research. Be aware that there are times where your findings will be unfavorable to you as they are not what you were hoping to get, even then you have to go with what you have, if not you are risking with misleading the whole research and even worth putting the business at risk as you won’t know the actual situation. With that said, it is important to mention that there are several main marketing research methods and designs:
Qualitative marketing research
It is used for exploratory purposes, usually, a small number of respondents (sample) is enough to get an idea. It may not be generalizable to the whole population but should be related to your target audience. Statistical significance and confidence is not necessary, therefore is not taken into calculations. As an example we can use: focus groups, in-depth interviews, and projective techniques.
Quantitative marketing research
It is used to draw conclusions and hard data where we need the actual result. For example we need to test a specific hypothesis. Random sampling techniques must be used to achieve the most accurate results. Again, we have to sample from the population of our target audience. In order to receive the most accurate result a large number of respondents should be tested – examples include surveys and questionnaires. Techniques to use: choice modeling, maximum difference preference scaling, and covariance analysis.
Marketing research is important and should be done before any major brand, product or service launch to ensure that you are on the right track and there is an interest and need in it.