Talking with a lot of my clients, one of the major hurdles we encounter early on is the question “What is market research?” See, most people have a vague idea of what Market Research is. But put into practice, that’s not always the case. I wanted to write a little bit about how to do market research for marketing so you can better understand the process that goes into it, and the value that comes from it. Hopefully you’ll be inspired enough to launch your own internal market research project to learn more about your audience!
How to do Market Research.
Hubspot wrote a fantastic article on Market Research that covers the basic process for all market research. In a nutshell, you’re looking at:
Understanding if you need Primary (new data you cultivate) or Secondary (data that already exists)
Determining who you need to be researching for your campaign
Finding those people
Gathering information from them
Reviewing your results
I really like this article, especially its use of Buyer Personas. But where it falls short, for me, is in two key categories:
It doesn’t translate 1:1 with brick and mortar, which is where a whole lot of marketing still happens.
It doesn’t speak enough about the value that marketers, specifically, can take from the process.
So let’s dive deeper.
Before any of the process starts, marketers need to ask themselves something: if you could know one thing about your audience, what would you want it to be? If you sell cheeseburgers for a living, you might want to know why people buy cheeseburgers. Is it for price, for taste, for ease? Why do they buy cheeseburgers over chicken sandwiches or tacos?
See, what marketers need to do is hone in on the question that pertains the most to their business. That question is going to be the foundation for our market research, the broad hypothesis of our testing.
Ask the right questions to get the right data.
Often, I advocate for surveys, especially from consumer audiences. So, for this exercise, we’re going to think about asking the right questions that answer the above research goals of what you want to know.
This isn’t demographic information. Asking people where they live and what they earn in a year isn’t going to answer our cheeseburger questions. But our friends in the field of psychology and sociology have been helping us develop better questions that hone in on the emotional aspects of our audiences, and this is where smart questions come into play.
If you can work with a psychologist, great, but honestly, most marketers have the tools to build emotional-gauging questions already. How do you think your audience buys? What pain-points do you think your product addresses? What are the need-states of your buyers when they buy? You have vague ideas of these answers, and now it’s time to build questions that answer whether or not you’re right.
Work with your team, and brainstorm great questions that invoke all of the emotions your marketing team perceives your buyers already have.
Measure what matters.
Summarizing the big data-set you have is how you’ll draw conclusion for your marketing. This applies whether you pulled a giant set of public data about your market, or you conducted your own field survey. Either way, you need to bring all the pieces together to start to see the big picture.
Once you have your data, you can measure exactly what you want to know. Did people respond how you thought they might? Do they spend, on average, as much as you expected? Take a look at the averages, the total scores, the shares of respondents by X, etc. and start to measure what matters to your marketing.
Cut it all up.
The great thing about big data is that you can cut it up into smaller sets of big data, and compare the two. This is the best part – this is where you get to explore.
Using basic data-analysis software like Excel, Tableau or PowerBI, you can pull your data into the system and recalculate new summaries based on different respondent types.
Ask yourself, do men buy cheeseburgers as often as women? Do they buy them for the same reasons?
What about age? Do older audiences buy cheeseburgers or chicken sandwiches more? Do they buy cheeseburgers more than younger audiences?
Do parents view any of these categories than those without kids? What about married v. single?
Finally, what about those pain-points? Could you compare the data based on whether someone’s a price-based burger shopper vs. a taste-based burger shopper?
Cutting your data is how you’re going to find some of your most profitable opportunities, by letting the data develop the buyer personas that matter to your bottom line the most.
Influence your marketing.
Now you know what you thought you needed to know. So, what can you do with this information?
For starters, you can probably develop some kick-ass messaging, especially on the persona side. Instead of trying to blanket your market with all-encompassing campaigns, why not develop targeted messaging based on those pain-points or need-states?
For social media marketers, could you build a more engaging in-person activation if you know where your audience spends their time? Or could you develop better messaging for targeted ad placements?
For direct marketers, especially those who network often or go door-to-door, could you change your approach if you better understand why a person would benefit from your services?
For media buyers, could you buy more intelligent digital out-of-home placements that worked better with your audience’s weekly habits?
Great insights are the result of great market research. And for marketers, these insights are gifts to help them develop stronger strategies.
Keep going. You’re doing great!
In the perfect world, the market research process ends right where it started – at the beginning.
Once you have some great information, it’s up to you to make sure that information remains accurate. Which is why you want to re-run your market research process periodically, to continue to learn and gauge how your audience is evolving.
So, what are you waiting for? If you want to fire-up your marketing, get started on a market research project today!