Market research is an important tool when it comes to understanding your customers better. By using market research methods, businesses can capture customer insights and understand their consumers’ ever changing opinions and emotions.
Customer insight research is beneficial to companies in developing their communication and marketing strategies. By conducting customer insight research, your business will be able to better meet your customers' wants and needs, which forge positive relationships with your customers and in return, likely increase sales.
Customer insights bring new, unfamiliar, and actionable ideas to the table. In this blog post, Drive Research, a Voice of Customer (VoC) market research firm, will discuss five different ways your brand can gather more effective customer insights.
Customer insights bring new, unfamiliar, and actionable ideas for businesses developing their marketing plans. Here are 5 ways market research can help.
1. Establish Research Goals
It is important to establish what problems you are trying to solve before diving into any market research study, whether it is qualitative or quantitative. Brand awareness and perception, shopping patterns, competitor comparison, customer needs, and business opportunities are just a few of the topics that a customer insights study might help your company better understand.
Your research goals help guide the project from kickoff to reporting. Identifying market research goals for example can help decide what methodology is best to meeting these objectives.
If you are looking for more customer feedback in a short period of time, an online survey would be your best route. If you are looking for more detailed feedback than more qualitative approaches such as focus groups or in-depth interviews with help your business goals more.
Once research goals are established, you will be able to move in a more specific direction and gather more clear and precise data.
Learn more best practices for choosing a methodology, based on if you are aiming to explore or measure.
2. Conduct Market Research Surveys
Once research goals are established, market research analysts can design surveys that will ensure the right questions will be asked. Customer satisfaction and brand awareness surveys are important when trying to understand perceptions that surround your brand and customer patterns.
Once designed, there are many ways customer satisfaction or brand awareness surveys can be conducted. Perhaps you can use an email list or follow up with customers after they make a purchase. If your company has a large online audience, social media is another excellent way to collect customer insights.
Although less common in the digital age, mailer surveys can also be useful to follow up with more offline audiences who might like a more personalized or “hands-on” survey experience.
Thinking about collecting customer feedback? Here are five options to consider including email, website, intercepts, phone, or mail.
3. Earn Customer Trust
Audiences can be difficult to understand, especially if you’re working with a niche group. On top of that, customers also want personalized experiences with brands, yet they don’t want to give up too much information about themselves.
If you want to collect more private information about your customers such as location, age, and interests, simply sending out a customer satisfaction survey to gather this data is not enough. Building a positive relationship with customers is essential when it comes to earning their trust.
Having excellent customer service practices is one of the best ways to gain trust with your customers. Another way to gain trust is to stay in touch with your customers and show them you care using non-sales related marketing materials, such as happy birthday emails.
4. Utilize Social Media Analytics and Track Engagement
When combined with market research, social media analytics and social listening tools can point your marketing strategies in the right direction.
In today’s digital age, there is no way around using social media. Since customers will often share their opinions, feedback, and ideas on social media, these platforms can be one of the best ways to stay top of mind and interact with your customers. Social media is a great place to prove to your customers that you care about their experience with your brand and show that you are listening to them.
Through monitoring social media analytics, your company can stay on top of how customers interact with your brand and better understand your target market.
Here are 5 reasons to consider Facebook for online surveys.
5. Understand Brand Loyalty
Very similarly to trust, if a customer is loyal to your brand, they are more likely to participate in customer insight research.
Loyal customers want to help your company because they understand that sharing their opinions will only positively increase their experiences with your brand moving forward.
How do you build a strong customer base that chooses to be loyal to your company?
Conducting research to better understand consumer perceptions and behaviors is essential to building and understanding brand loyalty. After the market research is completed, your company can use the data and make important changes to help both your company and your customers. It’s a win-win.
Do you know what drives consumer loyalty? Learn how a consumer loyalty survey uses data and facts to determine key purchasing motivators to drive your marketing efforts.
Contact Drive Research
Drive Research is a national Voice of Customer (VoC) research company located in Syracuse, NY. Our team has the knowledge and tools to design a robust market research study, whether it is customer insight analysis, customer satisfaction surveys, brand and image awareness surveys, and more!
Interested in learning more about our market research services? Reach out through any of the four ways below.
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