There are many articles available on how to calculate the ROI of the tools and resources you use in-house. But what about proving the ROI your products or services offers your customers?
Wouldn't this metric be nice to have to feature in marketing and sales collateral? Or, to better understand what key components customers value the most.
Luckily, we have a great resolution: conducting market research with your customers.
From our experience, Drive Research has leveraged various market research studies to find the ROI and other key performance indicators of our client's products, platforms, services, etc. from the lens of their customers.
Keep reading to learn how we accomplished this and the benefits of doing so.
Recommended Reading: How to Calculate the ROI of Software/SaaS with Market Research.
Benefits of Measuring Your Product's ROI
There are many benefits to proving the ROI of your product or service offers your customers. We discuss a few below.
Building marketing and sales collateral
By measuring ROI, businesses can discover where customers or clients are receiving value. That's huge because you can take that information and build out content, like whitepapers, sales sheets, blog posts, and more.
Even more importantly, you can build out sales collateral.
For instance, once an organization has done the market research and discovered the ROI, they can then go and advertise the findings to their potential clients/customers.
Say you discovered a service you offer is giving current clients a 500% ROI. You can advertise that to attract others to your company.
Understand where customers are seeing value
Additionally, measuring your product ROI framework with market research can tell you where your actual customers and clients are receiving value from what you're offering.
This will help you see if clients are using your products and services as intended, or maybe they’re using them in a different way.
Understanding how your customer base engages with a product/service will let you focus on certain aspects of that product/service.
On the other hand, the data you receive may tell you that your product/service isn’t getting much client use. From there, you can add improvements to boost usability.
Product development
When measuring product ROI, there's a lot of opportunity for creating new versions, or iterations, of your products and services–think spinoffs.
You may be offering a specific type of software, for instance.
By measuring ROI, you may find there’s a small feature that you didn't think anybody would use, that’s actually very important for customers. This goes back to prioritizing what your base values are.
From there, you can dedicate time to further develop this feature. However you develop it, you may gain new business opportunities because of what your market research revealed.
We dive more into the benefits of product ROI surveys in the video below.
💡 The Key Takeaway: If you’re wondering how to measure product value, market research is an invaluable tool to use. Market research can not only measure product ROI, but give you insight into how much value your customers are placing on it.
How to Calculate Your Product's ROI from Customers
We’re going to be honest: measuring ROI can be difficult, at times. (Don’t worry, we’ll simplify it for you.)
It’s not always possible to nail down specific ROI trends on your own.
A third-party market research team can help you do this through in-depth interviews (IDIs).
A form of qualitative research, IDIs are one-on-one interviews between a moderator and participant. The goal of these exploratory interviews is to gather detailed information that can aid in a market research project.
In the case of measuring product ROI framework, IDIs can help a market research team understand key value areas of a product/service. From there, categories of potential high-value benefits for customers are created.
For instance, maybe through your product or service, customers are able to cut down on operational expenses or create their own revenue stream. This kind of detail will be found through IDIs.
With these categorized benefits, you’ll be able to prioritize the information you tell the public. Think measurable and tangible. Promoting this kind of information can be a powerful sales tool.
Being able to share actual numbers can be really compelling for sales material.
💡 The Key Takeaway: IDIs are a great tool for measuring product ROI. These interviews can yield information that can then be promoted in sales material and other forms of content.
Why Using a Third Party Team Matters
Partnering with a third-party team will provide an outside perspective for a client wanting to measure ROI. Think of it as using an objective lens, allowing you to take a step back from your product.
Whether you’re using market research to measure product ROI, or for an entirely different project, an outside team can bring up new questions and ideas to promote valuable data.
This is often harder to do with an internal team, whose first priority is not market research.
Through detailed IDIs with customers and clients, areas of value will be detected. As we touched on earlier, market research to measure the ROI your product or services provides customers will deliver lead-generating statistics and actionable results.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Working with a third-party team to measure return on investment is essential–if you want the best possible data. They act as an objective lens, discovering information that you may never have noticed otherwise.
Contact Our Market Research Company
Drive Research is a market research company located in Syracuse, NY. Our team of experts has years of experience in the field and can work with you to obtain accurate ROI measurements.
Want to learn more about our market research services? Get in touch with us through any of the ways below.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
Chris Coville
As the Director of Research of Drive Research, Chris has 10 years of experience in the market research field and has completed projects with organizations across the globe. He was also named a 2017 40 Under 40 Award winner.
Learn more about Chris, here.
