Have a blueprint of your audience

Whilst it is true that ‘if you don’t comprehend your customer, you don’t appreciate your business’ in today’s competitive marketplace this is not enough. You may need to recognize their motivations, attitudes and habits otherwise it is almost impossible to surmise their behaviour. And if increasing your return on investment is important, then being able to figure out behaviour is really the only thing you need to recognize.

Otherwise you will not appreciate how to respond if you see changes in your customer acquisition patterns. As it’s so hard to retain customers, if you can’t respond quickly, you may have to resort to increasing your budget for new customer acquisition. Unfortunately, though most business owners like to think they learn their audience, many are really only assuming, using their instinct and experience to make a judgement. And when it comes to forecasting sales – whilst this strategy is fine, when things go right or wrong it becomes impossible to analyse, so an empirical understanding beats gut instinct almost every time.

Research for marketing combines the best of both Qualitative and Quantitative.

Market research usually splits its work into qualitative research (interviews and focus groups, with free-flowing and open-ended discussions) and quantitative studies (usually surveys). But this will not help you with some of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make about your advertising – the style and content of the commercial, radio script, direct mailshot, leaflet, phone call or sales pitch used to get new customers. If you really want research that can be systematically applied to suggest, guide and measure the style and content of your marketing material then traditional research just isn’t the answer. In order to be able creat ads that your audience might engage with then the best starting point is to take their needs, values, attitudes and wants and distil them into your marketing. To do this you might need research for marketing to give you the best combination of the traditional research methods. That’s because it uses qualitative style research to provide the ‘content rich’ behavioural information which is then processed using a more traditional, rigorous quantitative analysis. The conclusion is rich information that is ranked for importance – not unlike the way that tag or though cloud software is used to prioritise themes on a website.

Research for marketing helps you to distil the key audience themes and replay them back into the marketplace. And the result? This process although simple can have a dramatic effect on profitability with many companies reporting 15%-30% increases in profitability.

Consider marketing research to predict return on investment rates – and save your marketing budgets

Not only does research for marketing help to increase your profitability, it can help you to avoid making expensive mistakes. That’s because this form of research can be used to surmise the effectiveness of a communication prior to making a commitment and put into production. This type of pre-testing of creative styles and messaging can save not only money but time and may provide rigorous, metrics to convince others that things need to change to ensure maximum profitability.

Author Bio: A free booklet on research for marketing is available to all marketing professionals who wish to improve their response rates from espconsultancy.com the marketing research specialists.

Category: Business
Keywords: research for marketing, marketing, research, advertising, increse response rates, roi,market research