Importance Of Consumer Research in Marketing [2024]
From the initial stages of tracking a customer’s purchase history to soliciting feedback and analysing Net Promoter Scores (NPS), every interaction and every piece of data contributes to a mosaic of consumer behaviour. Less than 40% of marketers are using consumer research to drive decisions. With the help of the insights gained from consumer research, businesses position themselves better. In this blog, we will explore how these insights are important. But first, let’s have a look at what consumer insights in marketing are all about.
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Finding out a target customer’s interests, attitudes, motives, and purchasing patterns is known as consumer research. Shared characteristics amongst the various client groups are found and grouped into customer segments and buyer personas using a range of customer research techniques. These are then utilised to develop marketing campaigns that are targeted at a particular segment or persona.
To understand why the market acts in a particular way, consumer insights examine the needs and desires of your target audience. By utilizing this data, organizations may modify their offerings to become more customer-focused and ultimately boost consumer happiness. In turn, this will support an increase in business.
What is the Importance of Consumer Research in Marketing?
The importance of consumer research in marketing is to understand your target market’s needs and goals and match your company plan with them is through a form of research. You can learn why customers are buying from you or not, as well as what they might want to buy from you in the future.
Additionally, you can research your current clientele by finding out what they are buying from you and looking into why. For instance, you could find out how frequently your consumers shop online versus in-store, and then inquire as to why they make the choices they do.
1. Defines and Segments Your Audience
2. Minimises Risks
3. Greater Marketing ROI Due to Informed Decisions
Marketing uses return on investment (ROI) as a quantitative measure to support how marketing efforts and initiatives bring in money for the company.
This instance refers to comparing the amount of money your business spends on marketing initiatives to the sales those initiatives bring in. You can more efficiently manage your budget by using consumer research to better understand your target market. There will be no more money thrown against the wall to see what sticks. Rather, you allocate your resources to proven channels and messaging. Spending money on consumer research is an investment in more astute and successful marketing.
4. Understanding Trends and Adapt to Market Shifts
5. Product Development to Satisfy Your Target Market
6. Staying Ahead of Competitors
Develop a Better Pricing Strategy
8. Forecasting Consumer Behaviour
9. Providing a Better Customer Experience
10. Content
One of the prevailing proponents of top-of-the-funnel marketing is content. However, your content marketing may require assistance if you’re basing your content creation on what you feel like writing, what rival websites are doing, or what an influencer website stated is trending right now.
Your clients are yours in and of themselves. There’s a reason they found you and subscribed, so why not ask them what they want to read more of and find out what that reason was? Creating relevant and relatable content that strikes your consumer’s chord at the right time is as important as any other aspect of marketing and this can be done effectively with the help of a thorough consumer research process.
You can set realistic publication dates for each piece of content, taking into account the topics’ urgency as well as your available resources. To time your material for optimal impact, consider customer behaviour trends, such as seasonality or buying cycles. You have total control over your content by scheduling its delivery and distributing it among several challenges when you use a CX tool. This eliminates the need to manually publish content from numerous devices, such as stories, posts, YouTube videos, etc., and saves time.
4 Consumer Research Methods
Interviews
It can take time to interview customers who are using your product at different phases of their journey. While conducting interviews can present certain difficulties, they can also be among the most insightful and beneficial forms of consumer research your firm can use. Because you may ask follow-up questions based on prior responses and read or hear your participants’ replies in real time, interviews enable you to go deeper into qualitative research.
Surveys
With good reason, surveys may be the most widely utilized technique for doing consumer research. Although surveys don’t always yield as much insight as interviews, their simplicity makes it much easier to encourage clients to participate and provide feedback. With the use of surveys, you can swiftly get qualitative and quantitative data from a representative sample of your market, enabling you to conduct accurate and timely iterations of your study.
They give consumers a quick and simple opportunity to voice their opinions and let them know that a business values their requirements.
Analytics
Conducting consumer research through analytics differs greatly from conducting surveys and interviews. Analytics focuses on what the client actually does, as opposed to what they claim to need or want. This type of observational research aims to quantify real behaviour as opposed to behaviour as reported by customers.
Focus Groups
The easiest way to describe a focus group is as a small, carefully chosen group of people who participate in candid conversations for study. In order to ensure that study participants accurately reflect the broader community they hope to reach, the hosting organization carefully chooses study participants.
To extrapolate the response from the broader population, the group may consider new features, goods, or other interesting subjects. There is a moderator in this research. Their responsibility is to guarantee accurate outcomes and lessen conversation bias.
5 Consumer Research Trends in 2024
Artificial Intelligence in Consumer Research
62% of researchers from 14 sectors worldwide think that their organization now relies heavily on market research and insights. Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed several industries, including consumer research. In 2024, we may expect AI to play a larger role in data collection and analysis. AI-powered algorithms can rapidly process large volumes of data, allowing researchers to gain actionable insights in real-time. From chatbots performing surveys to machine learning algorithms anticipating consumer behaviour, AI will transform consumer research.
Online Surveys are on the rise
In recent years, the market research industry has stuck with what it knows: internet surveys work.
Today, approximately 90% of market researchers claim they do online surveys regularly. Online surveys have grown in popularity among market researchers due to their speed and low cost. Given the popularity of Internet surveys, it is reasonable to predict a similar popularity in mobile surveys. According to experts, poor UX and survey length are the main reasons why customers do not finish surveys on their mobiles.
Faster and more cost-effective research
Companies cannot afford to be behind with their market research.
In the post-pandemic environment, businesses are responding 20-25 times faster than typical when it comes to making adjustments. Automated market research is one technique to complements the agile methodology and provides faster insights with fewer people on staff. The findings are very convincing: 60% of market researchers say automation helps them provide results faster, 50% think it helps them save money, and 80% expect the trend will continue to expand.
VR and AR in Consumer Research
VR and AR technology are no longer exclusive to the gaming business. By 2024, these immersive technologies will be integrated into market research procedures, allowing researchers to develop realistic simulations and obtain insights via virtual environments. Immersing people in virtual settings allows organizations to gauge emotional responses, test product prototypes, and evaluate customer experiences, delivering vital data to drive innovation and improve customer happiness.
Social Listening and Sentiment Analysis
Social media platforms are brimming with conversations, interactions, likes, and dislikes that are important to a company’s brand.
Each of these interactions provides insight into the tastes and attitudes of a company’s target audience.
Social media listening entails acquiring both historical and real-time data from social media. This data, like that from other market research methodologies, can help to influence decisions and inspire new offerings.
According to statistics, 5.85 billion individuals throughout the world will use social media by 2027.
Better yet, 80% of what people share on social media is about themselves.
This means that businesses that invest in social media research methodologies have near-instant access to their target audience.
Locobuzz for Complete Consumer Research in Marketing
A marketing consumer research report must meet the needs of the brand and contain the data points that they want to see, rather than something that they may not comprehend.
Reports must contain metrics like Channel-Wise Page Followers Count, Total Mentions & Sentiment Split, Platform-wise ‘Share of Voice’, word cloud top influencers and other important metrics.
Locobuzz analytics reports provide you with deep insights into consumer behaviour and interactions. With the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the tool gathers, processes, and analyses a large amount of data across various channels, and it does so quickly and efficiently.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, we can say that a thorough understanding of consumer behaviour, thought processes and actions can help the business to sustain itself in the market for a long time and this can be achieved by conducting effective and planned consumer research that aligns with the company’s goals and objectives. Here, we talk about the different aspects of consumer research like what it means, various ways it can be done and what are the various benefits of it.
To enhance your understanding of consumer behaviour and conduct better research using an advanced analytics tool like Locobuzz industry reports can do wonders for your business. With the help of AI and ML businesses can transform raw data into valuable insights that drive strategic decisions and foster meaningful connections with customers. With its vast features and user-friendly interface it not only simplifies data analysis but also saves time for marketers and empowers them to stay ahead of the competition, market trends and enhance customer experience.