Research to uncover market intelligence

- The first step to marketing to your audience is understanding who they are, what they care about, and why you should share communication with them. Research is your opportunity to gather intelligence and to help your company learn more about the market. Yet many companies want to skip or rush through to get their communication distributed. If there's one thing I've learned in marketing, it's that you can skip or ignore the research. Let's start with why market research is so important so that you can make a case for moving beyond what professionals call their informal or internal research. First, market research reduces your risk and validates important decisions that you'll make about your brand communications. The intelligence you uncover will help you to get buy in from your leadership to support your marketing initiatives and hopefully, get you more budget and the resources you need for a successful program. Second, when you have a good market research program, you can prove the naysayers wrong, get past the internal struggles and have your programs become more of a priority. The research you present will also help you and your colleagues to remain focused on what's important to your customers and how you can continuously exceed their expectations. Third, your brand needs to stay relevant in the market. With the changing pace of media and technology, you have to keep evolving to better serve your customers. You should always be 10 steps ahead of them and their needs. Market research helps you to deliver what's important to your customers before your competition does. Next, let's focus on what you can learn through different research techniques. Number one, you can use research to dig deeper into the target market by uncovering information that helps you to relate to your audience. When you can truly understand your customers, you'll see better results and more impact from your marketing programs. Your market research will reveal audience behavior, perceptions, and attitudes as they consider what products they want to purchase. Number two, learn more about the market and how your brand is positioned. Gather key statistics and conversation-based research so you're able to identify where your brand will thrive. Gathering the right information results in a strategy that speaks more clearly to your customers and makes them responsive. Number three, understand your competition so you can capture and keep the attention on your brand rather than theirs. You can uncover competitor strategies, audit their communications, and benchmark your marketing communications against their efforts. Number four, take your communications to new heights by understanding what messages resonate with your audience. If you're analyzing different messages communicated through marketing, advertising, PR, and social media, then you can see what makes your customers react favorably and engage in specific behaviors based on what you share. Now for the tools. There are so many types of research tools to help you. Here's a brief list of tools and resources when you want to use market research to uncover important information. Survey research and questionnaires, one-on-one interviews, what about focus panels and mystery shoppers? There's usability studies and product testing. To find out or about the types of research, you can check out the accompanying handout that gives a breakdown of different kinds of research tools that you can use to help better understand the market and your customer behaviour. Are you really taking the time to dig deeper and find vital information that makes your marketing communications a success? If you take more time to invest in your market research program, then your communications will resonate and spark much deeper meaning and engagement between you and your customers.