You already know that marketing research is important. But what you may not fully appreciate is that it’s critical to your survival. As noted by MarketingProfs: “market research is essential to you and your brand’s long-term success. Market research will keep your brand afloat while companies who fail to make research a high priority drown.”
Naturally, you’d prefer the view from above the water – and that means you need a process in place that connects your solutions to your marketplace, and ultimately to your delighted, loyal and profitable customers. Or in other words, you need marketing research process.
To point you in the right direction – and give you a glimpse of what’s on the horizon – here’s a look at the elements of a 5-step marketing research process:
- Identify the Problem: Before focusing on what you need to do, start by identifying the problem you want to solve. While it’s ideal to be precise, this may not always be possible (i.e. you may need to do some further research to truly articulate what’s wrong and needs to be fixed). If so, be as clear as possible, and revisit the problem throughout the planning process to refine it towards finalization.
- Establish Objectives: In light of the problem you want to solve, establish the objectives for your marketing research process. These can include qualitative or quantitative statements (or both), as well as a hypothesis that you want to prove or disprove.
- Create the Marketing Plan: The problem you want to solve and the objectives you want to achieve combine to form the foundation of your marketing plan. Here’s where you lay out the logistics and tactics of how you’ll gather and analyze data. This can include interviews, surveys, scanning the competition, accessing supplemental information (e.g. industry white papers, analyst reports, etc.).
- Manage Data: Once data starts to flow in (from interview notes, survey answers, etc.), you want to have a process in place that allows you to capture, organize, analyze it in an efficient and focused way. Otherwise instead of actionable intelligence, you’ll be overrun by raw information.
- Create Recommendations: Ultimately, you want to leverage your data to create a series of recommendations, such as launching a marketing campaign to seize an opportunity, target existing customers to increase lifetime value, and so on. Remember: your recommendations have to be based on your actual research findings, and not on your objectives or preferences. Data needs to lead the way!
Learn More
At Leap Clixx, we develop customized marketing research processes for each of our clients based on their goals, competition and budget. We also provide comprehensive reporting (weekly, monthly, quarterly, bi-annually and annually) to ensure that the process is optimized and on track for success.
To learn more, contact us today and take advantage of your free consultation.
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Topics: Inbound Marketing
