The world of marketing has changed a lot since the advent of the internet. Marketing most marketing research is focused on the digital world, and there’s good reason for that. It’s hard to deny that the virtual world is where most of the consumers are right now, after all.
It’s opened the doors for a lot of exciting research, but it can also make delving into marketing research for our own businesses a bit intimidating. Thankfully, there are tons of resources online that can help us with this. In fact, that’s what we’ll be discussing today!
What is Marketing Research?
It might seem a bit silly to be thinking about this question, but honestly, a lot of folks really seem to misunderstand it. In essence, marketing research is a way for a business to get a better idea of who their target audience is and what they want out of various parts of the buying process. You can find out a bit more here, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ijmr.12014.
What are some of the questions you might ask yourself along the way? Well, the first thing is demographics. Luckily, technology has made this a lot easier. A lot of sites track certain demographic details about their visitors, and you can tap into those sorts of resources to do so as well.
Beyond that, though, there are still plenty of other things that we need to know about our target audience. Perhaps the most important bit is to do some research on what their general interests and shopping habits are, since that can help you tailor your releases to that sort of information.
The other critical piece of the puzzle is understanding what their current opinion on your brand is. Imagining and branding is a huge part of a successful business and with technology in market research, we can capitalize on these opportunities even more. However, it does require knowing your audience fairly well, so keep that in mind.
How Has Technology Changed it?
In all honesty, an easier question to answer would be “what hasn’t changed” with technology, but that wouldn’t be very satisfying, right? Instead, we’ll focus on a few key points that you should be aware of. Thankfully, pretty much all of these changes are positive ones, so there’s no doom and gloom to worry about!
Perhaps the best change has been the fact that nowadays, we can make any of our market research a lot more targeted and specific to exactly what we’re looking for. There’s not nearly as much sifting through data that isn’t relevant, luckily. Instead, we can find what we need and analyze it with a whole lot less fuss.
What else is there, though? Well, analytics in general have changed immensely. The fact that AI programs can help with that is revolutionary, really, and takes a lot of pressure off of the analysts themselves. They can focus on figuring out how to use the data rather than spending most of their time collecting and organizing it.
Social media has thrown another wrench into the equation too, though, considering it’s become such a huge part of how brands portray their public image. Taking in all of the data from those platforms can sometimes be a bit tricky, admittedly. So, in that way, it sort of has made things a bit more complex. The thing is, it’s in a positive way, because the end result is getting more data points for our target audiences – you can see that in this article.
Implications for Businesses
Maybe you’re still wondering what all of this even means – that’s understandable. The main thing that you’ll want to know from a business standpoint is that the more data we have on our customers, the better we can cater to their specific wants and needs. That can mean increased profits the better we get at analyzing the points of data that we receive.
In addition to that, though, as we improve technology in this department, it will increase productivity among our human employees as well. After all, when they’re not stuck doing tedious jobs like organizing data sets, they can instead focus on things such as analyzing that data and helping to invent new products or business strategies.
If you haven’t already started to embrace the ways that technology has changed marketing research, take this as your sign to do so. To say the least, it’s well worth improving the overall productivity levels in your business, that’s for sure! Obviously, though, the implications it can have for sales are huge.
While it can be hard to keep up with all of the changes in technology, do your best. Most of your competitors will be, so it’s important to keep up with them and hopefully eclipse them, too!