Get More Response Using Market Research

Appreciate your customer

Whilst it is true that ‘if you don’t appreciate your audience, you don’t learn your business’ in today’s competitive marketplace this is not enough. You might need to know their motivations, attitudes and beliefs otherwise it is almost impossible to anticipate their behaviour. And if increasing your profitability is important, then being able to surmise behaviour is really the only thing you need to recognize.

Otherwise you will not comprehend how to react if you see changes in your customer acquisition patterns. And because it’s so difficult to retain customers, if you can’t respond quickly, you will have to resort to increasing your budget for new customer acquisition. Unfortunately, though most business owners like to think they appreciate their customers, many are really only guessing, using their instinct and experience to make commercial judgements. And when it comes to forecasting sales — whilst this strategy is ok, when things go well or wrong it becomes impossible to analyse, so an empirical understanding beats gut instinct almost every time.

Advertising research combines the best of both Qualitative and Quantitative.

The market research profession typically divide their activity into qualitative studies (interviews and focus groups, with free-flowing and open-ended discussions) and quantitative research (usually surveys). But this may not help you with some of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make about your marketing – 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 methodically applied to suggest, guide and measure the style and content of your marketing material then traditional research just isn’t going to cut it. In order to be able creat meaasges that your audience might engage with then the best starting point is to take their needs, beliefs, attitudes and wants and distil them into your marketing. To do this you might need advertising research 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 prioritise the most important and relevant audience themes and replay them back to the audience. Guess what? This process although simple can have a dramatic effect on return on investment with many companies reporting 15%-30% increases in response rates.

Use research for marketing to foresee response rates – and save a fortune

Not only does marketing research help to increase your return on investment, it can help you to avoid making expensive mistakes. That’s because this form of research can be used to anticipate the effectiveness of a communication even before you have to make a commitment and put into production. This type of pre-testing of creative styles and messaging can save not only money but time and might provide rigorous, metrics to convince other stakeholders that things need to change to ensure higher response rates.

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

Processing your request, Please wait....