Get More Response With Research for Marketing

Figure out your customer

All marketing professional know that 'if you don't learn your audience, you don't appreciate your business' in today's competitive marketplace this is not enough. You may need to know their motivations, values and beliefs otherwise it is hard to anticipate their behaviour. And if increasing your return on investment is important, then the ability to foresee behaviour is really the only thing you need to appreciate.

Otherwise you may not recognize how to react if you see changes in your customer acquisition patterns. As it's so hard to hang on to 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 comprehend their customers, many are really only assuming, using their instinct and experience to make commercial judgements. And when it comes to forecasting sales -- whilst this strategy is fine, when things go right or wrong it becomes impossible to analyse, so an empirical understanding beats gut instinct almost every time.

Research for marketing combines the best of both Qualitative and Quantitative.

The market research profession typically divide their work into qualitative research (interviews and focus groups, with free-flowing and open-ended discussions) and quantitative studies (usually surveys). But this will 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. Should you 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 the answer. In order to be able creat meaasges that your audience may 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 result is detailed information that is scored for importance - not unlike the way that tag or though cloud software is used to prioritise themes on a website.

Research for marketing enables you to prioritise the key consumer themes and replay them back into the marketplace. And the result? This process although simple can have a dramatic effect on profitability with many companies reporting 15%-30% increases in response rates.

Consider research for marketing to predict roi rates - and save money

Not only does research for marketing help to increase your profitability, it can help you to avoid making expensive mistakes. That's because this form of research can be used to predict the effectiveness of a communication prior to making 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 others that things need to change to ensure maximum profitability.

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