What you can discover from Marketing research

Be conscious of your customer

Whilst it is true that 'if you don't appreciate your customer, you don't know your business' in today's competitive marketplace this is not enough. To be successful we may need to appreciate their desires, attitudes and beliefs otherwise it is almost impossible to figure out their behaviour. And if increasing your profitability is important, then the ability to surmise behaviour is really the only thing you need to appreciate.

Otherwise you will not appreciate how to react if you see changes in your customer acquisition patterns. And because it's so hard 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 recognize their customers, many are really only assuming, using their instinct and experience to make a judgement. 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.

Marketing research combines the best of both Qualitative and Quantitative.

The market research profession typically divide their work into qualitative studies (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 advertising - 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 systematically 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 customers will engage with then the best starting point is to take their needs, values, attitudes and wants and distil them into your advertising. To do this you may need marketing 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 outcome is rich information that is scored for importance - not unlike the way that tag or though cloud software is used to prioritise themes on a website.

This information enables you to prioritise the most important and relevant audience themes and replay them back into the marketplace. And the result? This process although simple can have a major effect on response with many companies reporting 15%-30% increases in profitability.

Use research for marketing to figure out profitability rates - and save your marketing budgets

Not only does research for marketing 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 foresee 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 effort and may provide rigorous, metrics to convince others that things need to change to ensure higher response rates.

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