The Importance of Research in Marketing
Research is an important, but often overlooked part of overall marketing strategy. You may do your research when it comes to other aspects of building your business, but the marketing piece often gets the short end of the stick. You know it’s important to stay one step ahead on shifts and trends in your industry, so why are you not doing the same with your marketing? Let’s dive into the importance of research in marketing and how you can start to implement it as part of your marketing strategy:
Deepen Your Customer Knowledge
Knowing your customers inside and out through research allows you to market directly to them and creates an environment where your brand really shines through. This also creates a much more engaged and sticky customer that will be loyal to your brand.
Customer sentiment and values shift often. Staying on top of these shifts can ensure your marketing is always effective and ahead of the curve. Various age groups have different values as well. Knowing these will ensure you are marketing for the long term instead of just the present moment. You want to continuously adjust your marketing strategy as broader cultural shifts occur. Research can help you understand and conceptualize all of this.
Competitor Research
This has always been a big part of your overall business strategy, but it should encroach into your marketing strategy as well. You should be engaging with your competitors on marketing channels in a friendly way. Don’t copy their ideas, but get inspired to brainstorm your own marketing strategies, content, and concepts. Here are some questions to answer during your competitor research:
Do they have true fans?
How engaged are their customers? Does it feel more like a community?
How involved are the business owners and employees? Do customers know who they are and do they interact with them often?
What is the overall sentiment around their business? What are they known for? Are their values clear to their customers?
Research Tools
Here are some of the research tools you should be using to get information:
Pew Research Center--for customer information and cultural and sentiment shifts
Exploding Topics and Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google trend reports for trend watching
Social Listening tools--keep a finger on the pulse of the sentiment around your own brand plus your competitors
I understand that as a business owner, you are short on time and being pulled in a million directions, so adding this to your never-ending to-do list is not ideal. I also know that doing thorough research is important to make your marketing more successful.
That’s where hiring someone comes in. You could hire a marketing agency to take care of every aspect of your marketing and have a team that handles everything for you, but this can be costly. You could also hire a consultant like myself. Many people don’t know I do hourly consulting on top of my regular monthly services. This means that if you want to hire me for just the strategy and research portion of your marketing, I would work with you on an hourly basis for a certain amount of hours per month. No need to hire a Marketing Manager or an agency.