3 Ways Market Research Is Vital to Your Business Growth – Don’t Skimp!
Without insight from market research, leaders at companies of all sizes and industries keep missing out on opportunities to grow.
Leaders who want to grow their business beyond short-term survival must prioritize market research for three essential reasons, beginning with the most critical:
1. Customers Matter Most
Without customers, you have no business. Regardless of the economy, industry trends, best practices or internal agendas, your customers rule.
The unspoken truth is that your business growth is driven by your customers, not you!
More accurately, successful strategies, decisions, and initiatives are rooted in how well you and your team understand your customers and their non-conscious, totally and authentically human filters that drive engagement and purchase behavior.
So, if you want to sell or develop a tangible product or intangible service, you must clearly understand the emotional experiences, mindsets, and perceptions that drive their choices and ultimately your business growth, however you measure it.
2. Optimize Growth Opportunities
When combined with industry and competitor intelligence, customer-centric research helps you to identify and prioritize growth opportunities. It enables you to assess key factors such as market demand and feasibility.
In a practical way, customer-centric research gives you a super-powerful tool for effective decision making.
Insights from research empower you to see and understand the world from your customers’ points of view, which are formed by their past experiences, present circumstances, needs, and intentions.
For high-risk decisions regarding investment in new opportunities, customer-centric research helps you analyze your data with greater rigor, clarity, confidence, and effectiveness.
This market research is a decision maker’s antidote to assumption, bias, and other human errors of judgment, as well as blind spots, which most of us don’t realize play a role in our business decisions.
3. Differentiate Despite Change
In a world of proliferating competitors and oodles of choices, marketers are more challenged than ever to identify the unique experience-based benefit that customers value and seek from your brand.
Market research illuminates how your customers perceive your value relative to what competitors promise or deliver.
There’s only one pre-requisite to achieving growth through delivering on your unique value: Understanding that customer needs, mindsets, and experiences shift over time in response to change.
Failure to stay in touch with your customers and their day-to-day experiences can derail growth initiatives.
For long-term growth don’t skimp on investing in periodic or ongoing customer research. It empowers you to stay relevant with customers despite marketplace disruption and inevitable change.
What you can do NOW to accelerate growth:
Identify specific priority business objectives and their desired outcomes to determine what you need to learn from your customers. This prerequisite to doing market research best ensures success. Insights from the research should inspire action that matters to customers and optimizes desired outcomes.
Initiate customer research to understand the “why” that explains your big data or numerical tracking measures. You’ll discover opportunities to respond to changes and emerging issues, enhance what’s working, and fix what’s not.
Pay attention internally and externally to assumptions about (a) opportunities and barriers to growth, and (b) beliefs about what works, doesn’t work, and why. Market research empowers you to juxtapose what a business believes about its brand and what customers actually perceive and experience. Business opportunity lies in the gaps that emerge!
Market research is crucial for any business’s success.
If you’re not sure how or where to begin to use research as a vital tool to plan and achieve growth, a market research consultant can make a difference.
An experienced research consultant knows how to help you gain clarity on the best options for your unique business situation, objectives, and organization’s culture.
Check out the range of solutions we’ve provided to clients, which have inspired them to act on prioritized opportunities and achieve measurable growth.
