6 Questions You Should Answer By Your Marketing Research to Impress Your Boss

Marketing research is key to your success as an online B2B business. Without it, you're flying blind and taking unnecessary risks with your e-commerce marketing. In this article, I'll share seven essential tips for conducting effective market research for your online store. Concentrate on these subjects, and you can make data-driven decisions that will help your business grow!

What is Marketing Research?

Marketing research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data about a target market. Market research allows businesses to understand their customers and make marketing decisions that will resonate with them.

It's important to know what kind of market research is needed in order to make decisions about your company's product or service. There are many ways to research marketing, but not all methods will be effective for every business. The easiest way to determine what method or combination of methods will work best for your company is to consult a well-known marketing research firm. They can help you design a customized research plan for your budget and business goals. But if you, like me, love to get your hands dirty and figure things out by yourself, then continue reading my article.

Before you start your marketing research, you need a clear idea of what you want to learn. This will help you determine the best methods and the most important questions to ask. Once you know what to learn, you can begin collecting data.

Types of Market Research

There are two main types of market research at the start of your research process: primary and secondary.

• Primary Research is collected firsthand through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and observations. It is more expensive and time-consuming to collect than secondary data, but it's also more reliable because it comes directly from your target market.
• Secondary Research, to me, is exploratory research where I can collect data about my target markets to encourage myself to dig deeper into the research, spending more time and money. As a small business with a limited budget, I search for published reports, government statistics, trade publications, and online databases in my business industry which you can find plenty for free by the way. This type of data is less expensive and quicker to collect than primary data, but it's not as reliable because it doesn't come directly from your target market.

Once data is collected, you need to analyze it to find out what it means. This can be done through qualitative and quantitative analysis.

• Qualitative data analysis is used to understand the meaning behind the data. It's often used to generate hypotheses that can be tested with further research.
• Quantitative data analysis is used to conclude the data. It's often used to test hypotheses and make decisions about marketing strategies.

After you've analyzed your data, you need to present it in a way that will be useful for your company's decision-makers. This can be done through marketing reports, presentations, and infographics.

Marketing reports should be clear, concise, and easy to understand. They should include an executive summary, an introduction, a body with marketing research findings and analysis, and a conclusion with recommendations.

Presentations should be visual and use simple language. They should be organized logically and tell a story that is easy to follow.

Infographics should be visually appealing and use data visualizations to tell a story. They should be easy to understand and shareable on social media.

Why Does Your B2B Business Need Frequent Market Research?

Firms that conduct market research regularly are more likely to experience significant growth and profitability than those that don't. This is because market research provides businesses with valuable insights into their customers and their target market's overall size and makeup. Without this information, it would be very difficult to make informed decisions about marketing strategy and execution.

Hinge Marketing ?research of professional services firms?has shown a strong correlation between research and growth/profitability. Firms that conduct frequent research (at least quarterly) grow up to 70% faster and are almost 50% more profitable than firms that don’t.

There are many reasons why your B2B business should make market research a priority:

• To understand your customer’s needs, wants, and perceptions.
• To identify new customer segments or markets to target.
• To gather intelligence on your competition.
• To benchmark your firm’s performance against others in the industry.
• To develop more effective marketing campaigns and messaging.
• To improve customer retention and loyalty programs.

If you don’t conduct market research regularly, now is the time to start. The insights you gain will be invaluable in helping your business reach new levels of growth and profitability.

Steps To Do Before You Start Your Marketing Research

Before you launch your research project, there are a few steps you should take to get organized and prepare for success.

1. Define Your Research Goals.

When companies don't take the time to think through their goals, they're left wondering why market research isn’t providing what's needed. The top reason for this is that many businesses forget about the upfront definition and dive right into interviews and focus group surveys without first defining these outcomes clearly mind- which leads them down an endless rabbit hole trying to figure out how best to approach questions instead of getting onto the more valuable ground (like customer personas).

Setting research goals at the start of your project will help you deliver what is needed for success once it's over. Defining these beforehand means no surprises later down through data collection and metrics tracking. This will ensure that all necessary information gets collected so decisions can be made wisely about how best to proceed with your products and services!

Not sure where to start? Here are examples of audience research goals:

• To understand the need for a new product.
• To learn about how customers use our products or services.
• To do market segmentation.
• To understand why customers choose our competitors.
• To develop personas for our target market.

By setting research goals from the beginning, you can avoid costly or time-wasting mistakes during market research and data collection!

2. Business Stack Holders Interview

The most successful kickoffs I've seen are when we meet with internal stakeholders one-on-one and listen, learning about their perspectives. We discuss who makes decisions here or there, what metrics will affect them positively/negatively if this goes well, and finally, how can all parties involved benefit from such an endeavor.

These questions help set the stage for what follows: research objectives, target market segmentation, and project scoping. But more importantly, they establish a personal connection with each internal stakeholder. They see that you care about their input and want to ensure that this research project will be successful for the company and them individually.

When conducting these interviews, it's important to remember a few key things:

• Come prepared with questions (and maybe even a handout!)
• Take note of both verbal and nonverbal queues
• Be an active listener - don't interrupt!

By following these tips, you'll be able to get the most out of your stakeholder interviews and set your research project up for success.

Example Questions

Now that you understand the importance of business stakeholder interviews, it's time to start preparing for your own. Begin by thinking about your research goals and who needs to be involved in the project. Then, you can develop a list of questions to ask during the interview and start setting up meeting times.

Not sure what questions to ask? Here are a few examples to get you started:

• What are your top priorities?
• What keeps you up at night?
• What do you hope to get out of this research?
• What are the top three things you'd want to know about your customers?
• Describe your very best customer.

By asking these questions, you'll gain valuable insights into what stakeholders are looking for from market research and how your project can help them achieve their goals.

So, there you have it! Business stakeholder interviews are crucial to any research project and can help set you up for success. By meeting with stakeholders one-on-one, you can gain valuable insights into their goals and objectives and ensure that your research project is on track to deliver the results they need.

Best Methods for Conducting B2B Market Research

Now it's time to start planning your research. But with so many different research methods, how do you know which is right for your business?

To help you get started, here are three of the best methods for conducting B&B market research:

• Qualitative Research: Qualitative research is about understanding people's motivations and behaviors. It is typically conducted through interviews, focus groups, and surveys. Qualitative research is a great way to gain insights into your target audience's needs and wants.
• Quantitative Research: Quantitative research is all about collecting data and analyzing it to see what trends emerge. It is typically conducted through online surveys, polls, and questionnaires. Quantitative research is a great way to get hard data that can be used to make decisions about marketing strategies.
• Secondary Research: Secondary research is all about gathering information that already exists. This type of research is typically conducted through online searches, library databases, and market reports. Secondary research is a great way to get an overview of a market or industry.

By taking the time to understand your target audience and what they want, you can create a marketing campaign that resonates with them and ultimately leads to more conversions.

The Primary Subjects You Need To Cover In Your Market Research

Before starting any marketing strategy, it is crucial that you first conduct market research. By understanding your target audience and what they want, you can create a campaign that will resonate with them and ultimately lead to more conversions. However, conducting market research can be daunting, especially if you're unsure where to start. To help simplify things, I've compiled a list of the primary subjects you must cover in your market research. By covering these key areas, you'll better understand your target audience and what needs to be done to reach them.

When you're doing marketing research, there are seven primary subjects you need to cover:

1. Who is your target audience, and what are their needs/desires/problems that you can solve with your product or service?

It's important to have target customers in mind. This way, you can market your product or service to appeal to them. To better understand your potential customers, you can conduct surveys, interviews, and focus groups. You can also use secondary research to find published reports and online databases that contain information about your target audience.

When you know your target customers and their needs, you can start creating solutions for them. This way, you can be sure that your product or service can solve their problems. This will help you increase your sales and grow your business.

So, who are your potential customers? What are their needs that you can solve with your product or service? What are their buying habits? And where do they hang out online and offline? Take some time to think about this, and then start conducting your research. With the right understanding of your target audience, you can increase your sales and grow your business.

When you know your target audience and their needs, you can start creating a marketing strategy. This way, you can be sure that your product or service is able to solve their problems. In turn, this will help you increase your sales and grow your business.

Simple ways to conduct audience research

One important way to do this is by understanding your audience and tailoring your marketing message accordingly.

Unfortunately, too many managers make the mistake of assuming they know everything about their audience. This can lead to communication breakdowns and ultimately undermine your team's goals.

The good news is that there are relatively simple ways to conduct audience research. By taking the time to understand who you're talking to, you can ensure that your message gets across loud and clear. Here are a few target customer research methods to get you started.

- Personas A persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. When creating personas, market researchers consider things like age, gender, location, interests, and pain points. This information helps you understand what motivates your target market and how to best reach them.

If you need help figuring out where to start, try this persona template from HubSpot .

• Surveys: Asking customers about their needs and wants is always a good idea. However, crafting your questions carefully is important to get useful insights. Leading questions (questions that prompt a certain answer) can skew survey results, so avoid these if possible. Instead, focus on open-ended questions that allow respondents to share their honest opinions.Another tip is to offer an incentive for completing the survey, such as a discount code or free shipping. This will encourage more people to take part and give you more data to work with.
• Focus Groups: are small panels of people who are asked about their opinions on a particular topic. This research method is often used in marketing, allowing businesses to get direct feedback from potential customers.While focus groups can be helpful, they can also be expensive and time-consuming to set up. If you're on a tight budget, consider conducting an online focus group using a tool like Zoom or Google Hangouts.
• Social Media Monitoring: Monitor what people are saying about your brand on social media. This will give you an idea of the general sentiment around your business and any specific pain points customers may have.You can do this manually by setting up Google Alerts or using a social media monitoring tool like Hootsuite Insights.

By taking the time to understand your audience, you can ensure that your marketing message hits the mark every time. Market research, customer persona surveys, focus groups, and social media monitoring help you understand your market. By conducting regular market research and creating customer personas, you can ensure that your marketing message is always on point.

2. What is the size of your target market, and how much potential revenue could you generate from it?

When most businesses forecast their revenue goals, they first calculate their total addressable market (TAM), the market demand for their industry’s products or services. Put simply, it’s the maximum amount of revenue a business could generate if it captured its entire market.

For example, the global automotive aftermarket was valued at $648 billion in 2019 and is projected to grow to $686 billion by 2022, according to Transparency Market Research. This means that businesses operating in this space have a lot of potential revenue to grab.

The second thing you need to calculate is the Service Available Market (SAM) or the TAM portion within your geographical reach. For example, if you’re a US-based company, your SAM would be the US automotive aftermarket.

Once you know your SAM, you can start thinking about the Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), which is the portion of SAM that you can realistically capture with your products or services.

To calculate SOM, you need to consider three things:

• The number of potential customers in your target market.
• The average revenue per customer.
• Your market share.

Let’s say there are 100 potential customers in your target market and each one spends an average of $100 per year on your product. If you have a market share of 20%, that means you can realistically generate $20,000 in revenue from this target market.

If you want to grow your business, it’s important to regularly conduct audience research and update your TAM, SAM, and SOM calculations. This will help you understand the potential size of your market and how much revenue you could generate from it. Additionally, it will give you insights into your current market share and what strategies you need to implement to capture more of the pie.

The starting point for estimating market size is to understand the problem you solve for customers and the potential value your product generates for them. This is an aspect that many startup founders in the innovation community tend to overlook since they get excited about the product they’ve developed without first understanding whether there’s a market for it.

To size your market, you need to understand three things:

• The number of people who have the problem you’re trying to solve.
• The average revenue per user (ARPU) generated by your product.
• The market share you can realistically achieve.

Let’s say you’ve developed a new type of software that helps businesses manage their inventory. To size the market, you must first estimate the number of companies that could use your software. This is your total addressable market. Then, it would be best to estimate how much revenue your software would generate for each business (ARPU). Finally, it would be best if you estimated what percentage of the total addressable market you could realistically capture with your marketing and sales efforts (market share).

If you’re selling to small businesses, there are 28 million small businesses in the US alone. If you capture just 0.01% of this market, that’s 28,000 potential customers. If your software generates $100 in ARPU per month per customer, that’s $28 million in monthly recurring revenue (MRR). And if you only capture 0.001% of the market, that’s still $280,000 in MRR.

As you can see, even a tiny fraction of a large market can generate significant revenue for your business. This is why it’s so important to accurately size your market share and understand how much potential revenue it could generate.

3. What does your competition offer, and how can you differentiate yourself from them to win over customers?

When you understand your competitive landscape, you can develop strategies for differentiating your products or services from those of your competitors. This will help you win over customers and grow your business.

There are many ways to differentiate your products or services. Some common differentiation strategies include:

• Offering lower prices than your competition.
• Offering higher quality products or services than your competition.
• Offering unique products or services that your competition does not offer.
• Offering better customer service than your competition.

Which strategy makes the most sense for your business will depend on various factors, including your industry, your target market, and your competitive advantage.

If you're unsure how to differentiate your products or services, consider conducting a competitive analysis. This will help you understand what your competition offers and how you can improve it to win over customers.

Conducting a competitive analysis is relatively simple and only requires researching companies in your industry and comparing their offerings. Once you have an understanding of what they offer, you can begin to develop strategies for differentiation.

A competitive analysis is a vital part of your company's marketing plan. By researching other companies, you can learn what they're doing right and wrong, so you can stay one step ahead. Here's how to do a competitive analysis so you can create your own competitive advantage.

First, you need to research your competitors. This includes everything from their products and services to pricing and promotion strategies. Look closely at their websites and social media presence to get a sense of their overall strategy.

Next, identify your company's strengths and weaknesses. This will help you understand where you have the most opportunity to improve and where you might be vulnerable to attacks from competitors.

By conducting a competitive analysis, you can develop a clear plan to improve your company's position in the market and stay ahead of the competition.

My default pick in competition analysis methods is SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis.

I like to start with a quick Google search and some light competitive analysis. I’ll look for the company’s website, social media accounts, and any press they have. This gives me an idea of their marketing strategy and overall tone.

From there, I’ll move on to a more in-depth analysis using SWOT. I find creating a grid with my findings from each category helpful. This gives me a visual way to see where my company falls in comparison and what our next steps should be.

To learn more about competitive analysis or how to use SWOT analysis specifically, check out this competitive analysis guide from HubSpot . It covers everything from how to get started to how to create your competitive advantage.

Finally, you can use this information to create a competitive advantage for your company. This could be anything from offering a lower price than your competitors to providing a unique product or service that meets a specific need.

4. How much will it cost to reach your target customer and acquire new customers (digital marketing budget)?

Organizations today are spending between 10.4% to 13.7% of their total company budget on marketing according to the 2021 CMO Survey , with digital marketing making up the majority of that. But how do you know if you're allocating the right resources to your campaign?

The answer lies in understanding your target consumers and their journey before becoming paying customers. Once you have a solid grasp on this, you can reverse engineer the steps required to get them from point A to point B and determine how much it will cost.

Here's a quick overview of what you need to consider when calculating your digital marketing budget:

• Your revenue and new customer goals.
• Your average cost per lead.
• Your average conversion rate.
• How many leads do you need to meet your goal?
• The final conversion costs associated with acquiring a new customer

By understanding these key metrics, you'll be able to develop a budget that is both realistic and effective in helping you reach your business goals. Consumer behavior, business decisions, and brand.

It's important to remember that your digital marketing budget should be flexible and based on your business goals. As your goals change, so should your budget—don't be afraid to experiment and adjust as needed.

5. What are the risks and potential challenges associated with entering the targeted market, and how will you overcome them?

Entering a new market is always a risk, but with careful planning and preparation, you can minimize its potential challenges. Being aware of the risks and having a solid plan to overcome them will give your business the best chance for success.

I’ve identified three main risks of entering a new market: internal, external, and social. Let’s take a closer look at each one.

Internal risks

Internal risks are those that arise within your business. Examples include not having the right products or services, not having the proper licenses or permits, or not having enough capital to get started.

External risks

External risks are those that come from outside of your business. The economy is a good example of external risk. Other external risks include things like political instability in the country you’re expanding to overcome external risks, such as being aware of the potential challenges and having a contingency plan in place. For example, if you’re planning on entering a market prone to political instability, you need to plan for what you’ll do if the business climate changes.

Social risks

Social risks come from consumers or other businesses in the market. Examples of social risks include needing to understand the culture and having a good relationship with the local government. To overcome social risks, you need to make sure that you understand the culture and customs of the country you’re entering. It would be best if you also tried to build relationships with key stakeholders in the market, such as local business

By being aware of the risks involved in entering a new market, you can put yourself in a better position to overcome them. By having a solid business plan and researching, you can minimize internal and external risks. And by building relationships with key stakeholders, you can reduce the social risks.

6. How long will it take for you to break even in this market, and what are the long-term profitability prospects?

A break-even point is the number of units or amounts that are needed to cover your business's total costs. The analysis determines this amount and will help you make decisions regarding how many products/services sold should generate enough revenue so as not to go into debt for a longer period than necessary.

It’s tough to say how long it will take to break even in a new market. A lot depends on the specific market you’re entering, your business model, and the level of competition. Generally speaking, breaking even in a new market takes longer than an established one.

The long-term profitability prospects for a new market depend on a number of factors, including the size of the market, the growth rate of the market, and the level of competition. If you enter a large market that is growing quickly and there is little competition, your chances for long-term profitability are good. But if you enter a small market that is stagnant or declining, your chances for long-term profitability could be better.

To maximize your chances for long-term profitability, you need to enter a market that is large and growing quickly. You also need to have a unique product or service that gives you a competitive advantage. And finally, you need to have a sound business model that generates enough revenue to cover your costs.

Break-even analysis is relatively simple. You can use the following break-even analysis equation to calculate the break-even point: Break-Even Quantity = Fixed Costs / (Sales Price Per Unit – Variable Costs Per Unit) Let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice. Company B sells and manufactures sportswear, and they have fixed costs that total $100,000 (lease, payroll, property tax, etc.). The variable costs associated with producing one piece of sportswear are $10 per unit, and each piece of sportswear sells for $50. You can use the break-even analysis equation to work out Company B’s break-even point:

Break-Even Point = $100,000 / ($50 – $40)

Break-Even Point = 200 units

This means that Company B needs to sell 200 units of sportswear to cover their costs. Anything above 200 units is profit.

As you can see, break-even analysis can be a useful tool for businesses when entering new markets. It can help you determine the number of sales needed to cover your costs and make a profit. And it can also help you assess the long-term profitability prospects of a new market. So if you’re thinking about entering a new market, be sure to do your break-even analysis first!

Conclusion

When starting your marketing research for your business, it's important to consider your research goals and the type of data you need to collect. Using one or more of these points, you can conduct market research to help you make better business decisions.

Thanks for reading! I hope this article was helpful to you. If you have any questions or want to learn more about market research, please contact me. I'd be happy to chat with you about your specific needs and goals.