Identifying the Trends and Value of Market Research for Successful Businesses

The market research industry has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 15 years, with its total global revenue increasing by more than $50 billion between 2008 and 2022. This high valuation isn’t surprising: we live in an increasingly data-driven world and market research blends customer behavior and economic trends to provide valuable insights enabling businesses to find customers and establish a competitive advantage.?

What Is The Value of Market Research?

Market research can offer a number of benefits to businesses, enabling them to succeed in the long run. One of the most obvious benefits is the ability to better understand and connect with consumers: market research is all about understanding your customer base better, and when you understand your target customers better, you are able to more effectively reach them. By embracing the right research model, you can establish a firmly customer-centric approach to business that will serve you and your customers well.?

Additionally, market research is a great way for even well-established businesses to seek out new opportunities for growth. This can come in many forms, from unreached customer segments to untapped business partnerships. Market research can also help you identify possible shortcomings in their existing products or services, highlighting opportunities for improvements, add-ons, and other upsells that appeal to your target market.?

The Types of Market Research

There are many different methods a business can use to conduct market research, from surveys and questionnaires to focus groups and interviews. Market research is also a very broad category encompassing many different strategies and approaches. By leveraging different types of market research, companies can tackle their own specific business goals and identify the exact information they need to deliver on consumers’ needs.?

Some of the most common valuable forms of market research include

• Consumer Research – Identifying the top audiences of your website/marketing content.
• Advertising & Marketing Research – Identifying whether or not your ad or marketing campaign is effective.
• Brand Research – Creating or refining your brand to make a more favorable impression on your target market.
• Keyword Research – Identifying keywords that are relevant to your target demographics.
• Consumer Segmentation Research – Dividing your larger consumer base into different groups or personas.?
• Competitive Analysis Research – The collection and study of info on rival companies.

What Does Market Research Look Like in 2023?

Given the size and value of the market research industry, it is likely to undergo a serious transformation in the coming years. As such, it is important for businesses to keep up with the trends that are likely to define market research in 2023 and beyond, as they could greatly impact how companies connect with consumers in the near future. Here are a few notable trends that have begun to emerge.?

Social Listening

With the rise of social media, consumer attitudes are now on display for anyone to see in real-time, providing easy access to conversations, interactions, likes, and dislikes that are relevant to a business’ brand. These interactions are an open window into a customer’s preferences, meaning those who can effectively monitor social media and make sense of the data will get a wealth of valuable information.

Agile Research

One way that market research has become faster and more efficient in recent years is through the development of agile research, which takes an iterative approach that takes findings from one source and feeds them directly into another one for a better understanding of a topic. With the consumer landscape moving at a rapid pace, companies will increasingly need to be efficient to keep up.?

Embracing Diversity

Market researchers have always been mindful to create their groups of research participants in proportion to the population of the market as a whole, recruiting people that mirror their target audience in terms of gender, age, and location. Recently though, there has been a push to redefine what counts as a “representative sample". This includes extending inclusion standards beyond ethnicities to include people with physical disabilities, those with intellectual disabilities, and people in LGBTQ+ communities.

Understanding Adjacent Markets

Something that the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted is that a company’s success or failure is rarely ever just because of what’s going on in its specific industry. The pandemic highlighted how major events can affect consumer behaviors and how interest in outside fields can require brands to rethink how they approach their products and services. For instance, consumers’ growing interest in sustainability has many companies adapting new business strategies and branching out into new products and services.

Bringing Research In-House

Traditionally, market research has been handled by outside agencies. However, brands increasingly demand more transparency and control over research, along with a more streamlined process overall. This has led many companies to invest toward in-house research, which they see as a way to keep their efforts customer-centric and use new technologies to empower their brand.

Looking Toward the Future

Brands that are able to effectively anticipate customer wants and needs are the ones that will succeed in 2023 and beyond. As such, companies need to invest in market research and keep up with emerging trends in the field. Those who are willing to embrace the practice and the many insights it can offer with drive the kind of value necessary for long-term success and growth.