Consumer research is an important part of marketing that shouldn't be overlooked. It’s not just about understanding your customers. It can also help you adjust your products and services to improve loyalty and ensure you’re using the right talking points to get stakeholders and audiences engaged and ready to do business.
If you haven’t used consumer research before, here are just some of the reasons consumer research matters to your business.
Many types of research require some analysis of customer behaviour. The beauty of consumer research is that it’s done firsthand through:
Firsthand research makes the insights much more reliable and concrete into why your customers, clients or stakeholders are or are not engaging with your brand.
You can truly understand the needs, pain points, preferences and behaviour of customers. With this information you can make decision about how best to:
Whether you are in the B2C or B2B space, improving the customer experience is crucial to the success of any business. By gathering insights into how your stakeholders or customers feel about your business, its products or services, you can quickly identify any areas of improvement.
Consumer research can be particularly helpful for businesses that struggle to retain customers. Acquiring new business is much more costly than engaging with existing customers. And sometimes it’s the smallest tweaks that can make all the difference. Stronger relationships with customers can increase customer satisfaction and result in more repeat business.
Consumer research can help you stay ahead of changes in customer or audience behaviour and make changes before the competition does. While it’s common for us to hear "I’m not worried about the competition” from clients, businesses don't operate in a vacuum.
Whether you’re a small business, nationwide change or large organisation, your customers have a choice. And they don’t have to choose you. Staying ahead of changes in consumer behaviour can help you identify areas to offer something new to your audience. Gathering insights into your competition is a great way to ensure you’re differentiating your products and services enough to stand out. Don’t be an emu when it comes to your competition.
Consumer research can be a great tool to help businesses launch new products or make improvements to their current offerings. With consumer research, you can find out what attributes are currently missing from existing products or services on the market. Things like surveys and phone calls can help you identify any gaps in the market for new products.
Insight from consumer research can also help drive innovation while minimising risk. Getting in front of customers and stakeholders is important for finding out what customers want and preventing costly mistakes.
Good products and services fail all the time. Consumer research can make sure you’re using the right talking points and the right channels to talk about your business. Knowing what stakeholders and customers like, care about and dislike and knowing how they want to engage with your business are powerful tools.
Once you know how audiences like to spend their time, and what information is the most relevant to them, you can design an effective marketing campaign to get audiences engaged and excited about your business.
At Ambitious Digital, we use consumer research to make sure we understand the needs and preferences of audiences during the initial research stage. This helps ensure we’re appealing to the pain points, preferences and behaviour of stakeholders, customers and audiences. It also means everything we do from here on out is closely aligned with what customers and stakeholders actually need.
We can gather detailed information about your stakeholders and customers to help you improve your marketing, products, services or offerings.
If you’re interested in hearing more, get in touch. We’d love to talk through what consumer research can do for your business.
