Market Research | A Comprehensive Guide to Competitive Analysis

Why Market Research is Crucial for Businesses

In today’s consumer-driven world, customers hold significant power. They conduct thorough research on products and services before making purchase decisions, relying on online reviews and recommendations from friends and family. To adapt to these changing consumer habits, businesses must tailor their marketing strategies accordingly. This requires a deep understanding of the target audience, their behaviour, and the factors that influence their purchasing decisions.
Market research is the key to unlocking these insights. While conducting research may require a substantial investment of time, energy, and resources, it is a vital aspect of any successful business strategy. At Absolute Creative, our branding and marketing agency offers comprehensive market research services at no additional cost to our clients. Let us help you gain a competitive edge in today’s rapidly evolving market.

Process of Market Research

Market research is the process of obtaining information about your company’s buyer personas, target audience, and consumers in order to evaluate how feasible and successful your product or service would be (or is) among these individuals.

You may meet your buyer where they are by conducting market research. This becomes increasingly useful when our world (digital/analogue) grows noisier and requires more of our attention. You may appropriately build your product or service to organically appeal to your consumer by knowing their issues, pain areas, and desired answers.

Market research may also reveal information on a range of factors that affect your bottom line, such as:

Where do your target audience and current customers go to learn more about your product or service?
Which of your rivals does your target market turn to for information, choices, or purchases?
What’s popular in your industry and among your buyer’s peers
Who makes up your market, and what problems do they face?
What factors affect your target audience’s purchasing decisions

You’ll probably hear about primary and secondary market research when you start focusing in on your market research. Imagine two umbrellas resting beneath market research: one for primary market research and the other for secondary research. This is the simplest way to think about primary and secondary research.

There are other forms of market research that fall under these two categories, which we’ll go over in more detail below. It’s not necessary to specify which of the two umbrellas your market research belongs under, though some marketers prefer to do so.

So, in case you run into a marketer who wants to categorize your market research as primary or secondary, let’s go through the differences between the two. We’ll look at the many forms of research.

Primary vs. Secondary Market Research

Primary research and secondary research are the two main forms of market research that your company may perform to gather relevant information about your products.

Primary Research

The pursuit of first-hand information about your market and the customers that make up your market is known as primary research. It comes in handy when segmenting your market and creating buyer personas. Exploratory and specialized market research are the two types of primary market research.

Exploratory Primary Research

This type of primary research is primarily concerned with possible problems that might be worth solving as a group than than observable customer trends. It’s usually done as a preliminary stage, before any particular research is done, and might include open-ended interviews or surveys with small groups of individuals.

Specialized Primary Research

Exploratory primary market research is frequently followed by specialized primary market research, which is used to delve deeper into challenges or opportunities that the company has previously recognized as essential. In specialized research, a company might ask questions of a smaller or more focused subset of their audience in order to solve a perceived problem.

Secondary Research

Secondary research refers to all of the data and public documents that you have access to in order to develop conclusions (e.g. trend reports, market statistics, industry content, and sales data you already have on your business). Secondary research is very beneficial when assessing your rivals. The following are the key categories into which your secondary market research will fall:

Public Sources

When performing secondary market research, these sources are your initial and most accessible layer of content. They’re frequently free to locate and evaluate, so you get a lot of bang for your cash. According to Entrepreneur, one of the most popular forms of public sources is government statistics. The U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor & Statistics are two examples of public market data in the United States, both of which provide useful information on the condition of various sectors around the country.

Commercial Sources

Market studies, which provide industry intelligence collected by a research organization like Pew, Gartner, or Forrester, are common sources. The cost of downloading and obtaining this information is generally high since it is so portable and distributable.

Internal Resources

Internal sources should be given more credit for assisting market research than they are. Why? This is market data that your company already possesses! Average revenue per sale, client retention rates, and other historical data on the health of old and new accounts may all assist you in determining what your buyers might be looking for right now. Now that we’ve gone over the broad categories of market research, let’s go more particular and look at the many sorts of market research you may perform.

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Common Types of Market Research

There are several forms of market research that cover a wide range of topics, and as a result, they are frequently misinterpreted. Market research may help you discover more about your customers’ buying patterns or estimate how much they would pay for a new product (if you use it correctly).

We’ll go through the many forms of market research, their goals, and when to utilize each one to help you figure out which one is appropriate for you.

We don’t always mean how you collect data when we say “types of research” Instead, we are referring to the methods and methodologies utilised to examine the data. Market segmentation, product testing, advertising testing, key driver analysis for satisfaction and loyalty, usability testing, awareness and use research, and price research (using techniques like conjoint analysis) are just a few examples of these procedures.

Market Segmentation

We ask survey questions to capture needs, values, attitudes, behaviours, and demographics when performing market segmentation research. Firmographic data relevant to the industry, such as business size, sales, and product category, may also be investigated by a B2B company.

One of the major aims of market segmentation is to allow for more efficient and successful marketing strategies. Marketing can’t effectively talk to every sort of individual or organization at the same time. Companies who do not divide their markets are shooting in the dark and squandering money. They might accidentally strike a consumer, but they’d miss a lot of others.

Test of Product

Because a thorough knowledge of how your product meets (or fails to meet) your customers’ demands is critical for both product development and marketing, these sorts of market research studies should be done throughout the life of a product. Finally, you should be able to make well-informed “go” or “no-go” judgments on new features and products before they are released, saving money, time, and effort. Successful product testing should have the following features:

Investigate competitive and substitute alternatives, as well as customers’ readiness to accept new products/services, to provide insight into product/service viability
Determine your competitive advantage as well as any risks posed by similar products or services
Determine which goods have the most income potential
Before launching a product, determine what upgrades should be prioritized (or re-launch)
Determine which product characteristics (current and future) are most essential to your target market
Assist in the creation of marketing messaging aimed at changing or improving existing perceptions of your products and services.

Satisfaction and Loyalty Analysis

Customers that are satisfied aren’t always loyal customers, but evaluating customer happiness on a regular basis is a fantastic method to boost client retention. This sort of study aims to uncover major determinants of customer satisfaction and assess the likelihood of consumers continuing to use a company’s products and services. The following are the objectives of these studies:

Determine what variables, such as product/service qualities, company operations, customer service, price, and so on, impact loyalty, advocacy, and repeat purchases
Over time, keep a close eye on general satisfaction, probability of recommendation, and likelihood of defection
Early indications of developing gaps in product/service performance, customer service, and procedures that might lead to customer defection are provided
Assist in identifying areas of the product or service that require improvement in order to satisfy changing customer demands
Customer loyalty and retention programmes are created and/or developed with your help
Indicate when changes to the organisation are required to improve operations and customer retention.

Pricing Research

Conjoint analysis surveys that offer consumers to select between several goods with varying features and price points can help you figure out which features are most useful to your audience and how much they’d be prepared to pay for them. These insights, when combined with some basic research on your rivals’ pricing, may offer you a significant edge when it comes to pricing your products and services.

Market Research as A Service

Any firm, service provider, individual, or organization may use market research as a service to assist them make better, more informed decisions. The more research a company incorporates into its strategic planning, the better equipped it will be to deal with the ever-changing environment in which it works.

Market research aids in the strengthening of a company’s position. Knowledge is a powerful tool, and market research may help you acquire a better knowledge of your market or target audience and keep your company ahead of the competition. It reduces the risk of an investment. This is a straightforward yet crucial and frequently business-critical factor. It makes good business sense to spend a tiny percentage of your investment on studying and testing the market, product, concept, or idea.

Market research also recognizes possible dangers and possibilities. Primary research (fieldwork) and secondary research (desk research) can both be used as insurance against the road ahead’s evident risks. Combining this with some qualitative research for further investigation might reveal opportunities or warning flags that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Increase Your Market Intelligence with Accurate Insights

Accurate market intelligence given in days, not months with Absolutecreative, will help you gain a competitive advantage. We can assist you in identifying your and your competitor’s strengths and shortcomings.

Marketing research done by our specialists is critical for taking a “eyes wide open” approach to any market research project, which is why working with a market research firm is frequently recommended to assure totally unbiased reporting. Use the results of your study to adjust and learn from your own flaws, while using your newly acquired information from competition analysis to gain an advantage and go ahead of the pack.

Being the first, the best, or creating something no one else has thought of is typically how you stay ahead in business. Taking the ‘pulse’ of what’s hot and what’s not in your business on a regular basis is a crucial discipline. Tell us about the many strategies you may use to identify and capitalize on these trends.

Companies that benchmark enjoy 69 percent quicker growth and 45 percent higher productivity, according to a PWC report. Use our market research method to conduct competition research, employee engagement surveys, and identify performance or knowledge gaps as well as prospective development opportunities.

We believe it is our responsibility as a market research firm that strives to deliver excellent levels of client service to keep our fingers on the pulse and present our clients with the most up-to-date research breakthroughs.