Grow Your Business:
6 Ways Market Research Will Help
To grow, businesses need to acquire new customers or sell more to existing ones. Market research is an effective tool to assist businesses of all sizes in their growth planning. When considering how to grow and apply market research in your organization, it is helpful to think in terms of whether your growth focus is to
- acquire new customers; or to
- retain and sell more to the customers you already have.
You can use external help from a local company, like Pivotal Arc, that serves small and medium sized businesses with Market Research, among other marketing efforts to help your business grow. When implemented properly, market research can help your organization better understand and address the most critical goals, needs and problems of your current and potential customers.
Acquiring New Customers
Here are 2 ways to put market research to work to attract new customers:
- New Products or Services. If you are developing or launching a new product or service, you can conduct research with your target audience to discover their unmet needs, prioritize your best new product ideas and concepts, learn the most important features and benefits, determine how price sensitive they are, and measure how likely they are to purchase.
- New Customers. If you are striving to gain more customers for your existing product or service, it is advantageous to take a closer look at how you can improve your marketing and sales efforts. You can do this through market research by determining the ways your target customers prefer to learn about and buy products like yours, what their key purchase decision criteria are, and what they perceive as your company’s strengths and weakness in relation to your competitors. Interviewing prospective customers who decided not to purchase from you to find out why they made that decision can be very illuminating and useful. In this effort, you may also discover adjacent market segments.
Retain and Expand Business with Existing Customers
Following are 4 ways research can be used to optimize the experience of your current customers and maximize the likelihood they will remain customers, say great things about your company to others and expand their business relationship with your firm.
- Loyalty & Experience. A study can be undertaken to measure important metrics such as customer satisfaction and advocacy, and to understand the factors that are influencing your scores in these areas. You can leverage research to explore how well you are doing during important interactions with your customers, such as their experience when using your product or service and when communicating with salespeople, customer service, and customer support. Such insights can help your company preserve and build upon key strengths as well as prioritize and address evident shortcomings. They also help provide early warning of issues and learn about customers at highest risk of leaving.
- Website Visits. If your company is like many other companies, your website is one of your most important touchpoints with your customers. By conducting research among visitors to your site, you will learn who they are, what their purposes are for visiting, their level of successes in achieving their visit purposes, and the factors that help or hinder their success. You can then make improvements to your website to enhance the experience and maximize visitor success.
- Cross-Selling. If your company offers multiple products or services, motivating your customers to purchase additional offerings is a powerful way to deepen your relationship with them and grow your business. Market research can help you get the knowledge you need to capitalize on this opportunity by answering questions such as: What other products and services are customers currently using? What is their level of satisfaction with these other solutions? What are the pain points and problems they have with these solutions? What is their level of awareness of your company’s other solutions? What is their likelihood to switch to your solutions and what might be holding them back?
Utilizing market research to probe the mind of your customer and understand who they are and how they think and feel will greatly improve your ability to develop more effective business strategies, create unmatched customer experiences, and produce increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
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