In today's highly competitive marketing landscape, maintaining a business relevant requires maintaining your finger on the pulse regarding market conditions, customer behaviour, competitors' activities, and emerging trends, among other things. Sure, this can be difficult, as field conditions change rapidly, and so does how customers behave. Not only that, but trends come and go in the blink of an eye, and competitors shift their strategies according to new necessities.
This means that a business needs to keep an eye on the market, ensuring flexibility and a capacity to adapt quickly.
That said, conducting quality market research is key to remaining competitive. This article will explore market research, why it is so relevant, how you can get started, and why Crowdsourcing plays such an important role when validating it.
The Role of Market Research
Market Research is a process consisting of a set of strategies to gather information about a target audience to establish how viable a product is or would be among customers. Its importance relies on the fact that it can either make or break a new business or stagnate or leverage one that has been on the market for some time. It helps reduce potential risks by enabling companies to understand their target customer's problems, way of thinking, and desired solutions. It allows businesses to navigate questions such as:
- What are the demographics of my target audience?
- What are their buying habits?
- What are their expectations of the market?
- How do they feel about my brand/industry?
- What problems regarding this group of people can I help solve?
- How to better connect with them?
Understanding a target audience means identifying opportunities, relating to stakeholders, and building a loyal customer base by improving customer retention strategies. All these things contribute to having the best marketing strategy out there.
However, market research is much more than analyzing analytics data and simply tracking numbers. For your business to succeed, you need to go one step further and understand how to connect with your customers. And believe us, all of this can be achieved cost-effectively.
Market Research is changing
Traditional market research consists of several techniques that businesses have used for decades. It includes interviews, surveys, focus groups, and user testing, among other things. It works well for projects where you want to know the answers to particular questions and when you don't need very large samples. In addition, traditional market research is a safe way to test concepts, as focus groups imply a low risk for companies to try their products.
Nevertheless, the traditional approach to Market Research has its limitations. It requires a lot of resources and can be very costly; attracting customers, so they participate in interviews, surveys and focus groups often involves having to offer them incentives, and analyzing the results means having to spend additional time and effort. The process is also very limited, as only a select group participates. While it can result in gathering valuable ideas, the outcome may not reflect the target audience.
It should be noted that market research is constantly changing and evolving along with the market itself. As new trends emerge, market conditions change, and customers' demands evolve, companies are continually looking for new and better strategies.
Given the Traditional Market Research limitations, most brands now see crowdsourcing as an alternative to discover valuable gaps in the market and develop new ideas to stay relevant in the field.
Crowdsourcing levels the playing field
As we have stated, engaging with an audience is important to any business's marketing strategies. Connecting with the public, thus properly communicating your brand's message, generates value for your business.
However, most startups and small businesses don't have a considerable marketing research budget, which can be time-consuming and costly.
One of the advantages of Crowdsourcing, is that it comes with cost savings. Nevertheless, its low cost does not interfere with the quality of the results it generates. Crowdsourcing is a form of open innovation where your business leverages its existing audience to spread brand awareness and improve sales. Whether a small, local company or a large organization with a well-established brand, this tool allows you to raise your marketing strategy.
SmartSpotter validates Market Research through Crowdsourcing, ensuring quality results. Our platform consists of a collaborative model, and through our mobile app data collection, the crowdsourced information is constantly improving the user experience. In addition, the ever-growing network of Spotters helps make the app more accurate each day.
Crowdsourcing enables faster idea generation, helping companies find solutions much faster, making all the difference for time-sensitive projects. It also allows brands to access a wider pool of expertise, finding innovative strategies and problem-solving techniques. Not only that, but Crowdsourcing means less management burden for companies, which generates lower costs.
In addition, conducting market research through Crowdsourcing will ensure your business faster results, gathering real-time data and vital insights on your target audience.
Contact us for more info!
