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What is the Marketing Research Process?
Every business collects data from their target markets to be able to create strategies and business plans that will succeed. This process is collectively known as marketing research. It involves the planning, collection, and analysis of market data based on certain goals that the company wants to achieve. It is the basic plan a brand creates before diving into the market and without it no brand can succeed.
Marketing research is a dynamic process. Since the market is highly competitive and volatile, businesses are expected to constantly update their marketing research and come up with suitable strategies. There are multiple aspects to cover while planning your marketing research process.
In this article we break down the most important steps towards conducing a successful marketing research. Read through them carefully to learn acute nuances that should guide a marketing research process.
Step 1: Define the Questions you Need to Solve
If your marketing research process is not goal oriented it is the least likely to be successful. It can be a singular long term goal that your process tries to achieve or multiple short term goals, or a mix of both. What you need to do is identify the key issues within your business and analyze how marketing can be a solution to these issues. This will serve as the roadmap to creating your marketing research plan as you will now know the particular aspects to look for.
An effective market research is meant to deliver data that will be analyzed to create solutions. And thus, the primary step towards creating the research plan is to know the problems that will need to be solved.
Step 2: Give Structure to Your Plan
There are multiple ways a research can be conducted; through interviews, surveys, tests, etc. If you know what your research is trying to achieve, it is now time to pick out the right tools that will help you succeed in your research. Since any professional market is huge in size this task may seem like an impossible one, however once the structure is in place the process will be much simpler. A step by step marketing research plan should be able to cover all aspects of your company.
Make sure that you are also checking for data that already exists within the system. This can help you save a lot of time by ensuring that you don’t run similar tests all over again.
Step 3: Data Collection
There are two major types of data, qualitative and quantitative. Both these types of data are important relating to what problems you are trying to solve through your market research. It is safer to collect both types of data in equal proportions to ensure that your research does not lack any of its important aspects. The data also needs to be updated, unbiased, and valid. A data centric marketing research process is bound to be successful.
Also make sure that the type of data you collect is feasible for the instruments you have chosen in step 2. Ensuring that each step is related to the others is a key to successfully creating a marketing research plan.
Step 4: Analysis Process
Now that you have collected the data the next big question is how the solutions will be devised from it. The first step is to digitalize the data so that the analysis tools can be used on them easily. Create different tables, charts, and graphs to understand the acute functionalities of your business and how the market aspect ties into them. This will reveal to you the major data trends that exist in your business process and how marketing can help enrich them.
Summaries are highly helpful while dealing with multiple reports and charts. Another aspect that one should look into is usage of Big Data and AI based tools in the analysis process. This provides better and more accurate results.
Step 5: Presenting the Results
At the end of the data collection and analysis process a thorough report needs to be created. This will help you easily communicate your findings to teams and managers who will be part of the marketing research process. If the research team and the marketing team are separate, the result presentation stage becomes crucially important in communicating the ideas and solutions devised from the data. There are industry specific methods that you can cater to or you can create your own method that will suit your team’s understanding.
Critical thinking is an important part of deciding the steps that will be taken in your marketing campaign. It is the results of the data analysis that will guide the marketing process; however experts will be able to pick the right marketing tools necessary for achieving the goals.
Step 6: The Marketing Process
As stated before, the marketing process is highly volatile and can only be created keeping in mind the needs of the current market and its trends. So, the actions taken in this step will ensure that the data centric structure incorporates the market persona. The type of market you are dealing in and your business goals will both be taken into consideration before the marketing process actually begins.
A holistic marketing strategy is as much based on data as it is on real life experiences. So make sure that you have plenty of both before running a marketing campaign. A successful marketing campaign should be able to boost brand awareness as well as achieve particular goals.
Wrap Up Marketing Research Process
These are the 6 primary steps that one needs to incorporate within their marketing research process. There are of course plenty of nuances to cover for a process this massive and important, but if you are unsure of where to start, these 6 steps will provide you the perfect strategy required to run a successful marketing research campaign. Make sure to use the latest technology available to aid your process and the results are bound to be accurate.
