1. Market Research
Gain Revenue Growth With Research Foundation
The global revenue of the market research industry exceeded $47.3 billion in 2018 per Statista.
Uncover Your SaaS Business' Spark
Market research is the systematic collection and evaluation of data regarding customers’ preferences for actual and potential products and services.
The purpose of market research is to aid and direct you to making well-calculated business decisions. Market research assists you in reducing uncertainties, investigating opportunities, and ultimately decreasing the risks of failing or further damaging your business’s potential.
Furthermore, market research is one that guides both short and long-term planning and strategies required to effectively sustain and grow your business. Market research attempts to fill a gap in your knowledge about your business, market, or customers so that you may:
- Build your revenue growth strategy inclusive of marketing positioning, sales how to and more
- Launch a new business.
- Introduce a new product or service and future road map.
- Deciding on a consistent messaging through to digital marketing and marketing channels choices to employ.
- Reinforce the above by finding customers where research answer these questions: demand, market size, economic indicators, location, market saturation and pricing.
- Establish competitive analysis to find a market advantage by identifying competitors by: market share, strengths/weaknesses, window of opportunity to enter the market, importance of target to your competitors, any barriers for entering the market, indirect or secondary competitors.
- Uncover business data and trends with existing sources available with various government offices such as: Statistics, Industry, Consumer, Census, Labor, Employment, Trade and more.
The resulting ROI from market research is fantastic. This is why bEffective recommends that this activity be a crucial activity to your success and to ensure you develop the right revenue growth approach. The following is what you need to know. Meantime check out our newsletter for regular tips as you proceed with suggestions or use our services.
“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” – W. Edwards Deming, Total Quality Management Innovator
Beware of Fools’ Gold
Several common types of problems occur with market research that can make it overly costly and produce results of questionable value for the organization. But if you know about them, you can avoid or minimize these issues. The first step is investigating the ‘how to’:
- Survey Design: It is a direct way of collecting information. However, if it is design to be random in doing so and it is not. Then the results are unusable. Similarly, if the survey questions are poorly worded. The results will likely be ambiguous since respondents didn’t grasp the intent of the of the question.
- Survey Non-response: It is usually due taking too much time to answer or not appealing to respondents to act.
- Survey Bias: The survey could be perceived by one or more respondents demographics as unfavorable or even offensive.
- Observation Research: when observing consumers, the researcher may become intrusive or interfering with the customer experience which may lead to inaccurate observations.
The second type of problem is mistaking correlation for causation when analyzing the results of your market research. For example, the use of windshield wipers in cars is likely to have a strong correlation with rainy weather. This should not imply that use of windshield wipers causes rain.
Overall one needs to be conscious of the limitation of marketing research beginning with the fact that human behavior is unpredictable, so results may not be replicated or interpreted differently. And as mentioned the research must guard against bias. What follows is the steps needed to establish or purchase market research services. We also provide tips through our newsletter should you be interested.
“Marketing Research Can Produce a Return Only If Someone Acts On It”
Best Practices In a Nutshell
Simply put the following are the main steps to follow for establishing your market research:
- Define the opportunity or problem at hand and set goals and objectives. The reasons are to ascertain viability of your offer, or marketing effectiveness, and more which also help focus the research.
- Develop the research design. Some of the methods to consider include surveys, field trials, interviews, and so on which can be qualitative or quantitative. Open research is qualitative and helps understand a situation. Closed research is quantitative for establishing relationships between variables.
- Gather data and information collected (Present in the right format from report to visuals)
- Analyze and interpret data and information collected (the ROI is made here)
Make a decision (aligned to initial objectives). Here are examples of objectives:
- Find customers with surveys, questionnaires, focus groups and in-depth interviews.
- One of the better ways to establish competitive analysis is with Porter’s Five Forces Analysis.
- Your government keeps tracks of business data trends
bEffective can help you establish the details of each of these steps beginning with the objectives through to the science of decision making on the research. We can also if required with the technology solutions available to deliver your surveys, polls, and so on. And beyond decision, we can help with you preparing, for instance your marketing message based on the market research.
“The goal is to transform data into information, and information into insight.” – Carly Fiorina, former HP CEO (
first woman to lead a Top-20 Fortune 500 company)
Action Step
You’ve read our promise, for the challenge you may be facing along with the ‘how to’ solve it.
bEffective offers services to help your SaaS business establish its revenue growth methodology in whole or for the module you need help to improve upon.
Should you wish to do it for yourself, then check out our resources menu for ‘how-to’ solve the challenge mentioned above as well as others in this area of our website. Keep in mind the research and science dictates the ‘right’ revenue growth approach needs to be built in sequence, integrated and more for achieving the promise percentage, dollars through to consistent cash flow.
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