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On any given day, marketers do a bit of everything, from carefully crafting website messaging and writing press releases to analyzing site traffic and coordinating with sales to gather the latest insights. Getting a decent marketing return on investment (ROI) takes considerable effort.
But at its core, marketing thrives on listening to and understanding audiences. In fact, marketers who use customer insights and data-driven strategies drive five to eight times the ROI of those who don’t. Keeping up with an ever-changing consumer base requires digging deep into your target audience’s behaviors until your marketing materials deeply resonate with them. Otherwise, you’re flying blind, undermining your business’s efforts to thrive amid economic uncertainty.
So, how can different types of consumer research help you understand your customers better and improve your marketing ROI?
The Big Picture: Types of Consumer Research
Traditionally, consumer research encompasses four major disciplines, each promising unique customer insights to help you make intelligent, data-driven decisions.
Primary Research
In essence, primary research involves gathering firsthand information about factors directly related to your business to help you make more informed decisions. If a software company wanted to refine its product features, for example, it could directly engage its users to benchmark key behaviors and generate product improvement ideas instead of relying on third-party data.
A 2022 CMO study revealed that 75% of marketers expected primary data usage to outpace secondary and third-party data. This underscores the integral role first-party insights play in addressing organization-specific challenges and opportunities.
Secondary Research
Unlike primary research, secondary research relies on pre-existing data rather than new information from respondents. It sources insights from public records, industry reports, government publications, online articles, and more from reputable, authoritative sources. Secondary research is often more affordable and provides a valuable starting point for understanding market trends and consumer behavior.
Quantitative Research
Quantitative research is the process of collecting and analyzing numerical data. The results of this research are typically represented in charts, graphs, numbers, or statistics to enable objective, scalable analysis.
Analyzing quantitative research is straightforward and based on numerical data and facts, not opinions. As such, quantitative research plays a huge role in:
- Performance and ROI measurement
- Scalability and generalization
- Risk mitigation
Qualitative Research
Qualitative research is one of the consumer research examples that reveals the “why” behind people’s perceptions, fears, emotions, dreams, and motivations.
Let’s say you’re a fashion retailer trying to understand why a particular line of products isn’t selling as expected. Instead of relying on numbers alone, you can conduct qualitative research to understand what’s keeping customers from buying. You can then use these informed insights to adjust the product or marketing approach to improve sales.
Breaking It Down: Methods Within Each Research Type
Each of the four types of consumer research is associated with different customer research methods.
Primary Research Methods
There are many methods you can use to conduct primary research. However, the most suitable one depends on the specific information you want to obtain and the problem you’re trying to solve. The table below summarizes key primary research methods and the insights each can yield.
Secondary Research Methods
Not every organization can afford primary research. In such circumstances, you can use existing research to inform your marketing decisions. The table below highlights the most popular secondary research methods and the insights you can gather.
Quantitative Research Methods
To collect quantitative data, you need dedicated data-collection technology that translates abstract concepts and raw data into quantifiable measures.
Analytic Platforms and Customer Data
Analytics platforms, such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems and Google Analytics, collect and quantify customer data to provide actionable insights. This data is often critical for customer segmentation, behavioral predictions, retention, and campaign evaluation.
A/B Testing
Also called split testing, A/B testing compares two variants of your marketing materials to reveal which performs better in achieving your goal. This method can help you identify content that resonates most with your audience and uncover the elements that drive conversions.
Market Segmentation Analysis
Market segmentation analysis divides markets into distinct groups based on:
- Behaviors
- Demographics
- Location
- Psychographics
- Preferences
Analyzing each segment offers insights on how to tailor your strategies to better serve each customer category.
Qualitative Research Methods
You can run qualitative research using several techniques.
Sentiment Analysis
Sometimes called opinion mining, sentiment analysis involves analyzing digital text, such as online reviews or social media comments, and interpreting it to understand customer emotions and attitudes. It uncovers consumer feelings about your brand and products to help identify areas for improvement.
Ethnographic Studies
Ethnographic studies entail observing and immersing yourself in a target audience’s environment or culture to examine how they interact with your products in a natural context. This method reveals deep, qualitative insights into your target market’s decision-making processes and customer experiences.
User Experience (UX) Testing
UX testing evaluates user interactions with your website, app, or product to identify pain points and usability issues. It can help you:
- Discover user journeys
- Inform design choices
- Optimize user flows
- Address accessibility issues
Fundamentally, UX testing generates invaluable insights for crafting intuitive and efficient designs that align with user needs.
The Value of Each Method: Turning Insights Into ROI
Each research method offers unique insights you can use to improve ROI. The method you choose should depend on your marketing goal. For example, if you’re trying to determine how customers might use a product, focus groups can be ideal.
When you have a new product idea, you want to gauge its viability and appeal before investing in it. Focus groups allow you to present the product idea or prototype to a group representing your target market to get immediate, candid feedback about its relevance and perceived value. You can then refine your product and lower the risks of launching products that fail to meet market needs.
On the other hand, you can use A/B testing to make data-driven decisions about ad campaign optimizations to improve marketing ROI. You can test different headlines, taglines, formats, or images to establish what resonates best with your audience.
The Challenge of Conducting Effective Consumer Research
While customer insights can have a considerable impact on marketing ROI, marketers often struggle with how to do consumer research in a way that generates reliable insights. They often face barriers, like:
- Lack of resources or expertise in research methodologies
- Difficulty interpreting data and deriving actionable insights
- High cost of specialized tools to gather and analyze information
- Groupthink in focus groups, where participants conform to dominant opinions and diminish feedback authenticity and diversity
- Logistical difficulties with bringing everyone in the focus group into the same room
These challenges can result in incomplete or misaligned research efforts, which can pose significant risks to decision-making and overall business strategy.
Flawed Decision-Making
Marketers who rely on incomplete, biased, or otherwise skewed insights risk executing strategies that don’t address their business challenges. Faulty decisions can result in strategic errors, such as entering unsuitable markets or ignoring customer pain points, which can harm a business’s long-term growth.
Ineffective Targeting
Without comprehensive research, marketers lack the direction to focus their resources on high-potential targets. As a result, businesses chase customers who are uninterested in their services or products, which translates to low ROI.
Poor Product-Market Fit
Misaligned research can overlook customer needs or preferences. As a result, launched products or services may fail to resonate with the intended market, leading to low adoption rates, sales, and engagement.
Making It Work: Avalaunch Summit and Expert Guidance
Your business needs to tap into the power of consumer data to shape winning strategies and outpace competitors. If you’re struggling to gather the right insights, Avalauch Summit can do the heavy lifting for you.
Our team of fractional CMOs and agency experts blend high-level strategies and cutting-edge tools to help you define your target audience, conduct deep-dive analysis, and deliver insights directly tied to ROI improvement. Together, we’ll simplify the process of revealing where your business does particularly well and where you underperform.
Elevate Your Marketing With Research-Driven Insights
Consumer research provides insights that can help you devise data-driven strategies, improve marketing outcomes, and drive sustainable growth. If you’re looking for expert guidance and support in conducting successful consumer research, Avalaunch Media can help.
We have the experience and resources to help businesses across industries gather customer insights to improve their marketing ROI. Contact us today to learn how we can partner with you to unlock the full potential of your marketing strategy through expert-led consumer research.
