Marketing Research: What You Do Starts With What You Know

What if you could get inside your target audience’s mind? How much more effective would your communication efforts be with a deeper understanding of your customer’s feelings and perceptions about you? That might sound like wishful thinking, but there’s an answer to this question – and it’s called marketing research. 

What is marketing research?

Marketing research is the process of gathering critical insights on a brand, service, or product by interviewing key stakeholders and target audiences. These insights can help you gauge the success of a new service or product, provide an understanding of how your brand is perceived, and ensure your organization is communicating as effectively as possible. 

Many organizations start backward – they want creative assets like ads, eblasts, or social media strategies, but they don’t know the minds of their target audience beforehand. As a result, their marketing efforts can fall flat. 

That’s why Origo recommends research as the first step for many of our partners. It provides a deeper understanding of your audiences’ needs, helps you remain competitive, and produces a more targeted creative strategy. As a result, every word, graphic, and video our team develops has a better chance of resonating with your target market and can help you achieve results. 

Different types of marketing research

Conducting marketing research might sound simple enough, but the methodology isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s a complex undertaking that requires thoughtful strategy and implementation. 

Depending on the source, there are endless marketing research methods. At Origo, we approach marketing research in many ways, but three methodologies come to the forefront when beginning to understand your brand and marketing challenges. This includes external research, internal analysis, and competitor audits. We believe these methods provide the most robust information that helps guide our strategic and creative development.

External research. This includes gathering information from individuals outside the organization, whether that be customers or community partners. Through qualitative research, online surveys, and phone interviews, we ask questions that get to the core: consumer behavior, what they like, what could be improved, and more. By doing so, we get detailed insights on how we can best serve them and their needs. A bonus of external research is that it is often less biased.

Internal analysis. Once we better understand the target audience’s experience, we then turn our research inward by surveying staff and leadership. There are plenty of advantages of internal data in marketing research. A key benefit is that internal research provides information, statistics, and trends that could only come from someone familiar with the day-to-day operations of an organization, its products, and its services.

Competitor audits. Unless you’re an entrepreneur who has created a first-of-its-kind solution, chances are, there’s someone else out there doing what you do. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s an immense benefit that comes from looking at these organizations’ strengths and pain points. When conducting a competitive analysis, we research to see what is currently being done and strategize how our client can get an edge up.

Is marketing research right for you?

Marketing research is essential to a successful business strategy, whether it be a B2B or B2C company, nonprofit, or government agency. It can provide useful information that helps connect with target audiences and create positive results. If you’re looking to understand your target audience better and meet their needs, marketing research could prove to be very beneficial for you.