The benefits of research in marketing

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In marketing, it’s important to communicate the right message, to the right audience, on the right channel at the right time. And to ensure you get it right, you should conduct and use research in your marketing activity.

Research in marketing allows you to leverage reliable information that is readily available in order to build an understanding of your audience and gain their trust, which will ultimately have a positive impact on your bottom line.

It’s been said that “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product or service sells itself” – Peter Drucker.

Today, we live in a digital world, and your customers expect brands to produce personalised and tailored content and marketing that offers value and resonates with them. Doing your research means that you can nurture your audience at each stage of the buyer journey, by producing unique and personalised touchpoints that keeps them engaged until they are ready to purchase.

Learn more about tailoring your content marketing by reading our guide here

Benefits you can gain…

Competitive advantage on opportunities and threats
By conducting regular research into your market you’ll have access to relevant content, be up-to-date with what’s going on in your industry and you’ll be able to spot emerging trends and take advantage of them as soon as they develop. In addition, you can use research to gather information on your competitors, and identify what’s working for them, what you can draw inspiration from, and where the gaps are in their activity – giving you an opportunity to fill the gap.

An in-depth understanding of your audience
By having an in-depth understanding of who you’re targeting you’ll identify your audience’s pains, needs and expectations and you’ll be able to focus your efforts on providing the solution to their problems. And, there are various tools that you can utilise to analyse your target audience’s behaviour. For example, you can integrate add-ons to your website that will allow you to track how your audience is using your site, what pages they’re spending the most time on, and what aspects they’re clicking through to.

Ability to plan ahead
As Benjamin Franklin once said: “by failing to prepare, you’re preparing to fail” so, make sure you have a thorough marketing plan in place to stand the best chance of meeting your business goals and objectives. Researching your activities ahead of time will allow you to plan better, and you’ll be able to schedule activity into your team’s calendars ahead of time to ensure nothing is missed.

Evaluation of your success
Along with external research into your competition, customers and market, it’s good practice to get into the habit of researching into the success of your own marketing activity.

This will allow you to identify what marketing tactics are working, what’s not, and where you can improve. At Origin, we conduct monthly reporting for all our clients so that we can refine our activity moving forward and ensure we’re always doing everything we can to help them reach their goals.