The Importance of Consumer Research in Marketing

To keep your audience interested, pay attention to what they like and give them something smart and related. Consumer research is a secret weapon for marketers. It helps create impressive campaigns that stand out and avoid boring people. Your marketing shows what your brand is like, so it’s important to be unique. Copying others won’t make you memorable.

Consumer research means studying what your audience wants and needs. It’s important because it helps you make better marketing decisions. After creating a great campaign, you must keep researching your audience because their preferences change.

Consumer research has four steps: discovering data, exploring it, taking action, and predicting changes. Many people prefer learning about products through content instead of traditional ads. And most people are more likely to buy from brands with unique marketing.

So, let’s explore how consumer research can help you make better marketing messages.

What is Consumer Research?

Consumer research is about understanding your target audience’s desires, needs, and habits to create a deeper understanding of them. There are different methods to do this, including surveys, interviews, and focus groups, but these traditional approaches can be slow and have small sample sizes. Social listening is a newer, faster way to conduct consumer research using analytics tools with AI technology. Brands are turning to social listening to capture consumer intelligence quickly, creating a multi-dimensional profile of the target consumer.

The end goal of consumer research is to personalize brand experiences and campaigns for the target audience. Social listening helps uncover interests, preferences, trends and attributes influencing consumer behaviour. It also identifies competitors’ customers who are dissatisfied and open to change.

Social listening goes beyond identifying interests and demographics; it also reveals the channels and domains the audience frequents and the authors, KOLs, and influencers that have their attention. This information can help in finding potential influencers to help promote products.

By knowing the interests and preferences of the target audience, brands can avoid using messaging that doesn’t cater to their interests. Social listening also allows brands to keep track of issues and needs that the audience faces as they arise, making it an essential tool for marketers.

This consumer intelligence allows you to customize your marketing message for specific channels and authors based on social insights. It also helps to identify the best time and place to engage with your audience and the type of content that resonates with them. Here are a few more advantages that you can anticipate for your marketing efforts.

Consumer Research Methods

When planning consumer research methods, it’s important to understand the differences between qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative research relies on observations and insights from interviews, focus groups, surveys, and social media content. Quantitative research, on the other hand, involves a more data-driven approach to analyzing these sources. Ideally, combining both approaches is the most effective, and the best solutions offer a hybrid approach that integrates insights from both methods in a user-friendly dashboard accessible to stakeholders and analysts.

How Does Consumer Research Work?

Consumer research involves multiple steps, starting with determining the research objectives and approach. It is important to avoid over-reliance on known issues and gain a deeper understanding of the topic, product, or consumer base. The next step is collecting primary and secondary data, which can be time-consuming if done manually. Uploading data via API can help save time for unstructured data. It is important to quickly upload unstructured and structured insight to accommodate real-time reporting needs. Analyzing the data is a critical task that should include aspect-based sentiment analysis. However, not all sentiment analysis tools are created equally, and accurate sentiment analysis requires understanding the differences. There is an in-depth discussion of this in our two-part sentiment analysis series called “Sentiment Analysis Explained by a Data Scientist”.

The Benefits of Quality Consumer Research

• Marketers often need time constraints; therefore, traditional research methods are unsuitable as the world is moving too quickly. However, there are other options than relying solely on intuition. Social listening can bridge the gap and provides several benefits, the first of which is speed to insight. Although there may be a learning curve to using social listening tools for consumer research, once familiar with the process, marketers can quickly apply their custom audience analysis to any topic. For example, suppose a vegan food producer has developed a new vegan pancake mix and wants to build a campaign around it. In that case, they can use social listening to filter out all conversations about pancakes except those from their target audience expressing their feelings about vegan pancakes.

• More than traditional research methods are required to keep up with the fast-paced advertising world. However, there are other options than abandoning consumer research and relying on intuition. Social listening is a marketer’s best friend and has several benefits. One of the benefits is the speed of insight. Once familiar with social listening tools, you can quickly gather intel on sentiment, impressions, popular posts, and more, allowing you to adjust your messaging accordingly.

• Consumer research also puts you in the consumer’s state of mind, allowing you to see your brand from their perspective. This perspective helps you adjust your messaging to their needs, ensuring you maintain relevancy. By analyzing your audience’s unique properties, you can create messaging that educates and entertains them, building trust and a vibrant consumer base.

• Consumer research also helps minimize tone-deafness by highlighting topics your audience loves and avoiding sensitive areas. This approach ensures your brand remains proactive and avoids messaging around the news cycle without a focus. Additionally, consumer research allows you to maximize your ROI by targeting your audience precisely and adjusting your messaging according to their behavioural shifts over time. This approach ensures you don’t waste your marketing dollars on people uninterested in your product.

Preparing for Consumer Research Success

To achieve success in consumer research, it is important to approach it as a long-term commitment, not just a one-time task. It is necessary to have specific objectives while being open to unexpected findings. More than simply going through the motions of consumer research is required, as it requires expertise and diligence to interpret the results accurately and create an effective marketing strategy to meet your business goals.

A real-life example is a consulting firm that used NetBase Quid to study consumer reviews of Sony OLED televisions on Amazon and Best Buy. They found that the reviews mainly focused on five categories: picture quality, sound, installation, smart TV features, and price. Further analysis revealed that the Smart TV discussion had the most negative comments, while the Installation discussion had the most positive reviews. By filtering the analysis to specific Sony models, the differences in consumer focus could be used to adjust the content marketing strategy accordingly.

Analyzing negative reviews for the A1E and A8F Sony OLED televisions makes it possible to identify specific pain points for each model. The A1E had negative feedback across 16 different issues, while the A8F had only three areas of consumer dissatisfaction. These insights can be used to identify messaging opportunities, such as focusing on high points like picture quality and ease of installation/setup. It also indicates that messaging about price may not be necessary since it had the smallest conversation and high sentiment.

Furthermore, the negative reviews identified issues with the Android TV functionality, which can be addressed in a future software update, presenting an opportunity to address that pain point. Consumer research provides valuable intelligence about your audience and their views on your products, enabling you to focus your messaging on areas that matter to them. Request a demo to access top-notch consumer research tools that can help you create effective marketing strategies every time.

Author Bio: 

Mark Edmonds is an expert in marketing who is employed by Academic Assignments, a company that provides students with MBA assignment help. As someone who is passionate about assisting businesses in creating compelling campaigns that stand out and don’t bore their audience, Mark emphasizes the importance of consumer research. He believes that comprehending the desires, needs, and habits of your target audience is critical to gaining a deeper understanding of them and personalizing brand experiences and campaigns. Mark highlights the use of social listening, a newer, faster way to conduct consumer research using analytics tools with AI technology, especially for those seeking marketing assignment help. Through social listening, brands can quickly obtain consumer intelligence, including interests, preferences, trends, and attributes that impact consumer behaviour. Mark provides insights on consumer research methods and how it works, highlighting the benefits of quality consumer research in maximizing ROI and precisely targeting the audience, particularly for those seeking mba assignment help.