Check out marketing research ideas to discover how some leading companies are using marketing research. Learn about why market research is important and how it can help you improve your own business. Find out more about market research ideas.
Narrow your scope with these research ideas. Ideas range from conventional types to more unique methods including the psychology of color influencing the way we feel or how to improve balance in your art pieces. We know finding the perfect idea for your projects is hard, so we’ve made it simple with marketing research ideas at your fingertips.
Turn industry events into a research venue.
The trade shows and conferences your company attends every year are an opportunity to talk with your target audience. Find out who will be attending and schedule times to get face-to-face with these people, if even for a few minutes.
Use a text analytics tool to study the wealth of information you’re already getting from customers.
This software can be rudimentary or complex–anything from a word cloud generator to an enterprise solution. It works by uploading customer feedback from various sources–social media mentions, call center feedback or survey data, for example–and looking for themes. “A lot of companies are drowning in consumer commentary, but are not taking advantage of it,” he says. “So if you don’t have anyone looking at all the commentary already in your feeds, put someone on it and give them a text analytics tool.”
Collaborate with other companies to glean insights about consumer sentiment.
It can even be competitors, as long as you’re comfortable with the fact that everyone involved will be getting the same insights. For example, a company in the media entertainment industry that wants to know how audiences are consuming TV could team with one or more of the television networks. “If you really need that research and can’t afford it you can team up with other like-minded companies in the field to try and get at it,” he says.
Use social media to crowdsource your research.
Use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn to ask simple questions of your fan base. “NPR puts questions on its Facebook page or tweets them out and gets answers that way,” he says. “It’s not going to be the most robust research, but depending on your objectives, the level of bias that you’re OK with, and if it’s the right audience, it’s a good way to get simple questions answered.”
A/B test your messages.
Whether it’s an email, digital ad or tagline, test the waters with a couple of versions to see which ones are getting the most engagement and click-throughs. “The downside is you might not really know the motivations and the reasoning behind why one message is doing better than the others, but at least you can [understand] which is the best performing,” he says.
Become involved in an industry association.
These kinds of memberships often offer access to copious amounts of research. “There is often a ton of stuff there you can get your hands on that can answer some pretty general questions about the marketplace and where the industry is going,” he says.
Use DIY tools.
For a long time, research has been considered a complex and labor-intensive process requiring extreme special qualifications to get right. In 2021, there will be a marked shift towards DIY in-house research with smarter research tools. Simple to understand and deploy platforms without the need for complex scripting and powerful research questions is the way forward.
The ability to collect quantitative data and qualitative data with the bonus of having a good respondent base in one location is the way forward for market research. Gone are the days where each component required going to different platforms. This will make the management of market research easier for all the stakeholders. DIY research, along with do-it-together (DIT) research where the research tool provider chips with specialized research services to let you focus on insights collection, is the way forward.
Log all your customer input.
Any kind of feedback you’re getting from customers–whether in person, through your call center or via social networks–should be captured. You can’t study customer problems, habits and lifestyles if you don’t harvest and store that information.
Start small.
You don’t need to talk to thousands of people if 20 or 30 will give you a good idea what direction to head.
Find what’s already out there.
You may be surprised what you can learn by searching the internet for studies that have already been conducted. For example, a wealth of data exists on Millennials regarding how they like to be engaged, what social networks they use and more. While the research you find may not be specific to your industry, you’re wasting money if you’re asking questions that have already been answered.
Social listening
Due to a large social media footprint, it is becoming increasingly important to listen to social media’s happening and derive sentiments from conversations. Since social media is highly emotive, there is a broader scope to get to the root of ideas, complaints, purchase behavior, macro and micro trends, etc. Using social listening, you can isolate the data you care about and keep an eye out for short-term indicators around consumer research. This is the future of ethnographic research. While social listening doesn’t make sense for all researchers and brands, if done well, it can help to identify actionable vectors at a very early stage.
AI-assisted data collection
Two common themes arose from market research in 2020 – personalization and convenience. Using AI-assisted data collection helps in advancing research for brands and researchers. The right data going to the right stakeholders in real-time define the success metrics of market research. By limiting human interactions but increasing on milestones and point of experience-based smart research, there is a greater success of collecting the right data. This helps in focusing on deriving insights from the data and not on the data collection itself.
For long-form data and open-ended data, AI-based research and sentiment analysis help derive insights from text-based data without intervening and manually interpreting it.
2021 will be a huge year for market research, and we are excited to play a pivotal role in making research easy and accessible to everyone. What are the market research trends you are looking forward to and are keeping an eye out to go into 2021 and beyond?
Emotive surveys
One of the biggest trends in market research that I am most excited about is the added use of technology to capture respondent behavior and data with various factors like facial recognition and contactless surveys. Surveys that help you capture insights where respondents do not have to interact with an external device and sentiments directly are captured just by facial and visual cues will be extremely important, going into 2021 and beyond. A simple question, for example, at point of experience where facial recognition captures respondent sentiments will go a long way in offering mature insights for brands.
Crowdsourced research
Crowdsourcing in market research helps solve problems at scale with lower costs and makes it to our top 11 market research trends to keep an eye out for 2021. Since crowdsourcing uses the quali-quant method, the insights you can get from a diverse audience base are tremendous. Not only can it help solve problems, but it also helps to get an idea of a more extensive and more varied population. The only drawback of this method is that for a brand to effectively leverage this model, there has to be an advantage of scale, which increases crowdsourcing’s success and feasibility.
Conclusion
This information will enable you to determine what you should be spending in terms of your marketing efforts, and will help you plan and execute the best and most effective research and market research ideas for your business. This can also help you develop an effective strategy to design and manage your company’s processes and goals.