How to conduct effective market research | 6 top tips to gather customer insights you can use

Are you struggling to match your messaging to your target market? Are you wondering if your product offering is in touch with evolving customer demands? You need to refocus on market research, and we’ve got 7 actionable tips to start levelling up your approach today.

In a nutshell, market research allows you to more effectively identify, appeal to, and connect with your target market segment. In many ways, it’s the most important part of the equation for business success. Afterall, there’s no point building a state of the art product if it doesn’t serve any mass need or aspiration. If nobody wants to buy it, it’s just a sunk cost.

Good market research not only informs product development, but helps your business match its messaging to appeal to ideal customers. It’s the connective tissue that allows all the other elements of your business to do their jobs and facilitate growth.

1. Consult Google Trends

Billions of searches are conducted by users every day on Google, and it’s almost a certainty that significant numbers of your target audience are contributing to those searches.

Google Trends is a powerful feature that gauges the popularity of search terms in real time based on samples from those billions of searches, so you can get a look at what’s popular within your industry’s topics and categories very quickly.

You can use it to identify trending topics and understand evolving customer interests – including the actual search terms people are using to look for your products or services and similar – enabling you to align your content and marketing strategies accordingly.

2. Look through relevant online forums

Dive into online forums and communities where your target market segments express their opinions: think Reddit, think Facebook groups, think Youtube comment sections on reviews and unboxing videos (yes, seriously), and more proprietary online forums that are industry-specific.

These are places where you’ll get unfiltered opinions and essentially crowd-sourced consumer advice. This is where people will say why someone should buy a competitor’s product over your own, or vice-versa This will provide valuable insights into customer needs and preferences, allowing you to inform product or service development, and to tailor your marketing communications to address the right customer challenges.

3. Look through Amazon, Google, and other large online marketplaces for reviews

Customer reviews on large eCommerce platforms like Amazon can offer all sorts of information – because of the scale of the platform, you could literally have thousands of reviews relevant to your industry, and they can be easily sorted into positive and negative.

Analyse both positive and negative feedback to understand what customers love and what they wish could be improved about related products or services. Much like with tip 3, this can inform product improvements as well as addressing key pain points in marketing content.

4. Use gamification throughout your marketing and customer touchpoints to gather data

You can use gamification in your marketing campaigns and customer interactions to generate more usable data than traditional methods, and to make the data collection process more engaging and enjoyable.

It’s a digital tool to enhance user focus in everyday tasks by tapping into the universal human desires to win and for discovery – it’s a more engaging form of content than traditional media because it’s interactive and immersive.

Every element of data collection is ripe to be optimised through gamification. Surveys offering entries into prize draws for completions can be used to obtain high volumes of quantitative and qualitative data, and can be distributed through social media, linked on web pages, on email invoices, and even on physical receipts and in physical locations through QR codes.

Pro tip: You can customise Quizzes to test how much customers know about particular subjects that might be relevant to how you market a new product. For example, if you were releasing a product to the market that uses advanced theory or materials from the aerospace division, you could assess exactly how extensive your content marketing campaign will need to be to help position it. The Quiz could even form part of the release and help inform the direction of the campaign.

5. Conduct competitor research

You can learn a lot from your competitors’ successes and failures to help you fine-tune your content and effectively differentiate your brand and products.

To start with, you should make a list of all your competitors. Think: “If our customers didn’t use us, who would they use?” Think: “Who do we lose business to?” You probably have more competitors than you realise, or possibly, depending on how niche your product or service is, even have been competing with businesses who aren’t actually your rivals.

You should then group this list into 2 categories: direct competitors and indirect competitors. Your direct competitors are exactly that: if you’re Adidas, they’re Nike. If you’re Apple, they’re Microsoft. It’s a real like-for-like. Your indirect competitors sell different products to you, but essentially, it’s to serve the same need: if you sell running shoes, they sell bicycles. If you’re a streaming platform, they’re a TV channel.

Analyse their online presences across websites and social media, their approach to content, and any other marketing efforts they might make to identify gaps and opportunities in the market. Which ones are succeeding? What’s their tone of voice? What do their customer interactions look like? If you were an impartial customer, which brand are you drawn to and why? Reverse engineer the good stuff, take note of any of their missteps.

Pro tip: Conduct competitor analysis regularly. All markets fluctuate, all are disrupted by new trends and advances, and all must cater to evolving customer demands. You must also remember that while you may ape some of your rivals’ better decisions, they will be doing the same to you! Don’t rest on your laurels – keep innovating so when you do get a gap on your competitors, they have to blow their financial doors off just to try and reel you back in.

6. Run A/B testing on Google Ads and social media ads

Conducting A/B testing allows you to trial different ad variants with your target audience and assess which approach performs best.

Experiment with various ad copies, visuals, and CTAs to identify which are most effective with your target market segment on things like Google Ads and social media, where you can easily analyse key performance indicators (KPIs) to quantify a better performer.

Use the insights gained to optimise your approach to content and boost the impact of future campaigns on potential customers.

Pro tip: Don’t set your style guide and media best practices in stone. If your A/ B testing shows you there’s a better way, adopt it!

Key takeaway

Effective market research is a pillar of sustainable business growth. It’s how you learn exactly what to sell, who to sell it to, and how to sell it to them. It really is the connective tissue between all the elements of your business that allow it to operate as one cohesive entity.

For your market research to be effective, you need to take a long-term approach to it, conduct it on a regular basis, and to cover all possible facets. The 7 actionable tips listed above are all good starting points for improving your approach to market research, whatever your sector.