Regardless of the product or service you have, you’ll want to be sure the market has an appetite for it. No matter how sure you might be about the strength of what you have to offer, market research is an essential step in the process.
Those who have done their training in digital marketing understand the importance of market research, and how it can help them better tailor their ideas and marketing strategies to the needs and desires of the public.
Here’s an examination of how market research is done by those with digital marketing training.
Why Primary and Secondary Research Are Important
There are two types of data involved in market research: primary and secondary. With primary research, your aim is to get first-hand information from prospective clients. Secondary research, on the other hand, utilizes outside data such as studies, reports, sales figures, and statistics to improve your findings. The latter typically makes up most of your research. Using internal data that already exists – such as your business’s client retention and sales figures – should also play an important role in your secondary research.
Those in digital marketing training should understand that both types of research are important to collect, since a combination of direct feedback from potential clients and pre-existing relevant data can help give you a clear picture of who your target audience is and what messages will best resonate with them.
Doing research on your competition can also help enhance this. Your competitors will be targeting their services to a similar demographic, so it’s worth understanding their approaches.
Conducting Market Research During Your Digital Marketing Career
During your digital marketing career, there are many different means through which you can conduct market research. For example, you can utilize surveys, polls, focus groups, or directly contact clients via text message. You can also conduct research based on competitive analysis, where you research your competition and compare your approaches to see which ones you can incorporate into your own efforts. This includes observing how your competition creates content, uses social media, and how well they use SEO to their advantage.
There are more personal ways you can do this research, too, such as through watching someone from your target demographic using your product and taking notes based on your observations. You can also schedule one-on-one interviews in-person or through video chat, as this can be a more insightful and detailed way to better understand your market.
Why Is Market Research Important? And How Can it Help Digital Marketers?
To perform market research is to better understand your target audience, what they buy, why they buy it, and what trends typically affect your market. With this information, there is a lot that digital marketers can do.
For example, by understanding who your target audience is, you can better focus your resources, only targeting those who are most likely to convert into leads. Targeted ads can reach highly relevant audiences based on age, gender, interests, and other factors.
In addition, understanding your target audience can also help you determine which social media platforms to prioritize. Those aged 30 and up, for example, are more likely to use Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube as opposed to platforms such as Instagram or Snapchat, which tend to be much more popular among teenagers and those in their 20s. 79% of those who use Facebook are 30-49, while only 47% use Instagram. By comparison, 72% of those aged 13-17 and 67% of 18 to 29-year-olds use Instagram.
Knowing this, digital marketers with limited resources might benefit from concentrating their efforts on one or two social media platforms, rather than stretching their resources across several.
Understanding your audience through market research can also help you develop more relevant and engaging content. You can consolidate your research findings into a document that outlines who your target personas are, as well as their motivations and concerns, and use this as a guideline for the digital marketing content you produce. Doing it this way allows you to tailor your messaging and content to your audience, and keep your messaging consistent across platforms.
Do you want to get your digital marketing diploma?
Contact Cumberland College to find out how!
