Marketing Research Series: Why?

Now that you’ve narrowed your target audience down for conducting your research, with the Who article in this series, you’ll need to make sure you have a firm grasp on exactly what you’re looking to learn from this research. 

What is the decision you are trying to make? What information do you wish that you had. You may be looking to do some market research to decide which campaign to run next year. But having such a general “why” may not get you the data that you need to make an informed decision. An article by Forbes titled Spending on Marketing Knowledge shows how much the current landscape of spend is growing for marketing research. Knowledge is critical and immeasurably worth it in the long run.

Which campaign should I run? Isn’t the “why”. Instead, your “why” should be ‘Is there a need for this product in the market, right now?’ or ‘What problems can my product help solve?’

Take your broad ask and find the avenue that will get you exactly the data you need to make smart decisions. Finding the right time to run your campaign might lead you to research:

• Spending trends by month over the past few years

• Economic factors during the time you want to run the campaign

• Seasonal changes that may affect when your audience would need your product or solution

• User pain-points and needs in the market

While deciding which product you should run a campaign on might lead you to research:

• Competitor products or services

• Market share for this product

• Would your audience spend money on this, if so why? And why MY product over others?

Once you’ve narrowed down your “Why” questions so that you can focus your research on the questions and methods needed to acquire the data, you’ll be on the right path to making the most informed decision possible. Next week we’ll look at the “How”. How do I even begin the research? And which tools do I use? There are so many it seems overwhelming. We’ll narrow them down, together.