Market research can provide important data to help a business grow its influence in the market. With such data, solving marketing issues that arise from competition and uncertainties brought by consumer behavior becomes an easier task. Now, with the help of market research software tools, accomplishing marketing objectives is even more straightforward.
Market research tools are key in allowing organizations to dig deeper into information that relates to their impact on the entire business ecosystem. Through tools such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and social networks and blogs, businesses are able to monitor how their products, services, and brand are faring in the market. Especially with online data, the prospects of gaining insights from customer behavior are endless. With so much data available, analyzing them using traditional methods can become a sheer challenge.
The Role of Analytics
Through data analytics, a business will have the capacity to make use of every data gathered without sacrificing any potential value. Analytics caters to the more scientific treatment of data and information. It is capable of:
- Uncovering data that can impact the metrics and objectives of a business through the collection of hard data from online sources;
- Identifying repeated correlations among pairs of metrics and observed factors that can explain changes in a given metric; and 3. Determining what these correlated factors and metrics are trying to imply through experimental approaches.
Using Analytics for Market Research
Analytics in business has been seen as a separate activity from market research. Market research is focused on the brand and product issues, gathering data directly from customers. A majority of its analytical approaches are qualitative. Data filtering and calculation with the use of demographics, geographic factors, or spending behavior, to name some, are enough to produce insights that matter.
Analytics, on the other hand, when applied to business settings, employ more quantitative approaches, looking at sales data to come up with strategies that will improve profitability. These data are obtained largely from databases or secondary sources, unlike market research.
Today, there is growing great interest in integrating both techniques to understand the organization and its relationship to its market better. By converging both, businesses are finding:
- Improvements in the structures of their databases, which is providing them with more practical solutions to using data for easier access for market research teams and developing analysis, from merely social engineering to business intelligence;
- Better internet solutions that offer market research teams a cheaper alternative to collecting and analyzing their data;
- More advanced tools like APIs to communicate with each other, enabling automation to take center stage in solving very complex and resource-consuming market research processes;
- Advantages within e-commerce like linking purchase data with customer’s online behavior so as to generate more meaningful insights; and
- Increased convenience in the use of mobile platform technologies that make market research teams’ jobs more efficient in gathering data.
Analytics can definitely reengineer the data collection and analytical approaches to market research. This is not to replace them but to serve as a supplement to prevailing research methods. The synergy of these approaches will surely pay dividends.
