Today every business is going digital – from health and hospitality to real-estate and retail and anyone who underestimates the power of market research is missing out on massive growth potential. In the B2B world, where customer relationships have a considerable impact on business revenue, having direct feedback in real-time can tremendously improve your market strategy and boost your sales.
When B2B sales take a blow, the only way to boost them is by better understanding the needs of the target audience and analyzing the competition. Sales cannot be increased based on guesswork or gut feeling; businesses needconcrete, actionable data to boost their bottom line.
So, here are 5 effective ways that B2B businesses can leverage forconducting market research:
- Collect Consumer Feedback
Market research survey software enables businesses to capture valuable feedback in real-time with unique links that can be shared across multiple channels. It is easy to use and features a slick UI that is perfect for every use case. Businesses can customize their surveys and set automated reminder emails to engage the non-responders. Market research software generates accurate insights that can be used to make profitable changes in marketing campaigns.
Once the industry-specific questions are ready, the market research software can be integrated with different social media platforms and advertised publicly or to a selected target market. The market research software also tracks the data, the source that is generating maximum respondents and the completion rate. So, businesses must consider using survey tools as most of them are customizable and cost-effective for conducting digital marketing research.
- Know the Needs of Your Audience
The first and the most important step of market research is identifying your audience and creating your consumer profiles. Start by segmenting your audience on the basis of demographics, location, buying patterns, purchase preferences and personality traits. Once you have done that, create your customer profile.
There are plenty of platforms to gain insights from – Google Analytics, online survey making tools, Facebook Insights, Hubspot, and Hootsuite. Digital marketers can leverage these platforms for useful data on customers and their shopping preferences.
Doing this will allow you to adjust your offering, improve your marketing messages, and fine-tune your pricing to fit their needs and suit their preferences.When your audience is segmented, it becomes easier to tailor the marketing messages in manner that connects and converts.
- Conduct Competitor Analysis
Any B2B business is competing against thousands of businesses across the globe, so it is absolutely important to perform a detailed analysis of your market and your competitors. And in a digital era, simply being louder than your competitors will not help you clear the clutter. You need to stand out and say what your consumers want to hear, when they want to hear it and in the manner in which they want to hear it.
Market research will help you identify:
- Opportunities that can be leveraged to create a competitive advantage
- Key areas where business competitors have already created an edge
- What your successful competitors are doing differently
- Business risks that are unknown to your competitors
- Advertise on Social Channels
Social media platforms make for excellent market research channels where you can observe your target audience, track their behaviors, uncover their likes and dislikes, and accordingly align your promotional ads to boost the click through rates and make conversions possible. Integrating consumer tastes and preferences in promotional campaigns can help businesses drive more traffic,land more leads, and close more deals.
- Remarket to the Right Audience
When doing digital marketing research, it is very important to set up a conversion tracker to gain a better understanding of what is driving your consumers to sign-up, buy, submit their email or fill a form. These insights will allow you to optimize your remarketing campaigns and boost your conversions.
For this you need to segment your target audience based on their behavior and exclude those who have already converted into customers. Then you need to focus all your efforts and resources on converting qualified leads. This is where you need to leverage the right keywords that match your buyer’s intent and get very specific with your messaging. You can also use cost-per-click model for A/B testing different ads on the same audience.
When businesses leverage the combined power of market research and digital marketing, it becomes much easier to monitor, manage, and optimize marketing efforts for maximum reach and increased conversions. With market research, all the digital marketing strategies can be tweaked in real-time and made more effective for better business outcomes!
Bhavika Sharma is a survey designer at SurveySparrow, where she designs surveys that work by making them more conversational and engaging, fetching 40% more responses. When she isn’t designing killer surveys, she loves to travel in search of adventure and to meet new people. Her travel experiences have taught her the importance of conversation and that is what she brings to the table while creating surveys or content for her readers.