It is one thing to realize that your business needs to embark on marketing research; it is another thing to find yourself a marketing research platform among the numerous marketing research companies in the market that can precisely deliver what your business needs. Marketing research companies basically help your business conduct research in order to answer specific business questions regarding your customer base, products, or services, and how your firm hopes to succeed in a particular business environment.
What Are the Differences Between Market Research Companies?
First off, you need to decide on what kind of marketing research you want to go for. There are basically four common marketing research techniques, namely; Surveys, interviews, observations, and focus groups. Secondly, you will also need to determine the type or method of marketing research that suites your business research needs. Is it going to be a quantitative method or qualitative? These questions will help you determine the ideal market research companies to approach, as different market research companies have various capacities and strength points.
What is an Example of Market Research?
Examples of market researches include:
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Polls (Online)
Online surveys have gradually topped the list because, as we all know, the world is now a digital parlor. Another primary reason this research type is widely popular is that it is incredibly cheap when compared to the traditional methods of market research. Before now, you would be spending much; now, thanks to tech, things have changed for good.
In all of this, the ability to include the right poll questions matters a lot in order to get valid polls that answer the organization’s needs without misinformation.
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SMR-Social media research
This is a very convenient means of information gathering. This is because most marketers simply post content on their page (LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook), as they can easily get responses about specific products to be launched or features to be updated from followers and target customers. Also, because your followers are usually regulars or potential clients of your products, you are getting priceless insights from the right people.
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Focus groups
This, as a marketing research tool, has been in existence for a pretty long time. It involves about 6 to 10 carefully selected people from different demographies who give their answers to a moderator in charge of the session. Questions and answers on new concepts, marketing ideas or product launch, etc. are collated for further analysis.
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One-on-one interview
This is also a prevalent research form. Here, the focus is on one interviewee who is asked specific questions, one at a time. Their responses are documented against their name or identification means. The benefit of this research method is that the business gets to have impartial and in-depth data from each respondent. Information garnered is richer because the interviewer can see beyond interviewees’ responses, watching their body language, self-confidence level, etc. before drawing conclusions.
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Phone surveys
Phone surveys involve conversations with respondents via phone calls, usually to further validate information garnered from the other interview forms such as focus discussion groups. A good example of this is when a school may conduct 300 phone surveys to measure customer satisfaction in terms of service delivery. To do this, marketers will develop a questionnaire from where questions will be asked. These questions would subject around efficiency in service, effectiveness, staff attitude, timeliness, and accuracy, and respondents might be asked to rate these elements on a scale of probably 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Respondents might also be asked to elaborate on their answers where needed; this will help in clearly stating where improvement needs to be made.
Choosing a marketing research company that would satisfy your business needs requires that you take time to make your findings. Hopefully, this article equips you with the information to decide the best marketing research companies or company for you. Check automated product feed.