Do you know what your target audience is really looking for in a product or service? Does your marketing truly resonate with your ideal customer? Is your sales process and customer journey impactful? Take a moment to consider how well aligned your business is to meet these needs and expectations.
While it’s certainly possible to make informed hypotheses to answer these questions, market research superpowers organizations to fully understand their customers and their target market. Not only that, but insights gleaned from market research analysis enables businesses to take actionable steps to better keep up with the constantly-evolving market. While this may sound like a lot of time-consuming work, a market research insights platform like PureSpectrum provides end-to-end functionality so researchers can gather data and glean insights quicker and easier than ever.
This article will explore more about how the process works as well as how market research and analysis tools can help.
What Is Market Research?
The term market research, sometimes called marketing research, refers to the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data about an organization’s customers and target market. This data is gathered through a variety of market research methods, including surveys, focus groups, interviews, cold calls, social media listening, and more. Additionally, market research data can come from a variety of sources, including primary, secondary, commercial, internal, and public.
Once they gather the appropriate data, companies can analyze and interpret this information to gain a more data-driven perspective to aid in decision-making. In other words, market research helps companies connect with their audience and the industry at large to keep a better pulse on their interests, concerns, pain points, habits, and more.
What Is Market Research Analysis?
While the term market research certainly encompasses analysis and interpretation, the concept is so critical that it’s worth calling out on its own. Market research analysis refers to the part of market research that is involved with digesting and interpreting data to obtain actionable insights to power decision making.
At the end of the day, data means little to nothing without analysis. It allows us to:
- Glean wider meanings, patterns, and outliers in data
- Better understand what the numbers actually mean
- Know whether or not our hypotheses are correct or incorrect
In short, businesses can only make data-driven decisions with thorough, detailed analysis and reporting.
What Are the Main Purposes of Market Research and Analysis?
The main purpose of market research and analysis is to empower businesses of all sizes and in all industries to make better, more informed decisions about product development, marketing, sales strategies, and more.
Of course, the reasons to perform market research—and the benefits that can be gained through this process—are much more varied than this. Other advantages include:
- Identifying and Understanding Your Target Market: Market research can help businesses uncover a wealth of information about their customers and target audience. What demographic and behavioral insights can you glean? Where does your audience conduct research when shopping for new products or services? What value propositions resonate with them? All of this can help develop offerings and marketing campaigns that are truly effective.
- Staying Updated on Industry Trends: In business, there’s little room to fall behind. Market research can help companies understand who their competitors are and how they’re performing. On a wider level, it can also provide insight into overall industry trends or innovations. For example, Gartner recently reported that B2B SaaS leaders are planning to up their customer experience game in 2023. This type of knowledge can help companies stay ahead of the curve.
- Improving and Iterating Offerings: Market research can help companies understand how well their products or services are functioning and how well they’re received in the marketplace. All of this information can help product teams add features, functionality, or even an entire new product or service to truly differentiate from the competition as well as deepen brand loyalty.
- Uncovering New Markets: For most organizations, customer growth is a critical key performance indicator (KPI). With the right market research, it’s possible to uncover underserved markets within a particular industry that are ripe for development as well as increase brand awareness / new client bases as well as growing existing.
How Do You Do Market Research Analysis?
Market research analysis cannot be completed in a vacuum; instead, it’s a part of the larger market research process, which consists of six steps:
- Define your question(s)
- Create a plan to answer your question(s)
- Collect data
- Analyze the data
- Present your findings
- Decide on next steps
For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on steps 4 through 6. This is where the real magic of analysis—and actionable next steps based on that analysis—occurs.
Analyze the Data
There are a variety of ways to analyze market research. The following diagrams and models may be useful:
- Affinity Diagram: Affinity diagrams empower organizations to sort through large amounts of data by categorizing them into user-defined categories. This can help identify potential trends.
- Conjoint Analysis: Conjoint analysis helps organizations identify what specific attributes trigger specific responses. For example, when launching a new product, an organization could run this kind of analysis to determine which features are most impactful when it comes to conversions.
- Cluster Analysis: Cluster analysis is a powerful market segmentation tool. By establishing groups, or clusters, that have similar characteristics, organizations can identify patterns and overlapping trends across various groups.
- Customer Journey Maps: Customer journey maps help uncover how a customer interacts with a business over a set period of time. This can define stages customers move through, which would inform various sales or customer experience strategies.
- Discriminant Analysis: Discriminant analysis looks at various factors to determine why something occurs. For example, businesses may use discriminant analysis to understand why buyer personas in specific roles are more likely to make a purchase.
- Factor Analysis: Factor analysis looks to identify correlation. For example, if a marketing campaign is highly effective for one group of people, but not another, what correlating factors may exist to explain why?
- Flow Model: Flow models track how information flows through a system. For SaaS companies especially, flow models can help visualize how users interact with your platform.
- Multidimensional Scaling: Multidimensional scaling organizes a business and its competitors onto a map to better understand price points, target markets, strengths, and weaknesses.
- Multiple Regression: Multiple regression refers to a statistical model that illustrates how a variable might impact another variable. For companies launching a new marketing campaign, they may use this to understand what colors, fonts, or word choices work best.
But how do you sort through the large amounts of data to run any of these analyses? With market research insights software solutions that allow for the synthesization of large amounts of data to perform these critical types of analysis. At PureSpectrum, our Insights platform provides the functionality that B2B organizations need to run different types of analysis about brand tracking, concept testing, creative asset testing, ad effectiveness, consumer sentiment, customer and market segmentation, and more.
Present Your Findings
Typically, the next step after analysis and interpretation is presenting the findings to key stakeholders. This is usually done via presentation or report. How do you write a market research report? These steps provide a jumping off point to get started:
- Segment the Data: Most market research reports don’t provide every piece of information, just the data points that are relevant to a report. Determine what data you will present, and organize the information into various focus areas for the report.
- Create an Outline: What does your report need to cover? Generally this might include sections for background, audience, question or hypothesis, methodology, market research, conclusions, and a summary.
- Build Visuals: Not only do charts and graphs look nice, they can aid in understanding, too. With the PureSpectrum Insights platform, it’s quick and easy to develop and export compelling data visualizations.
- Finish Strong: Every good market research report should include conclusions and recommendations based on the data findings. Market research is designed to be actionable, and this final section should include high-level or granular steps to take.
Decide on Next Steps
Once the information has been gathered, analyzed, and presented, it’s time to take action. Depending upon the kind of market research, this might include:
- Changing sales or customer experience processes to better meet customer needs
- Developing a new product or service to increase market share or upsells
- Improving marketing effectiveness based on consumer behavior data
As a plan is developed, it’s critical to include goals, milestones, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to give the entire team something concrete to work towards.
Which Tools Are Used for Market Research and Market Research Analysis?
To perform the entire process of market research—from data collection to analysis and beyond—most organizations turn to market research software tools. But with so many solutions available today, finding the right market research tools and techniques can certainly be a challenge. For example, you may need tools that assist with some or all of the following:
- Building quality surveys
- Finding relevant consumers
- Deploying surveys to consumers
- Accessing data analytics features
- Measuring predictive analytics and competitor intelligence
- Purchasing samples from reliable market research panels
At PureSpectrum, we have two solutions that help businesses perform better market research: Marketplace and Insights. Marketplace provides researchers and analysts with access to a global pool of high quality consumer and B2B respondents, while Insights provides teams with the ability to synthesize large amounts of data to enable easier analysis and reporting—all in a single platform.
PureSpectrum Marketplace Platform
ow do you collect data for market research? There are a lot of options available, but the best market research platforms provide teams with access to a supply of high-quality, global respondents. With PureSpectrum Marketplace, organizations can have that very functionality, combined with robust features including:
- Automated Fielding: Remove time and inefficiency with functionality that automatically deploys your survey to the defined target market.
- Fraud Prevention: Ensure your data is accurate and free from fraud with PureScore™, which checks dozens of verification points to ensure unparalleled security.
- Panel Deduplication: PureSpectrum’s system assigns individual respondents with a unique ID to ensure each response you receive is unique.
- Survey Tool Agnostic: Research is simple with PureSpectrum Marketplace, which connects to any survey platform that accepts redirects and/or offers API integration.
PureSpectrum Insights Platform
What is the most valuable marketing research tool or platform for analysis? The one that provides access to agile research tools that enable consumer behavior, consumer insights, consumer research, and market research all in one location. PureSpectrum Insights platform provides the features companies need to synthesize their data in order to better analyze and interpret it, including:
- Data Visualization: With several different charts and graphs, organizations can analyze their data and export it to use in reports or presentations.
- Instant Downloadable Results: Have your own workflows? With PureSpectrum Insights, it’s easy to download research results to integrate into your existing system.
- Market Research Analytics: Automate crosstabs, create data cuts, and run significance tests—all with state of the art market research capabilities.
- Real-time Results: PureSpectrum Insights updates results in real time, making it simple to see how your research efforts are performing.
- Unparalleled Data Quality: Combining Insights with Marketplace means organizations can take advantage of the PureScore™ program to ensure responses are quality and trustworthy.
Which Is the Best Tool for Market Research Insights and Analysis? Meet PureSpectrum
For B2B and B2C companies, market research is critical. With new competitors popping up on a nearly daily basis, staying ahead of the pack could truly mean the difference between success and failure.
But doing so often means inefficient processes that put a drain on staff time, budgets, and resources. That’s where PureSpectrum truly shines. Our market research tools empower organizations to automate many of these processes and gain a holistic view of their customers and target market. With PureSpectrum, you can collect responses from a high-quality marketplace and glean insights from data—all in one simple, intuitive platform.
2023 is the year of the user, and we’re committed to putting you first and helping you do the same for your customers. Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo today.
About PureSpectrum
PureSpectrum offers a complete end-to-end market research and insights platform, helping insights professionals make decisions more efficiently, and faster than ever before. Awarded MR Supplier of the Year at the 2021 Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards, PureSpectrum is recognized for industry-leading data quality. PureSpectrum developed the respondent-level scoring system, PureScore™, and believes their continued success stems from their talent density and dedication to simplicity and quality.
In the few years since its inception, PureSpectrum has been named one of the Fastest Growing Companies in North America on Deloitte’s Fast 500 since 2020, and ranked for three years in a row on the GRIT Top 50 Most Innovative List and the Inc. 5000 lists.