Imagine spending months creating a children’s play, only to show up opening night to an audience expecting a heavy metal concert. If you aren’t careful about what you communicate, you’ll have trouble attracting your ideal customers. Understanding how to do market research is the first step to connecting with your audience and maximizing the impact of your marketing.
Reaching the right audience is TOTALLY necessary to make any aspect of your website be as effective as possible. Your copy, layout, user experience, even colors should all be chosen based on your audience’s preferences. If they’re not, we guarantee you that you’re missing out on more conversions.
In this article, we’re giving you a guide on how to perform effective market research. No matter what industry your business is in, you need this. Before we go too deep, let’s address the question of “What exactly is market research and how it helps your business”.
What is Market Research?
In its simplest form, conducting market research simply refers to getting to know your audience.
In its more complex form, market research is gathering information on what the customers and competitors are like within your industry. You want to find patterns, trends, and areas where your competitors lack so that you can build the proper messaging.
You want to understand your audience’s needs, preferences, pain points (challenges), questions, desired transformations, etc. so you can better stand out from your competitors.
How Market Research Helps Your Business
Thorough market research will outperform generalized assumptions every time.
According to Paypal, 76% of consumers expect retailers to understand their unique needs. If they see generic marketing, they’re much less likely to make a purchase because it seems ingenuine, out of touch, and irrelevant.
It can be easy to fall into the trap of identifying ourselves as the target audience of our business and building content that appeals to our own personal style and taste. If this sounds familiar, don’t worry. It’s never too late to shift your approach. Changing your strategy and leveraging research now can create long-term benefits for your business.
Benefits Include:
Effective Market Segmentation
Market segmentation is separating your audience into different groups based on specific interests, behaviors, demographics, or needs. When your content appeals to a potential customer’s specific interest, they are much more likely to continue on your defined customer journey towards making a purchase.
💡 Did you know that you can run different versions of sales pages to different segments of your audience? You can send a different URL to the same sales page with different copy, imagery, or whatever you’re trying to test.
Analyze Consumer Behavior
You need to know things like how old your audience is and what their favorite social media platforms are because it affects when/what you advertise to them. For example, Instagram is popular with younger generations while Facebook appeals to older ones. If you’re targeting men and women in their late 60’s, it will be more effective to advertise on Facebook where they spend more time.
Additionally, knowing things like if they’re an impulsive spender or if they make long, analytical decisions will shape how you craft your offers and messaging. You may need irresistible pop up offers for one group and a long form, extremely informative sales page for another.
Understanding how your audience makes spending decisions helps you design your platform to encourage those behaviors, making it easy and appealing for them to take action.
Optimize your Efforts for Maximum Impact
As a business owner, data is your best friend.
For example, if your sales page has a high click-through rate but a low conversion rate, it tells you people are interested enough to click but aren’t convinced to buy. This could mean your offer doesn’t clearly address their needs, the pricing feels too high, or your page lacks trust-building elements like testimonials or guarantees.
The great thing about digital marketing is that nothing is set in stone. If something isn’t working or could be improved, you have the flexibility to make changes and optimize for better results.
Increase Conversions
Ultimately, catering your content to match your buyer personas preferences are going to make them happy. When they feel like your content speaks to them and they’re convinced that your product or service would transform their life for the better, they will feel more inclined to give you their business.
4 Phases of Market Research
Phase One: Preliminary Information You Need
Before you go searching google for random odds and ends about your niche, you need to zero in on your business. Analyze what you have to offer in detail. Go through the features and benefits of your product or service. Think about who your ideal customers are. Consider great customers in the past and what made them amazing to do business with.
The purpose of this phase is to paint a clear picture of what you bring to the table and who you’re best suited to serve. This foundation will guide your research, and make sure you’re looking for information in the right spaces.
Phase One Checklist:
Identify Your Offer: Clearly list out your products and/or services.
List the Features and Benefits: Think about the physical and emotional aspects of your offer. What does your product do, how does that benefit someone’s life?
Pinpoint Your Golden Customer: Look back at everyone you’ve done business with. Who was the best? Who made the most purchases? Why do you want to do business with them more? What made them memorable?
Identify: What Sets You Apart? You need to already have an idea about what you offer that competitors don’t. What makes your business unique?
Think About: Where has your business seen the most success up to this point? Have you had success running ads on a certain platform? Are you mostly getting customers by personal word of mouth recommendations? Do certain web pages, blogs, or email strategies work better than others?
Phase Two: Competitor Analysis
Alright, if you haven’t already, you’re going to want to start a word doc where you can compile all the information you defined during the first phase and will continue to collect during each of the phases going forward.
You probably have heard marketers and other business owners talk about doing a competitor analysis. What exactly does this mean?
When we do competitor analysis, we first identify 2-3 competitors in each of the following categories:
- Direct: Businesses that are local to you and actually take customers.
- Industry Leaders: The biggest, most successful businesses in your niche.
- Admired: Brands that impress or attract you and inspire you to build your brand in a similar way.
After you find competitors you want to focus on, it’s time to start studying their stuff.
Now, it’s important to note that we’re NOT telling you to find similar businesses in your industry and copy them. Instead, the goal is to gather insights and understand what does and does not work for your industry’s audience. By analyzing their successes and failures, you can adapt these lessons to craft a unique strategy tailored to your brand and target market.
Go to their website and take notes about the following things:
- Copy: What words do they use that you notice? How effective do you feel their headlines are? How long/short are they? What vocabulary do they use that you feel stands out?
- Imagery: What kinds of images do they use? Do you feel that they’re effective? What do the images showcase? How do they showcase a transformation?
- Structure: Where do they place different elements around the page? Do you think that’s effective?
Phase Two Checklist:
Create a Word document or file to compile all the information from this and subsequent phases.
Identify 2-3 competitors in each category (direct, industry leaders, admired brands):
Pull Up Competitors Websites
Evaluate Competitor Copy (Identify key headlines, take note of phrases that stand out, evaluate the length of headlines, highlight any unique or impactful vocabulary)
Assess Competitor Imagery (List the types of images used (e.g., product shots, lifestyle images, before-and-after transformations), assess the story the images tell, note whether the images showcase a transformation or benefits of their products)
Look At Competitor Structure (Map out where key elements like CTA’s or testimonials are placed, take note about whether the layout makes navigation easy)
Phase Three: Find Your Market
Now it’s time to find your audience in real-time. During this phase, your goal is to find people who are talking about your competitors or other topics relating to your product/service. You can start by looking in the following places:
- Social media comments
- Competitor reviews
- Google reviews
- Blog articles
- News articles
By analyzing these sources, you can uncover what your audience is saying, their pain points, and their unmet needs. This process not only helps you understand your audience better but also enables you to position your product or service as the solution they’re actively seeking.
Phase Three Checklist:
Have you explored social media platforms where your audience engages?
Did you analyze competitor reviews to identify common themes?
What pain points or unmet needs are mentioned in social media comments?
Are there specific problems or desires frequently highlighted in reviews?
Which blog articles or topics are they commenting on or sharing?
Are there news articles or industry trends they are feature in?
Can you identify recurring topics, questions, or frustrations across different sources?
Are there specific phrases or keywords that keep appearing?
Phase Four: Create Your Personas
Let’s meet your audience!
Using the information you collected, you are going to build a few specific personas.
Sift through everything you learned and separate into a few different areas where you see a connection. Build an imaginary person and assign their demographics, career, specific challenges, aspirations, and other characteristics.
This phase is about getting organized and creating a clear picture of who your audience truly is. Seriously, give them a picture (can be a stock photo), name, and layout their characteristics so it’s easy to reference when writing copy.
Phase Four Checklist:
What demographics define your audience (age, gender, location, income)?
Which industries or careers do they typically work in?
Think about the challenges do they face,
What specific pain points or obstacles do they encounter in their daily lives?
Who or what motivates them?
Consider their goals and aspirations, what do they want both personally and professionally?
What messaging or tone would resonate most with their values and needs?
What channels do they use to consume information or make purchasing decisions?
Now, What Do You Do With This Information?
Market research is the cornerstone of building a successful business strategy. By taking the time to understand your audience, analyze competitors, and uncover market trends, you position your business to meet your customers’ needs more effectively.
Use the personas you build to base all of your content off of. Think of what would appeal specifically to them.
If you need help understanding market research or have further questions about defining your target personas, reach out to us! Our team is ready and passionate about helping businesses better connect to their customers so they can increase conversions and drive business growth.
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