Building a successful business is not an easy task. To be an expert on your industry, your products, staff and most importantly, you need to be an expert on your customers. If you don’t know who you’re selling to, you can’t target them effectively. Advertising and marketing that’s tailored to your customers is more efficient: it communicates your message more clearly, and gets you more sales per pound spent. The advantages of your business understanding who its customers speak for themselves, but how can you achieve that understanding?
Go to the Experts
The sort of intense data gathering and interpretation you need to do is beyond the reach of many companies – not just small, new businesses. Even large, established companies tend to go to independent market research firms when they need an injection of expertise rather than keep a full-time research team in house. When you’re looking for companies that can give you this insight into consumer intelligence, London is the place to start. London has a big mix of industries and tech expertise that allows market researchers to stay at the cutting edge, so it’s a great place to find a firm that can help you.
The Help They Can Give
Understanding your customers requires more than data. While you can survey customers yourself, to generate spreadsheets full of results, you won’t be able to turn them into a useful tool for your business without the two key things specialist market researchers bring to the table: reach and understanding.
Reach
To get useful results that help you understand your market, you need the reach to get answers from people who haven’t already chosen to shop with your brand! The only consumers you have access to are the ones who are finding your advertising effective – fine for optimising your tactics to target them more effectively, but useless if you want to target a bigger audience!
Market research firms can survey a broad demographic, including, crucially, those people who don’t yet find your marketing persuasive, and find out why.
Understanding
The currency of research is not data but ‘insight’. Understanding what that data is telling you, and turning it into practical advice that can power a successful marketing campaign, product development cycle or rebrand is where a market research firm really earns its money, and where you can really learn to understand who your customers are and what they want.