If you’re genuninely customer curious, your business will be reaping multiple benefits. B2B market research will be embedded in your culture and because of this, customer brand perceptions, product fit, customer service requirements, sales and marketing strategies will be aligned on a sustainable growth pathway.
B2B research is, at its heart, the process of gathering data on what your potential customers are looking for and what they need. It involves taking a sample of your target audience and understanding their motivations and preferences. By researching how your potential audience thinks, feels and behaves, your strategic planning for attracting your target market will be much more effective.
Not only that, but when you have them on board, you won’t risk creating an experience gap where your customers aren’t getting what they expect. You’ll be better able to predict future trends and tackle issues before they happen.
Topline benefits include:
1) Better ROI
With business research behind you, you can more effectively target customers and encourage engagement with your brand. The more tailored your offering is to what they want, the more they’ll spend with you.
2) Up-to-date insights on customers’ mindsets
Your potential customers’ needs and desires may change frequently and keeping up can be tricky. Basing your future plans on past customer behaviour might not be accurate. Research can help you stay on top of any new developments and keep ahead of market fluctuations.
3) More significant customers
If you’re looking to target more than just small fry, you’ll need market research to understand exactly what your competitive advantage is – or what you have to do to get one!
4) Performance monitoring
Asking potential or current customers how you’re doing on a regular basis means that you can tailor your approach to fit their needs and expectations. Rather than guessing how you’re doing, you’ll have proof of your success (or failure).
What are the key market research methods?
So here are some of the most common primary and secondary research types with pros and cons that can help you get started:
1) Primary research methods: pros and cons
B2B marketing research is usually divided into two types of research: primary and secondary.
Primary research is where your brand speaks directly to the target audience to get data and insights. This type of research can be qualitative research or quantitative research (more on that shortly).
Pros: This type of research gets to the heart of your particular audience, and gets words directly from your participants’ mouths.
Cons: It can be costly and time-consuming to gather large amounts of data and analyse it. Your B2B participants may not have the time or the inclination to help you in your research, meaning you need to make the experience quick, easy, and engaging.
2) Secondary research methods: pros and cons
Secondary research is research that has been conducted by a third party and is publicly available.
Pros: This type of method is important, as it can yield information from outside your experience that can inform your results. For example, asking people directly for answers (primary research) might not actually reveal their real intentions. Sometimes, understanding audience behaviour is easier when using secondary research.
Cons: You’ll have to evaluate what third-party data is actually useful for your needs. This research can also be biased, or be inaccurate – you need to check your sources thoroughly.
Let’s dig a bit further into qualitative and quantitative research and their strengths and weaknesses:
Qualitative research: pros and cons
Qualitative research involves the collation of data that can’t be summed up in numbers. It’s helpful for understanding potential explanations of behaviour, rather than providing an exact explanation. Using this type of research, you’ll be able to form a hypothesis about your target market and potential customers.
You might use the following methods for qualitative research: :
· Focus groups
· Interviews
· Open-ended survey questions
Pros: This type of approach is specifically useful for B2B market research as you might not have a large enough target audience to get quantitative data. Given this market’s complexity, you might need in-depth, smaller discussions to get to the bottom of certain behaviours or perceptions.
B2B decision-makers are also likely to respond better to a personalised approach, rather than being quantified. You can build a closer relationship with your customers if you ask them questions in a more personalised setting.
Cons: This is a time-consuming approach to research, and it can be difficult to analyse insights for comparison. The interviewer can also skew results, making it difficult to maintain an unbiased approach. For groups, scheduling can be an issue.
Quantitative research: pros and cons
Quantitative research collects information that can be defined numerically. It’s much more definitive than qualitative data and is often used to prove a hypothesis with empirical evidence. You might use the following approaches for quantitative research:
· Questionnaires
· Surveys
· Polls
Pros: Using numerical data makes comparisons easy, and you can gather a greater number of responses in a more cost-effective way. It’s easier to reduce bias as there’s no interpersonal element. B2B decision-makers are also able to easily fit this into their likely busy schedules.
Cons: Though you will get concrete data using this approach, it’s hard to get nuance from structured results summarised in numbers. There might be less incentive to respond to a questionnaire or survey as it feels less personal, and answers might not be as in-depth.
How to apply your B2B market research findings
Once you’ve completed your market research, it’s time to use the insights you’ve gained. Taking action is where the true benefits of market research lie. Here are a few ways in which you can leverage the data you’ve collected and achieve a good ROI:
1) Create detailed market segments
You might use your B2B market research to create:
· Buyer personas: Who within each customer business are you aiming your efforts at?
· Customer segments: How can you create products and services that will fit the different types of customers you’re aiming to attract?
· Competitive intelligence: What can you offer that your competitors don’t?
2) Improve brand perception
Your research can help you to tackle:
· Brand perception: How do customers think of you? How aware of your presence are they?
· USP: What is unique about your brand when compared to others?
· Customer retention: Why do customers continue to choose you over competitors?
· Marketing strategy: How can you leverage your brand perception in your marketing and inform sales strategy? How are your current efforts perceived?
3) Identify opportunities for growth
Your research can help you identify:
· Segments to target: What unreached segments could benefit from your products or services?
· Opportunities: What are the opportunities to partner with other businesses that already have an established connection with your target audience?
· Issues: What possible shortcomings exist in your product or services that, if remedied, would allow you to appeal to more customers and improve customer satisfaction?
4) Optimise the buying process
You can utilise your market research to understand more about:
· Decision-makers: Who makes the decisions about making a purchase, and how can you target them?
· Drivers: What makes a customer choose one brand over another?
· Wins and losses: Why did you win a pitch, or why did you lose a customer?
5) Measure success
Your research results can help you to track success across the following areas:
· Brand equity: Does your target market think well of your brand? How aware are they of your existence?
· Customer satisfaction and loyalty: Are your customers happy and will they come back?
· Performance against decision-making factors: Are you successful in attracting customers with your price, ease of use, and more?
· Product and service success: How successful are you in selling your products and services?
So there are multiple uses and benefits for B2B market research. Embedding a culture that’s genuinely customer curious and relentlessly questioning about business prospects and customers bodes well for sustainable, long term growth.
If you’d like to chat about conducting customer market research that helps you to achieve better business growth - do get in touch via the form below: