Tips to Overcome the Target Market Research Challenges

Market research is a challenging task but one that is critical to business success. Over the years, the parameters for collecting market insights have expanded and new methodologies developed.

The modern marketplace is fluid and dynamic, with constantly shifting trends that pose challenges for research teams. However, businesses still want to identify and understand their target audience through insights gleaned from market research data for effective engagement. Here are some market research challenges and suggestions on how to overcome them.

Identifying the target market

You have the perfect product, but identifying the right market for it is the challenge. To overcome this challenge, look for any possible connections between the product and a particular market demographic. These market demographics may include gender, age, occupation, income, religion, or even geography. Isolate one demographic group to target with trial ads intended to extract their response to the product.

The research team can use Prolifiq’s relationship mapping tools native in Salesforce to manage incoming data from contacts in the survey. Measure the response rate from the targeted group and cross-reference data to validate your audience list.

Multiple audiences

Your demographic research produces multiple audiences with differing consumer traits for the same product. Create customer personas from these insights and launch targeted campaigns that match solutions to their interests and motivation. Your marketing initiatives, though selling the same product, should create specific messaging for the different segments addressing their particular needs.

When selling across different age brackets, for example, appeal to what excites the young, is practical to the middle-aged, and supportive for the seniors to reach all in the targeted demographic. By creating personas, you are essentially listing specific market audience characteristics that simplify the outreach strategy and campaigns, ensuring total coverage.

Knowing the right hook

So you have gotten your demographics right, but how do you engage them? Why should they listen to your pitch, or better still, buy from you and not the competition? You must know or have something that will prick their interest and rope them in, something different, something personal – the hook.

Run subtle surveys to get glimpses of their desires, goals, problems, leisure activities, whom they currently buy from, to see how this relates to your product. Acquiring this business intelligence ahead of launch provides insights for specific messaging that is critical to the success of a targeted marketing campaign.

Capacity limitations

Budgetary and staff capacity poses another challenge for targeted market research. Many organizations may not afford to splash vast budgets on market research programs but still expect credible business insights for decision-making. A viable solution for this challenge is to adopt technology for research agility in achieving quant validation and qual iteration standards.

A minimalist budget and a handful of staff can deliver fast and efficiently with the right technology in place. Invest in the latest reporting dashboards for instant feedback, automated templates to fast track your timelines, and enhance the qualitative analytics of your research initiatives.

The data privacy challenge

You are holding this valuable trove of customer data that is vital to your business, but the same also carries the threat of regulatory penalties. Market researchers in fast-evolving e-commerce today have to dig a lot deeper into personal data to get the right consumer insights. It is all fine until a breach happens and the organization faces a barrage of litigations and reputation damage.

Aside from internal privacy policy, adopt the right technology capable of managing multiple sources of big data with speed, efficiency, and high-level security standards. Constantly review your technology and data security to stay compliant.