How many times have you sat around in meetings talking about building your brand and have heard the same tired old cliches? Are you still hearing them in today’s Zoom-normal meetings?
The truth is this: if you want to build your audience, you need to know who it is, what it does, what it likes, what moves it, what inspires it and what it aligns with.
It may be a simple truth, but it’s way harder to realise, hence those meeting room cliches and promises without any substance. So, what’s the answer? The simplest way to know your audience is through consumer insights, and the simplest way to acquire those is by working with a market research company.
Read on to find out why.
Insight is Power is Growth
Information about potential customers, their behaviour, and spending patterns not only provides target profiles, but the right kind of market research will also guide you towards the best way to communicate with customers. This could be Instagram, face-to-face, video, etc.
Market research can empower you to:
- Identify new opportunities and trends.
- Spot potential threats
- Neutralise any potential investment risks
- Better define your marketing and brand strategy.
- Better engage and align with your customers and ensure business growth.
In short, it’s another tool to help you stay ahead of your competition.
Take a look at our work for Barbour Beacon, where our audience-insights gave us the power to create a fully-integrated and audience-specific online and in-store campaign.
Consumer Opinions: Thick and Fast
The right consumer insights company will have access to your audience at its fingertips and not just in your backyard but globally. It means opinions on subjects from COVID (naturally) to new products can be harvested and turned into effective real-life campaigns without breaking into a sweat.
We’re a next-generation creative agency that uses audience and cultural insight to influence every corner of our clients’ strategic planning and brand creation.
SELFHOOD is our global insight network of U30s consumers and social natives. They tell us what they think, feel and do in real-time, allowing us to create campaigns based on facts, not supposition or assumption.
Why a Market Research Company?
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach here. You have to ensure that the company you choose is the right fit. We’re not just talking about the chemistry around the table here. Here’s our suggested checklist for when you’re shopping around:
Ask your shortlisted agencies about their:
Size: Big isn’t always better. Sometimes a smaller agency that deals in a particular niche area such as Gen Z and Millennial consumers might be better suited to your needs.
Approach: will they help you drill down what you want to discover? The right agency will help you narrow your goals and ensure your campaigns focus each and every time. They can also help you understand why past campaigns haven’t always worked or why sales of particular products are down.
AI tools: To gain deeper insights into consumer behaviour
Monitoring tools: For instance, focus groups, social media monitoring and surveys.
Impartiality and Transparency
Getting outside help from professionals who are just as invested as you but who have a different and impartial approach will get you better results. It’s natural for businesses to feel love for their products; it’s also natural to find impartiality difficult as a result, especially if your target audience doesn’t share that love.
Consumers often find it easier, to be honest about a brand to knowledgable outsiders and feel less like they’re being sold. Not only that, but the right agency can run focus groups effectively, know what the right questions are to ask and design consumer surveys as a matter of course.
Look for an agency that’s transparent about its fees that don’t shy away from giving you a detailed breakdown of costs and potential additional costs. It’s also essential that they have a transparent and collaborative approach to their work, so you’re never in the dark about what’s going on.
There’s no mystery to consumer insights and market research—just a cost-effective solution to your brand building problems.
Check out some of our market research led campaigns for yourself.
Are you ready to strengthen your brand and identify untapped opportunities?
Get in touch and say hello.
