Use Market research to Attract more Customers, Consumers or Clients

The life blood of any business is its ability to continually attract willing buyers.

You may define the people who buy from you as a customer, consumer or a client. The terminology doesn’t matter, what matters is that they have buying intent - they are not looking in the window, they have money in their hands and they are willing to spend it.

The key to attracting willing buyers is knowing, out of all the available buyers, which ones are most receptive to your offer.

The marketing research principle we are going to use here is what we refer to as the Mark Twain principle:

Mark Twain said, ‘The best way to ride a horse is the direction its going’, and in our context this means, engage the buyers that are already heading in your direction.

An example, if we are trying to sell e-book readers (e.g. Kindle) it is too simplistic to target people who like books. We want to target people that like books and like technology. These people have the right combination of characteristics than make them more receptive to our e-book reader than just book lovers.

This combination of characteristics is called the targetable characteristics because we can use this description to make choices about how to target the people we want – the communication message and where we place it, the best form of distribution, packaging design, etc.

This is where market research can really help and more than pays for itself. Quantitative market research can determine how many people in our competitive frame have the targetable characteristics we need. We can also find out how old they are, their gender, their current shopping habits, their social media and search behaviour, etc.

Market research allows us to create a factual, detail rich picture of what our most receptive buyer looks like. Ultimately, this leads to less money spent on marketing activity for much better results. Who doesn’t want that!