Understanding what makes your target market tick is critical to the success of your marketing and overall business strategy, and is a key aspect to making your budget work harder for your business.
What you really need to know is…

• What keeps them up at night
• What are their deepest desires and problems
• What influences their buying decisions
• The language they use
• Their buying motives related to your product or service

Once you understand these parameters in depth, you can create marketing and advertising campaigns that instantly connect with the people that you serve. You can also use this information when developing products or tailoring your services to meet the needs of your market. Today we want to share some of the most effective marketing research tools that will give you an insight into the psyche of your customers.

Amazon Reviews 

No matter what business you’re in or what market you are targeting, someone has written a book about the subject. For example if you sell boats you can go to Amazon and type in “buying a boat”. You’ll find a long list of books on “how to buy a boat.” Many of these will have reviews that tell you – in the language of your customer – what information they were looking for, what was lacking and how many stars they gave the book.
The description and the contents page of the book  (which you can usually view on Amazon) is also a great resource. The chapter titles and descriptions are generally carefully crafted after much market research to connect with what the market wants to know.
This means you can simply skip all the hard work and use someone else’s market research to craft your sales messages.

Forums

Forums are a very well known source of market research, but even though many people know they could be valuable, very few business owners or marketing managers actually take the time to sleuth around these valuable communities.
The main criteria you want to look for to ensure you are onto a great forum is…

• Very large and active membership base.
• An open, positive platform where people are really there to help each other and are giving honest advice.
• Be very careful to ensure that these are people with desires or problems for whom your company can provide a solution.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords – the ads you see at the top of search results and in the right hand column when you do a search in Google – is a very competitive marketing arena.
To be profitable on Google’s Pay Per Click advertising platform you must write great ads, have a landing page that converts traffic into leads and then have a follow up system that turns leads into sales.
If you want to know what is working in your market simply type in a search term that someone looking for your products or services may type in and see what ads are in the top results. If you monitor this over a few months and see the same ads still in the top positions you will know you are dealing with a campaign that is profitable, so you should investigate what it is they’re doing right by digging a little deeper. Click their ad, go to the landing page, sign up for any offers and dissect the copy on the landing page to see how and why it’s working for them..
This is another great way to leverage someone else’s hard work to develop a better and more strategic approach in attracting your ideal customers.

Surveys

Finally, one of the best market research tools available is a simple survey. This allows you to directly ask the exact questions you want answered and is a great way to see what your actual customers like/dislike about your business. One of the biggest issues with surveys is getting customers and prospects to fill them out. Often an incentive is needed to generate a good response to your surveys.
Rewards such as eftpos gift cards are ideal for this purpose as it is a gift that has a broad appeal and can be customised in terms of value and branding. Make sure you know what you’re getting into before choosing your vendor. Have a read through our previous post that lays out the 10 critical questions to ask a potential gift card vendor.
Finding the right market research tools for your business can take a little time, but gaining a better understanding of your target market is some of the most valuable work you can do. These tools will give you a great starting point from which you can then develop effective marketing strategies.