The first step to creating a successful campaign is to understand who your audience is. A company selling luxury items and a company selling cheap value items will have two different target audiences and should be treated as such. This could easily get lost in the process of reconfiguring your website, worrying about shipping, and all the other tedious tasks that business owners need to do. However, it is important not to overlook market research.
With market research you could:
- Understand your target audience: If you understand who they are and what they like, you can write relevant content that is tailored to them and develop more effective calls to actions and headers.
- Use suggestions provided by your customers: Feedback directly from your customers themselves is a great way to make quick fixes that improve customer satisfaction.
- Match the language to theirs: Know what words they are using when searching for items and match your language so you are included in the results.
- Capitalize on your competitors’ weaknesses: Market research is not limited to your company only. You could find out more about competitors and offer customers something they cannot get from your competitors.
- Understand why people don’t buy: Understanding why people don’t do something is just as, if not more, important than understanding why people do buy your product. This will give you a holistic look into your customer base.
How to perform Market Research with Google
There are a variety of tools available at your fingertips to help you get the information you need from your users. Google alone has various tools such as Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and Google Forms that could help you get to know your customers better.
- Google Analytics generates reports on audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversion helping you understand more about your users, where they came from, what they do on your site, and if it leads to sales.
- Google Keyword Planner can research keywords to add to a new or existing campaign and get historical statistics and traffic forecasts for those keywords.
- Google Trends helps you see the interest in a topic over a period of time and see if people are looking for what you are selling.
- Google Forms could help you collect data from your customers on customer satisfaction, suggestions of improvements, or anything else you might want to know directly from them.
Best part? Most of these are free to use or have a free version that can meet most business needs.
How often you should perform Market Research?
Market research shouldn’t be done once and then never touched again. It is something that can and should happen regularly to continue to understand your target audience. With the tools mentioned above, it is easy to do this on a daily basis (although I don’t recommend you do this every day). Depending on how rapidly the market you are in changes, market research should be done anywhere from quarterly to annually.
Have you kept up to date on your market research? What are your favorite tools to use?
*** This is a guest blog post by Matt Tanguay where he shares his numbers-backed findings in the form of Ecommerce conversion tips ***
