Entrepreneur Resources Your source for small business information
To keep your business growing year after year, you need to always have the latest marketing data at your fingertips. From knowing how your business stacks up against the competition to understanding which of your company’s products or services are most popular with customers, these and other topics ultimately determine the success or failure of your business. If your
the marketing team is preparing to conduct a study, here is how you can ensure your team has quality data.
Develop a Research Plan
Before any study can take place, it is critical that your marketing team develops a comprehensive research plan. This will determine not only the best ways to collect data but also what methods will be used in its analysis and how important data will be separated and examined.
Rely on Multiple Regression
To get quality data and ensure data quality monitoring occurs, many marketing teams rely heavily on multiple regression when conducting their studies. Focusing on how independent variables shift during the course of a study, multiple regression is often used in the business world to help determine how sales revenue changes as it relates to advertising costs, where ads are placed, and when the ads appear to consumers.
Factor Analysis
Very popular with market research teams, factor analysis deals with how various factors within a marketing or other areas of a business are interrelated to one another. Particularly useful in focus groups and other similar forms of research, this type of analysis helps companies to narrow down which of their products or services are most appealing to consumers. Widely used within the restaurant industry and other industries as well, it is a very cost-effective analysis method due to it being able to let a team narrow down its data to only a few variables.
Perceptual Maps
When marketing teams are trying to gather data about competing services or products, you often find them developing perceptual maps. As an example, you can look at the specialized coffee industry. To understand which of its products are most popular now and which will be in the future, marketing teams within this industry look at such factors as the number of specialty coffees and flavors, how their products are packaged, and the various distribution channels used to get the coffee to consumers.
While it is a painstaking process to collect quality data, doing so is critical to helping your company better understand its customers, products, and how your brand stacks up against the competition.
