In the world of business, the most important currency is data. Running a business means a constant string of decisions, often made under times pressure and with high stakes. All too often you don’t have important information. You’re making these life and death decisions, with not just your own success but other people’s livelihoods resting on them, based on an incomplete jigsaw, filling in the holes in your knowledge with guesses based on your experience.
Anything that fills in the gaps, that gives you a more complete picture of the backdrop you’re making your decisions against is vital, and that means research.
You can conduct some research yourself: you can survey customers actively, seeking their feedback on your service, prices and products. You might find your customers more eloquent when they’re not speaking at all though: simply observing their behaviour can tell you a great deal. Observing how your customers behave on your website is like following a customer’s journey through a physical store and both could provide you with vital insights.
Knowing where people enter from, what they look for when they first walk in or click through, and how direct their journey is from browsing to payment is useful insight whether it’s digital or physical. It allows you to identify the blocks between your customers and a purchase, places where they give up, close the tab or walk away and smooth those areas over. Creating a smoother customer journey is vital for both enhancing your revenue and building a reputation as a good place to shop, and you can only do that by doing the hard work of researching how people behave.
To learn more, you’ll need someone with a reach beyond your own customers – this is a small subsection of the market and contains only people who have already chosen to shop with you. There’s a limit to how much you can learn from them.
A market research agency can find out what the broad spread of consumers is thinking, not merely the people you’ve already attracted to your brand. They can tell you if you need to make changes to break into this wider market: placing new adverts in new places, changing your brand to appeal to more people, or if you simply need to be more visible. That’s perhaps the best outcome: finding out that the only thing stopping thousands more people spending money with you is that they need to hear about you! It’s good news you can only find out with the right research so click here to learn more.
