These days, the world revolves around digital technology. From surfing websites to checking out the latest apps, most of the world spends at least some time online each day. This means that your business needs to be plugged into the digital world as well, including a robust website and well-maintained social media accounts. That’s not all, though. You also need to be doing thorough market research to ensure that your digital marketing strategies are working as well as possible.

Market Research Helps You Understand Your Customers

Chances are you did some market research using agile market research methods when you first started your business, but your customer base may change over time. Periodic research is important for determining how your customer base’s demographic has changed over time. This ensures that your marketing efforts are still targeting the right people.

Maybe your original customer base was young families but now empty nesters are more prominent. Perhaps you thought college-age people would be most interested but it turns out that seniors are more interested in your product than you expected. Understanding the gender, age, income level, and family size of your established customers helps you to determine who you should be targeting with further digital marketing.

Market Research Helps You Send the Right Message

Sending the right messages ties into who your target audience is now. If you started with college kids as your target audience, chances are you were more casual and used a lot of slang. However, if today’s demographic tends to be older generations, speaking too casually or using too much slang may cause them to think of you as unprofessional.

Performing market research helps you to monitor how the consumers on your website and social media pages are speaking. By learning their language and the common terms they use in reference to your product or industry, you can determine which keywords and key phrases to focus on when creating your next digital marketing campaign. It also helps you to match their tone, which is important when gaining the interest of potential customers.

Market Research Helps You Create a Mobile Campaign

These days, a good digital marketing campaign has to include a mobile marketing technique. Roughly 90% of the global community uses their smartphones or other mobile devices to browse the internet, and an ever-increasing number of people shop from their mobile devices as well.

When you understand how your audience uses their mobile devices, you can create mobile marketing campaigns that gain the right attention. SMS marketing is increasingly popular and has a nearly 100% open rate as compared to e-mail marketing, which is only at about 20%. You can use SMS in a number of ways, including alerting your audience to new sales, reminding them of abandoned carts, and providing them with shipping information.

Market Research Helps You Track the Competition

Part of thorough market research is to determine how your competition is faring in the market. This means finding out where their strengths lie as well as considering where they are showing weakness and how you can improve your product or service to best those weaknesses. When you use internet market research tactics, you can then implement a digital marketing campaign that shows how your business beats out the competition. 

Market Research Ensures You Don’t Waste Money

Market research shows you what your current customers and potential ones are looking for out of a business, product, and service. By understanding your customers and sending the right message the first time around, you ensure you’re putting your marketing budget into the right place. You won’t waste money on e-mail advertising if your customers all prefer text messages, for example. 

You can’t have a successful business without doing market research. Whether you’re just starting out of you’re re-vamping what used to work for you, take your time to perform your research correctly. Doing so will save you money, time, and effort in the long run, not to mention be more likely to bring in the audience you want.