If you could significantly speed up the market research process, ensure more accurate insights, and improve efficiency at every stage, what could you accomplish? Think about the possibility of being able to accomplish that task without even having to think about it or having to get your hands dirty.
The good news is that you can enjoy these benefits if you utilize the right tools and invest in automated market research. Since the advent of recent technological advances, every industry has experienced and continues to experience significant changes.
Therefore, it is imperative to produce customer-centric products and services as quickly as possible. Keeping up with the global economy and being of top value in a fast-paced economy requires market researchers to provide affordable, fast, and accurate insight on time. In order to conduct effective market research, automation is essential.
How does automation contribute to market research?
As brands rely more and more on automation for marketing, customer service, and data collection, it makes intuitive sense to automate the research tools that guide decision-making as well.
In addition to cutting down on the amount of fat in the research process, automated methods also allow market researchers to eliminate inaccurate results, poor methodologies, and anecdotal evidence, as well as produce reports that are easy to comprehend. The following are some of the tools used to accomplish this task.
1. Monitoring social media
Brands can benefit greatly from the abundance of information, opinions, and consumer preferences available on social media. If that data were to be collected manually, imagine how difficult it would be. The solution lies in market research automation.
In order to automate messages and focus on customer responses, market researchers can now use algorithms. This allows you to send out relevant messages, learn what is being said about your brand, and respond to messages that require immediate attention. Researchers can automate this process by using artificial intelligence and automation software instead of manually reviewing websites, discussion boards, blogs, etc.
Briefly, social listening and automated analysis tools provide brands with consumer insights they can use in the development of products and customer service practices, as well as in marketing strategies.
2. Mobile analysis
Recent estimates indicate that there will be 4.68 billion users of mobile devices in the next few years. Mobile phones store a great deal of practical information about target customers. In both cases, without automation, accessing this information would be impossible, as well as gathering data quickly enough to make informed business decisions.
Tracking GPS location data is one area where market researchers can benefit from automation. Studies have shown that users spend more time using apps than searching the web on their mobile devices. We now know that tracking location data via apps is a great way to collect both local and global data.
What are the benefits of tracking location data? Using mobile GPS tracking technology, you can deploy in-the-moment surveys automatically, according to Mobile Marketing Watch. You can reach customers at the exact moment they engage with your brand and conduct exit and entrance surveys at the same time. As a result, market research remains relevant and supports on-point customer research.
3. Collecting data automatically
It is sometimes beneficial to use past results to forecast future performance, for example, when planning a marketing campaign.
It is now possible for marketers and market researchers alike to obtain specific answers to campaign questions based on past behavior through the use of robots. An example of this can be the way in which a target audience is responding, the return on investment of past marketing campaigns, the messages that resonated well, the locations and times where campaigns performed best, etc.
Through automation, large amounts of data can be amalgamated in a short period of time, allowing intelligent decisions to be made and human tasks and jobs to be made easier. As a result of efficient data collection, market researchers can spend more time analyzing the results in order to make better business decisions. In terms of gathering data for insights, the days of manual processes are long gone. An automated tool should be considered by every marketing, product, and/or research team.
4. Community and automation in the online world
A particularly troubling method of old-school market research relies on insights gathered from a small sample population based on one small interview. While interviews can be helpful, there are more effective ways to gather more natural reactions from more customers when they are not under time constraints.
It is possible for market researchers to track customer preferences and feedback over a long period of time and from a wider sample of the population using online communities. Moreover, online communities provide a forum for members to connect with each other in a way that is educational, insightful, and enjoyable. Researchers are thus able to gather reliable and natural data that can be used for better diagnostic purposes.
Because participants engage in real-time and provide insights into online behavior and insight consumption, researchers can use this information to formulate strategies. Automation tools can be used to feed those data into marketing automation systems for quick access. A community tool can also be used to generate easy-to-read research reports and forecasts for future studies using automated processes.
5. Technology for customer loyalty
Automated customer loyalty technologies are also becoming more prevalent as a means of gathering customer information. One of the most intriguing aspects of these technologies is that they use a loyalty program app to collect customer data regarding their most loyal customers.
The technology tracks when a customer visits a store, when they make a purchase, what they purchase, and how much they spend and compares this with competitor data. A further benefit of this tool is that it allows business owners to send NPS feedback at the moment and to set up automated alerts in order to respond immediately to customer service issues.
The use of this type of technology allows researchers to gain insights into how they can encourage consumers to visit more often, spend more when they are there, and come at times they would not typically make a visit. This information can also be used by researchers to guide automated email marketing campaigns. The use of automated loyalty programs is another method by which market researchers can collect information about their top customers in order to improve products and services, and offer better customer service.
Conclusion
We live in a world that is moving at a rapid pace and innovating at an ever-increasing rate. Without the assistance of automation, it is easy for manually collected marketing research data to expire before it can be used for marketing research purposes. A key benefit of automation is that it allows industries that are constantly evolving to keep up with the competition.
The automation of the market research process ensures that research is timely, effective, accurate, and readily accessible. It is clear that we are not yet at a point where algorithms and robots will take over the world of market research. The data must still be analyzed and utilized by humans in order to inform business decisions.
It is only by automating that we can collect data faster, smarter, more accurately, and from a broader sample base that we can gain a deeper understanding of the current market conditions. Market research automation is expected to continue to evolve in the future, leading to further improvements.
