Why and How to Make Fieldwork Market Research Part of Your Strategy
Presently, the market is on continuous transit with the needs of consumers. Having an insight into the interests and specific needs of your clients makes a huge difference. Fieldwork research involves gathering data straight from sources outside a company: from customers, experts or even competitors.
This influences your response to the needs of your audience. This helps to determine a company’s productivity and success. The best part of it — market research software tools make this much easier. Let’s have a closer look at the advantages of field market research and the reasons to make it part of your strategy.
Advantages of Conducting Field Market Research
Among all the advantages of conducting market research, let us single out the following six:
- Insights: It gives you insights into the products and services as well as the needs of your customers. This is because now you know the things you are great at. You also know the things that don’t resonate well with the market.
- Better products and services: Once you understand the needs of your customers, you can get on the right track of meeting them. The right information about your customers’ interests, informs winning business strategies. This means an increase in profit and sustainability of your company.
- Processes and cost optimization: You are armed with accurate information on exactly what the market needs. This way, you don’t waste time and money on the things that are not necessary. Using the right field survey software also saves overhead costs.
- Competitive advantage: Companies that employ field research, stay ahead of their competition.
- Spot opportunities: Fieldwork market research opens your eyes to potential unexplored markets and audiences, as well as upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
- Improved marketing: It gives you new ideas to use for promotions and content. This also helps with your targeting and use of audience insights and allows setting realistic yet challenging marketing goals.
Latest Facts on Fieldwork Market Research
The market research sector, witnessed some growth in 2018, compared to 2017. In 2018 alone, it was valued at $47 billion.
Over time, the research industry has transitioned from using paper for research to using the software. Employing the use of market research survey software is more convenient.
According to a report on Quirks.com, the use of paper for fieldwork has reduced from 21% in 2006, to 10% today. We’ll now discuss this transition and growth according to studies and research.
There has indeed been an increase in the popularity of field survey software among market researchers. According to a report published on Research and Markets, the field survey software market as of 2017, it was valued at $4.065 billion.
In another report published by MarketResearchFuture, the global enterprise software market is estimated to increase at approximately $634 billion by 2023. This at 8% of CAGR between 2017 and 2023. This is the reason why choosing the best market research platform is very important.
How to Choose the Best Field Market Research Platform
As the popularity of automated software for research increases, so does the amount of emerging research platforms. However, not every platform for market research is productive for fieldwork market research. Here are the factors to consider when choosing among the available options:
- If the platform is a cloud-based field survey software: Cloud-based software is accessible at all times from all the devices, which makes them preferred solutions for many market research agencies.
- How many features the software has: If the platform has many features integrated together, you will need just one tool for all market research needs. In addition to survey options, it is preferable to choose a platform that will allow you to perform retail audits and mystery shopping. Some comprehensive platforms like Checker Soft even include such features as recruitment, training, testing, and certification of mystery shoppers.
- Interface: If the platform provides a user-friendly interface with an easy system, your team will actually use it and you will be able to oversee every step of your project. The software that gives you the option of customizing your dashboard to suit your preferences or set up end-client dashboards would be a superior choice.
- Project management: It is a field survey software that provides a unified and seamless operational workflow. All results and findings should be saved and clearly displayed on your dashboard that will give you and your clients easy access to all the project details and reports
- Survey options: A software should let you control the whole survey process and facilitate each step from the creation of questionnaires to the branding of your survey and validation of results. It is also important for a platform to support all kinds of surveys including phone and SMS surveys, online and field surveys.
Conclusion
There are many green flags for field survey software. What works best for you will depend on who you are trying to reach, your budget and your product. You need to find the most cost-effective method for your business plan. Having the necessary platform for market research will put you ahead of your competitors and help to better understand your client base.
Originally published at https://www.itechfy.com on January 15, 2018.