Ten marketing research tips and tools for strategy decisions

Do you want to increase sales, refine pricing, or boost your brand name awareness or branding position in a target audience? Can you quickly use marketing research tools to achieve that singular goal? You sure can, and here’s how.

1. Clarify the marketing strategy decisions you must make. Before you start, make sure you are clear about the marketing strategy and tactical decisions you face. Market research for decision-making won’t pay unless you take this important first step.

2. Think first about your marketing decisions.

 Think creatively; key decisions are at play. List the possible decisions, problems, and opportunities. These could involve pricing, product development, advertising, branding, brand image, or channels. Work with each. Hold off on the filters and judgments. In the beginning, put all ideas on the table. Allow incubation time.

3. Target the right problem or opportunity.
 
Take time to explode the marketing problem or opportunity. Reframe. Take a fresh view. Rarely is the surface problem the real marketing strategy issue or opportunity. For example, if you’re losing market share, it might be only a symptom. It could mean creeping product lag, a weak sales engine, undifferentiated branding or positioning, uncompetitive advertising copy or ad reach, or something even worse.

4. Begin now with a simple process that moves toward enhanced decisions, and eventually to market share growth.


 Opportunity scanning is the first of four classical decision stages. Start there.

5. Ask four key questions.


 Start with what you know right now. Use these simple questions:
• What do we know now about our markets, our market opportunities, and our own strategic and marketing goals?


• What are the best marketing and operational opportunities as we understand them now?
• How can we frame our marketing and strategic options based on what we know now?
• What do we need to know that we do not know now — about strengths, weaknesses, our products, our markets, and our customers?

6. Adopt a broad view of Marketing Intelligence.
 At Power Decisions Group, we use the Intelligence Platform with three components: data, ideas, and management drivers. Harvest each.




7. Pinpoint your decision-making stage to drive market research objectives and design.

 At each stage, ask, “Do we have solid marketing information, or is more market research needed?” Use the Decision-Research Matrix. This matrix links likely research tools to each of the four stages in the Decision Pathway.


8. Don’t fall in love with any one marketing research tool or technique, e.g. focus groups, online surveys.

 A strong method for one decision stage may be wrong for another. 



9. Build deep knowledge about your customer. Know the attitudes, behaviors, and product or service use system of your target market. 


The key to building loyalty is deep knowledge of your audience and their drivers of brand choice.

10. Use a Decision Agenda that is updated weekly: this will force you to surface, address, and clarify problems and opportunities as part of your regular management routine.