What Is Market Research?
Market research is one of the most essential tools for financial advisors to create a successful financial advisor marketing plan. You can make informed decisions about how you market your services and products by understanding market trends, market conditions, client preferences and competitor activity within the financial services industry.
Benefits of Market Research
Market research is invaluable for firms looking to maximise growth and profitability. With the help of research, you can comprehensively understand your target market and make informed decisions based on clients’ needs and preferences, resulting in higher client retention and increased financial lead generation.
Growth opportunities
You can uncover growth opportunities, identify potential market segments, develop effective marketing plans, and optimise your services and products by conducting research. This can also be used to measure client satisfaction levels and assess the effectiveness of existing business strategies.
A better understanding of your audiences
Market research is particularly useful when it comes to launching new services or products. By using research data, firms can better understand the needs and preferences of their audience to create a service or product tailored specifically to meet those needs. This helps ensure that the service or product will be successful once it is released into the market.
Additionally, research allows financial firms to predict client demand for a new service or product before it is launched. This helps you set realistic goals and expectations for launching a new strategy.
Overall, market research provides a wealth of information that helps financial advisors make more informed decisions about their strategies and operations, which is essential for business success.
With the insights gained from market research data, firms are better equipped to identify opportunities for growth, develop effective marketing strategies and optimise their service or product based on client feedback – all of which will lead to increased sales and profitability over time.
There are several types of market research that financial advisors should consider when developing their marketing strategies:
1. Primary market research
Primary market research is vital to understanding and staying closer to your clients. It’s invaluable for gaining insights into client behaviour, preferences, opinions, and needs. It can typically be conducted directly with clients through conversations or surveys. This helps you gain insight into client needs and expectations, as well as the market size and competition.
2. Secondary market research
Secondary market research uses existing sources such as industry publications, reports or public records to gain insights into the market. This type of research can help you understand market trends and potential market opportunities.
3. Qualitative market research
Qualitative market research is used to understand client attitudes, motivations, and perceptions about your services or brand. Through exploratory questions, in-depth conversations and observation, you are able to uncover the motivations and behaviours that lead clients to engage with your brands and products. Qualitative research provides an opportunity for financial firms to understand the wants and needs of clients on a deeper level, allowing them to build relationships that foster loyalty.
4. Quantitative market research
Quantitative market research focuses on collecting numerical data to measure client behaviour and preferences in the market. You use this data to understand your target audience better and make informed decisions about your marketing strategies.
By leveraging the different types of research available, you can identify opportunities for growth, develop effective marketing plans and make informed decisions about how to market your services. Research is essential for maximising your marketing efforts and creating a successful plan.
How to conduct market research
Market research is crucial to maximising your marketing efforts when creating a successful plan. There are several steps that you can take to ensure they have the most comprehensive market research data available:
1. Identify the market
The first step of market research is to understand your market fully. This includes understanding your target audience, their needs and preferences, and the market size and competition.
2. Set objectives
Once you’ve identified the above, it is important to set clear objectives for market research. These should include the type of data you expect to collect and any specific questions or insights you would like to gain from conducting market research.
3. Design a data collection plan
Once objectives are established, it is important to design a comprehensive data collection plan that outlines the steps involved in collecting market data. This could include surveys, focus groups, interviews or existing sources such as industry reports. It is also important to determine what tools will be used to analyse and store data collected during market research.
4. Collect data
After designing a data collection plan and setting objectives for market research, it’s time to start collecting data. Depending on the type of research being conducted, this could involve surveying clients or prospective clients directly or gathering existing sources such as industry reports or public information. You should also consider utilising tools such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems or analytics software to analyse collected market data further.
5. Analyse findings
Once all of the market data has been collected and analysed, you need to evaluate your findings to draw meaningful conclusions about the target audience’s needs and preferences and any potential market opportunities for your service, products, or brand.
6. Take action
The final step in conducting market research is taking action based on the findings of your analysis. This could involve changing business strategies, developing new services and products, rebranding, or launching targeted marketing campaigns based on client needs and preferences identified through your research efforts.
By taking these steps when conducting market research, you can better understand their target audiences and make informed decisions about how you should position yourself in the marketplace in order to maximise sales and profits.
What Is Online Market Research?
Online market research involves collecting and analysing data and information from the internet to gain insights into trends, client preferences, and other industry conditions. This type of research utilises various online tools, techniques, and technologies to uncover valuable market insights that can help you make informed decisions about your products, services, marketing strategies, and more.
Website analytics
One of the most common types of online market research is website analytics which uses data collected from web visitors to gain insights into visitor behaviour on a website. Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics provide financial firms with useful information such as page views, time spent on a page, bounce rate, conversions, etc. This allows you to identify how users interact with your website and what areas need improvement or further optimisation.
Track online metrics
In addition to website analytics, another popular type of online market research is social media monitoring, which involves tracking conversations across various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to understand better client opinions about brands or topics related to your industry. By monitoring these conversations, your firm can gain valuable insight into current market trends and client sentiment towards certain services and products you offer.
Search engine optimisation
Finally, search engine optimisation (SEO) is another form of online market research which looks at how prospective clients find information about a business via search engines like Google or Bing. Optimising content for SEO best practices will improve your ranking in search engine results pages for certain keywords related to your service offering. This will help you reach more prospective clients who may be interested in using your services.
Overall online market research provides financial advisory firms with a wealth of actionable data that can be used to make informed decisions about service offerings and marketing strategies. By leveraging the power of online market research, you can identify opportunities for growth while also gaining a deep understanding of your target client’s needs and preferences, ultimately leading to improved sales performance over time.
What Are Paid Market Research Surveys?
Paid market research surveys are a type of research technique designed to uncover client feedback and opinions about services, products, or brand perceptions. Market research surveys typically involve asking people a series of questions via online or in-person interviews. These surveys are typically conducted to gain insights into the market and better understand what prospective clients think about certain topics.
The information collected through market research surveys will help financial firms make more informed decisions about product design and development, business strategy, advertising campaigns, pricing strategies, client service initiatives, and more. Additionally, market research surveys allow you to obtain useful data from your target market that can be used to create tailored marketing messages that appeal directly to your audience’s interests and needs.
There are two main types of paid market research surveys: Incentivised Surveys and Non-Incentivised Surveys:
Incentivised market research
Incentivised market research surveys offer respondents rewards such as a complementary initial meeting for completing the survey. In contrast, non-incentivised market research surveys do not offer any reward but instead rely on the respondent’s willingness to provide honest feedback without any incentive.
Incentivised market research surveys are often preferred by companies due to their higher response rates, as people are much more likely to complete the survey when given an incentive to do so. However, since there is typically an associated cost associated with offering an incentive in exchange for survey completion, there is also the risk that some respondents may provide false responses just for personal gain, which could lead to inaccurate data results.
Non-Incentivised market research
Non-Incentivised market research surveys are often preferred in situations where accuracy is paramount. The lack of incentives ensures that all respondents provide honest feedback without being influenced by outside factors, leading to more reliable results overall.
Overall, paid market research surveys provide a wealth of valuable data that allow firms to make more informed decisions about their operations based on client feedback directly from their target market audience, which is essential.
By leveraging the power of paid market research, financial firms can better understand client perceptions, preferences, and motivations, which helps them create tailored marketing messages and optimise their services and products accordingly – ultimately leading to increased sales performance over time.
The bottom line
Market research provides a wealth of information that helps financial advisors make more informed decisions about their strategies and operations, which is essential for business success.
With the insights gained from research data, financial firms are better equipped to identify opportunities for growth, develop effective marketing strategies and optimise their services or products based on client feedback – all of which leads to increased sales and profitability over time.
Ready to discuss how to keep your clients engaged and loyal?
Regular communications are key to creating the feeling of a personal connection that persuades clients to stay loyal. For more information about how Goldmine Media can help your firm, talk to a member of our Business Team on 0845 686 0055, or email: findoutmore@goldminemedia.co.uk.
Jack Reid, Digital PR and Creative Team Consultant,
Goldmine Media
