Market research can open your eyes to many things. The results from the research often show marketers that they’ve been viewing things from the wrong perspective. Even if you think that you had a marvelous product launch and that your services are the perfect fit, this type of research can show you the many flaws in your work.
Knowing the flaws also shows you ways to improve them. Eventually, this should help you boost your SaaS sales, your image on the market, and your user onboarding process.
It could very well be that you are targeting the wrong audience for your product. You could also learn that it’s simply not the right timing for the product launch. Market research provides you with invaluable information on costs and prices and helps you find ways to maintain a competitive edge.
They are simply many reasons why market research is important for your business growth. Below you will find some areas where this can improve your strategies and significantly boost those sales. Before we get into that, let’s consider how you should perform your market research.
The right way to research the market
Diving into the market blindly is not a smart idea. Before you do this, it’s good to research the market. Performing the right kind of research is crucial to this part. You wouldn’t want to spend all of that time, money, and effort just to end up with the wrong information.
Attest, a trending solution for performing all kinds of research and analytics for businesses, has a great guide on how to do market research for startups. According to them, picking the right research methods is the key to success. They differentiate between two types of methods: primary and secondary.
Primary data includes the information you gather from people who show interest in using your product or service. Attest’s surveys make this quite simple – you can use them on focus groups or individuals to get a better understanding of what they need.
Secondary research is when you check the data that is already out there in the world. You are not coming up with the results with surveys and interviews, but checking what’s already known about your industry on sites like Google Trends.
Both kinds can be super useful for your brand. Secondary research is great for figuring out what is trending in the industry in general. Primary research is more focused on your brand and your product, which makes both important in different stages of your product development and sales.
How this can boost your SaaS sales
We’ve arrived at the main purpose of conducting market research – boosting sales. Below you’ll find the ways in which good market research can improve your brand’s image, performance, and increase sales.
1. Improve your SaaS branding
Don’t you want to learn how your brand looks in the eyes of customers? We often have no idea how others perceive our work and our products. Getting such information gives us a great advantage and shows how we can stack up against the competition.
Market research is amazing for this. You can use it to boost your SaaS branding by exploring things like competitive comparisons, brand awareness, personification, etc.
Competitive comparisons show how people view your SaaS product in comparison with products by the competition. Brand awareness shows you if people are familiar with your product or brand, how many of them know about it, and how much they know. Personification refers to the traits that are associated with your brand.
To gather information on these points, you can convey different types of research. Primary research is great for this. You can use surveys to gather their feedback on your product, your website, your social media presence, etc. This will show you if they recognize your brand and your logo, if they like your product over others in the SaaS industry, and show you how they relate to it.
The trickiest of them all is probably personification research. You need to ask the right questions to receive honest and insightful answers.
Ashokcharan has a great guide on how to research personification. They say that: “it is far easier to relate to people, so by describing the brand as a person, it becomes easier to articulate what the brand is about”. They also offer some examples of how personification research works:
2. Better understand your customers
Do you need more and better information about your buyer persona? Knowing who you are targeting, what they need, where they hang out, how much they are willing to spend, what triggers them to buy, and much more – helps you develop a better sales strategy.
This is also where market research can help you – and tremendously for that matter.
By performing market research, both primary and secondary, you can learn a lot about the people who are interested in your kind of SaaS product. You’ll learn about their age, gender, location, education level, preferences, marital status, budget, social media preference, etc.
In their guide on how to use market research to better understand customers, Market Research lists three essential primary research tools: surveys, focus groups, and ethnographic studies. All these give you actionable information on how you can attract, impress, and convince your target buyers to make a purchase.
3. See how effective your current strategies are
In today’s highly digitalized world, it’s only natural that you want to promote your brand online. This is especially important for the SaaS brand. Where else would you promote your products if not on the Internet?
To do this well, you need a great marketing strategy. You might have one that sounds amazing and you spent a lot of time planning and executing, but do you know if it actually works?
Market research can give you the answer to this – and much more. It can provide you with accurate data on how well your marketing efforts are paying off. You won’t just learn if people are responding to your marketing strategy, but you’ll also learn what works and what doesn’t.
While you can determine the success of your strategy by looking at stats such as the number of sales, views, clicks, or shares, none of that will tell you what you should do to improve or which area of your strategy needs improvement. That’s what market research is for.
4. Identify fresh opportunities for growth
Researching the market will help you detect new market opportunities, possibly even before the competition. This surely helps you stand out.
By performing research, you can see which geographic regions are promising for expansion. You can see if the market is currently ready for updates or new products and services.
Let’s see an example of this. Say you want to promote a new SaaS product and it needs to target a specific location. Information on demographics, market size, industry dynamics, competition, industry suppliers, and market share stats can give you all the tools you need to make the decision. It will also give you an idea of how people will respond to your product launch, what information they’ll need, and how you can grab their attention.
5. Learn if you should include new product features
Businesses often fail because they invest in the wrong thing. Whether it is an update that your product didn’t need, a feature that isn’t much needed by your customers, or something that costs more than you can earn with it – you are doomed to fail unless you have the right data.
Before you commit to huge production or upgrade costs, you should perform some research. Gather customer feedback on prototypes and concepts to see how people respond to your fresh idea. Showing your product or change to people and allowing them to test the new design, look, or usability can provide you with amazing feedback.
If you decide to proceed with the idea and include the new feature or update, research data will show you what you need to change and improve to optimize its performance.
Some good methods for collecting such data are focus groups and interviews where you’ll get feedback from consumers. You might even want to provide a free trial or prototype of your SaaS product.
6. Gives you a competitive advantage
Competitive advantage includes plenty of things such as better value, better price, better product, better packaging, etc. It can also include wider reach and larger distribution, better marketing strategies, and ads.
You can gain a competitive advantage because your idea was unique or you grabbed the attention of the audience with your marketing strategy. However, you shouldn’t base this only on luck. If you want to achieve better results and boost your chances, you should work to determine which advantage is good for your business.
In this case, you should research your competition. Competitor analysis is usually based on secondary research, while it doesn’t hurt to ask your customers about it, either.
Either way, this will tell you what options you have available, how and when to introduce your new features or products, and how to promote them.
Market research can potentially have an enormous impact on your brand. It can boost sales because it improves your marketing strategies, tells you how to improve your product, and shows you what the audience needs.
