disadvantages of market research reports

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Overview Of Market Research Advantages & Disadvantages

As the global market becomes increasingly competitive, the significance of market research cannot be understated. Businesses today must understand their target audience, competitors, market trends, and more to gain a competitive edge.

Market research plays a crucial role in helping businesses make informed decisions and stay ahead in today’s competitive landscape. However, it’s essential to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of market research before investing considerable company time and resources.

In this article, we will explore the benefits and drawbacks of market research. We’ll also look at primary market research advantages, as well as those of secondary market research.

What Is Market Research 

Market research refers to the process of gathering and analysing data about customers, competitors, and market trends to gain insights and make informed business decisions. It helps businesses understand their target audience, identify opportunities, and develop effective marketing strategies.

Market Research Advantages

While there are advantages and disadvantages of market research, we’re going to focus on the advantages first. 

Market research offers several advantages for businesses seeking to thrive in the marketplace. By understanding the advantages, companies can leverage market research to gain a competitive edge. Let’s take a look at the main ones that you need to be aware of:

1) Informed decision making

One of the primary market research advantages is informed decision-making. By conducting thorough research, businesses gain valuable insights into customer preferences, needs, and behaviours.

This knowledge empowers them to make informed decisions regarding product development, pricing strategies , and marketing campaigns. With market research, businesses can identify market gaps, understand consumer demand, and tailor their offerings to meet customer needs.

2) Targeted marketing

Market research enables targeted marketing efforts. By understanding the target market, businesses can tailor their marketing messages and strategies to resonate with specific customer segments. This leads to more personalised and effective marketing campaigns, resulting in higher customer engagement and conversion rates. Market research helps businesses identify the most appropriate marketing channels, messaging, and positioning to reach their target audience effectively.

3) Gaining a competitive advantage

Market research provides businesses with a competitive advantage. By monitoring industry trends, customer preferences, and competitor strategies, companies can identify gaps in the market and develop unique selling propositions. This differentiation helps them stand out from the competition and attract customers. Market research enables businesses to stay updated on industry developments, anticipate market shifts, and proactively adapt their strategies to stay ahead.

Market Research Disadvantages

While there are important market research advantages, it’s equally important for businesses to be aware of the potential drawbacks. We’ll now examine common drawbacks that most organisations need to take into consideration:

1) Cost and Time

The first disadvantage is the cost and time involved. Conducting market research can be expensive and time-consuming , especially for small businesses with limited budgets and resources. The process involves data collection, analysis, and interpretation, which requires investments in terms of time, staffing levels, and technology. Small businesses may need to carefully allocate their resources to ensure an effective and efficient research process.

2) Data accuracy

The second disadvantage is the potential for data accuracy and reliability issues. The quality of market research data heavily relies on the data collection methods and sample size. If not conducted carefully, there is a risk of obtaining biased or inaccurate data, leading to faulty insights and misguided decisions.

Businesses need to ensure the use of reliable research methodologies , proper sampling techniques, and rigorous data analysis to minimise inaccuracies. 

3) Information overload

The third disadvantage is the potential for information overload. With the abundance of data available through market research, businesses may face the challenge of processing and analysing large volumes of information. Without proper analysis tools and expertise, it can be overwhelming to extract actionable insights from the data. Businesses need to focus on extracting the most relevant and meaningful insights from the research findings to guide their decision-making processes.

Does it Differ for Primary and Secondary Market Research?

There will be differences when it comes to the advantages and disadvantages of market research depending on whether you’re using primary or secondary market research . We’re going to consider these differences now.

Primary market research advantages & disadvantages

Primary market research involves collecting new data directly from the target audience. Let’s explore the pros and cons:

• Provides first-hand and specific data tailored to the research objectives.
• Allows businesses to gather unique insights directly from customers.
• Provides more control over the research process and data quality.
• Time-consuming and expensive compared to secondary research.
• Requires resources for survey design, data collection, and analysis.
• A limited sample size may not represent the entire target market.

Secondary market research advantages & disadvantages

Secondary market research involves analysing existing data and information. Here are the pros and cons:

• Cost-effective compared to primary research.
• Provides access to a wide range of existing data and industry reports.
• Allows for quick analysis and benchmarking against competitors.
• May not provide specific or up-to-date information tailored to the research objectives.
• The reliability and accuracy of secondary data sources may vary.
• Limited control over the data collection process.

How WatchMyCompetitor Can Solve Your Market Research Problems

WatchMyCompetitor is a competitor intelligence platform that helps businesses track their competitors’ global digital footprint in real-time. The platform provides a wealth of information, including the following:

• Social media engagement
• Product and pricing changes
• Marketing campaigns
• Press coverage

This information can be used to identify competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, track their progress, and develop strategies to stay ahead of the competition.

Here are some of the ways that WatchMyCompetitor can solve market research problems for businesses:

– Identifying competitors : WatchMyCompetitor can help businesses identify new competitors, both direct and indirect. This is important for businesses that want to stay ahead of the competition and identify new opportunities.

– Understanding competitors’ strategies : The platform can help businesses understand their competitors’ strategies, including their product development, marketing, and pricing strategies. This information can be used to develop strategies to compete effectively.

– Tracking competitors’ progress : WatchMyCompetitor can help businesses track their competitors’ progress, including their website, social media engagement, and products. This information can be used to identify opportunities to improve your own business.

– Developing strategies to stay ahead of the competition : Finally the platform can help organisations develop strategies to stay ahead of the competition. It does this by helping businesses identify new opportunities, develop new products and services and optimising existing marketing and sales strategies.

Overall, WatchMyCompetitor is a powerful platform that can help businesses solve market research problems. By providing a wealth of information about competitors, the platform can help businesses identify strengths and weaknesses, track progress, and develop strategies to stay ahead of the competition.

Final Thoughts 

Market research provides significant advantages for businesses, such as informed decision-making, targeted marketing, and a competitive edge. However, it’s crucial to consider the potential disadvantages, including cost, data accuracy, and information overload.

By leveraging primary and secondary research methods effectively, and utilising tools like WatchMyCompetitor, businesses can maximise the benefits of market research and drive their success in the marketplace.

FAQs About Market Research Advantages & Disadvantages

1) why is market research important for my business.

Market research provides insights into your customers’ needs and preferences, competitive landscape, market trends, and more. These insights can guide your business strategy, from product development to branding and marketing, helping you make informed decisions and increase business success.

2)How can I overcome the disadvantages of Market Research?

You can overcome these disadvantages by planning your research efficiently, outsourcing to professionals, using a mix of primary and secondary research, and utilizing technology to manage and analyze data.

3) Can small businesses also conduct market research?

Yes, small businesses can and should conduct market research. While budget may be a concern, there are cost-effective ways to conduct market research such as online surveys, utilizing free or affordable data analysis tools, and conducting simple competitor analysis.

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4) What are some of the most common market research methods?

Some of the most common market research methods include:

• Focus groups
• Online research
• Social media research

5) What are some of the ethical considerations of market research?

Market research can be a powerful tool, but it is important to use it ethically. Some of the ethical considerations of market research include:

• Obtaining informed consent from participants
• Protecting the confidentiality of participants’ data
• Avoiding deception or manipulation
• Using market research for good, not for harm

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What is a Marketing Research Report and How to Write It?

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There is nothing more embarrassing for a marketer than to hear a client say “…this doesn’t quite address the business questions that we need to answer.” And unfortunately, this is a rather common occurrence in market research reporting that most marketers would care to admit.

So, why do most market research reports fail to meet client expectations? Well, in most cases, because there is more emphasis on methodology and analytic techniques used to craft the report rather than relying on data visualization, creative story-telling, and outlining actionable direction/steps.

Now, our next big question is, how do you avoid your client’s dreaded deer-in-the-headlights reaction when presenting such a report? This blog post will answer this and much more, as we go through the following:

What Is a Market Research Report?

Why is market research important, differences between primary and secondary market research, types of market research, market research reports advantages and disadvantages, how to do market research, how to prepare a market research report: 5 steps, marketing research report templates, marketing research reports best practices, bring your market research reports a step further with databox.

The purpose of creating a market research report is to make calculated decisions about business ideas. Market research is done to evaluate the feasibility of a new product or service, through research conducted with potential consumers. The information obtained from conducting market research is then documented in a formal report that should contain the following details:

• The characteristics of your ideal customers
• You customers buying habits
• The value your product or service can bring to those customers
• A list of your top competitors

Every business aims to provide the best possible product or service at the lowest cost possible. Simply said, market research is important because it helps you understand your customers and determine whether the product or service that you are about to launch is worth the effort.

Here is an example of a customer complaint that may result in more detailed market research:

Suppose you sell widgets, and you want your widget business to succeed over the long term. Over the years, you have developed many different ways of making widgets. But a couple of years ago, a customer complained that your widgets were made of a cheap kind of foam that fell apart after six months. You didn’t think at the time that this was a major problem, but now you know it.

The customer is someone you really want to keep. So, you decide to research this complaint. You set up a focus group of people who use widgets and ask them what they think about the specific problem. After the conducted survey you’ll get a better picture of customer opinions, so you can either decide to make the changes regarding widget design or just let it go.

PRO TIP: How Well Are Your Marketing KPIs Performing?

Like most marketers and marketing managers, you want to know how well your efforts are translating into results each month. How much traffic and new contact conversions do you get? How many new contacts do you get from organic sessions? How are your email campaigns performing? How well are your landing pages converting? You might have to scramble to put all of this together in a single report, but now you can have it all at your fingertips in a single Databox dashboard.

Our Marketing Overview Dashboard includes data from Google Analytics 4 and HubSpot Marketing with key performance metrics like:

• Sessions . The number of sessions can tell you how many times people are returning to your website. Obviously, the higher the better.
• New Contacts from Sessions . How well is your campaign driving new contacts and customers?
• Marketing Performance KPIs . Tracking the number of MQLs, SQLs, New Contacts and similar will help you identify how your marketing efforts contribute to sales.
• Email Performance . Measure the success of your email campaigns from HubSpot. Keep an eye on your most important email marketing metrics such as number of sent emails, number of opened emails, open rate, email click-through rate, and more.
• Blog Posts and Landing Pages . How many people have viewed your blog recently? How well are your landing pages performing?

Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics and HubSpot Marketing experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template that contains all the essential metrics for monitoring your leads. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your HubSpot and Google Analytics 4 accounts with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Marketing research requires both primary and secondary market research. But what does that mean and what are the main differences?

Primary market research takes in information directly from customers, usually as participants in surveys. Usually, it is consisted of:

• Exploratory Primary Research – This type of research helps to identify possible problem areas, and it’s not focused on discovering specific information about customers. As with any research, exploratory primary research should be conducted carefully. Researchers need to craft an interviewing or surveying plan, and gather enough respondents to ensure reasonable levels of statistical reliability.
• Specific Primary Research – This type of research is one of the best ways to approach a problem because it relies on existing customer data. Specific research provides a deeper, more thorough understanding of the problem and its potential solutions. The greatest advantage of specific research is that it lets you explore a very specific question, and focus on a specific problem or an opportunity.

Secondary market research collects information from other sources such as databases, trend reports, market or government statistics, industry content, etc. We can divide secondary market research into 3 categories:

• Public market data – Public sources range from academic journals and government reports to tax returns and court documents. These sources aren’t always easy to find. Many are available only in print in libraries and archives. You have to look beyond search engines like Google to find public source documents.
• Commercial data – Those are typically created by specialized agencies like Pew, Gartner or Forrester. the research agencies are quite expensive, but they provide a lot of useful information.
• Internal data – Your organization’s databases are gold mines for market research. In the best cases, your salespeople can tell you what they think about customers. Your salespeople are your direct sources of information about the market. Don’t underestimate your internal data.

In general, primary research is more reliable than secondary research, because researchers have to interview people directly. But primary research is expensive and time-consuming. Secondary research can be quicker and less expensive.

There are plenty of ways to conduct marketing research reports. Mostly, the type of research done will depend on your goals. Here are some types of market research often conducted by marketers.

Focus Groups

Product/service use research, observation-based research, buyer persona research, market segmentation research, pricing research, competitive analysis research, customer satisfaction and loyalty research, brand awareness research, campaign research.

An interview is an interactive process of asking and answering questions and observing your respondent’s responses. Interviews are one of the most commonly used tools in market research . An interview allows an organization to observe, in detail, how its consumers interact with its products and services. It also allows an organization to address specific questions.

A focus group is a group of people who get together to discuss a particular topic. A moderator leads the discussion and takes notes. The main benefit of focus groups is that they are quick and easy to conduct. You can gather a group of carefully-selected people, give them a product to try out, and get their feedback within a few hours/days.

Product or service use research helps you obtain useful information about your product or service such as:

• What your current customers do with the product/service
• Which features of the product/service are particularly important to your customers
• What they dislike about the product/service
• What they would change about the product/service

Observation-based research helps you to observe your target audience interacting with your product or service. You will see the interactions and which aspects work well and which could be improved. The main point is to directly experience the feedback from your target audience’s point of view.

Personas are an essential sales tool. By knowing your buyers’ pain points and the challenges they face, you can create better content, target messaging, and campaigns for them. Buyer persona research is based on market research, and it’s built around data that describes your customers’ demographics, behaviors, motivations, and concerns. Sales reporting software can significantly help you develop buyer personas when you gain insights after you collected all information.

Market segmentation research is carried out to better understand existing and potential market segments. The objective is to determine how to target different market segments and how they differ from each other. The three most important steps in writing a market segmentation research report are:

• Defining the problem
• Determining the solution [and]
• Defining the market

Related : 9 Customer Segmentation Tips to Personalize Ecommerce Marketing and Drive More Sales

A price that is too high, or too low, can kill a business. And without good market research, you don’t really know what is a good price for your product. Pricing research helps you define your pricing strategy.

In a competitive analysis, you define your “competition” as any other entity that competes with you in your market, whether you’re selling a widget or a piece of real estate. With competitive analysis research, you can find out things like:

• Who your competitors are
• What they’ve done in the past
• What’s working well for them
• Their weaknesses
• How they’re positioned in the market
• How they market themselves
• What they’re doing that you’re not

Related : How to Do an SEO Competitive Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide

In today’s marketplace, companies are increasingly focused on customer loyalty. What your customers want is your product, but, more importantly, they want it delivered with a service that exceeds their expectations. Successful companies listen to their customers and respond accordingly. That’s why customer satisfaction and loyalty research is a critical component of that basic equation.

Related : 11 Tactics for Effectively Measuring Your Customer Service ROI

Who you are, what you stand for, what you offer, what you believe in, and what your audience thinks of you is all wrapped up in brand. Brand awareness research tells what your target audience knows about your brand and what’s their experience like.

A campaign research report is a detailed account of how your marketing campaign performed. It includes all the elements that went into creating the campaign: planning, implementation, and measurement.

Here are some of the top advantages and disadvantages of doing market research and crafting market research reports.

• Identify business opportunities – A market research report can be used to analyze potential markets and new products. It can give information about customer needs, preferences, and attitudes. Also, it compare products and services.
• A clear understanding of your customers – A market report gives company’s marketing department an in-depth picture about customers’ needs and wants. This knowledge can be used to improve products, prices, and advertising.
• Mitigates risks – 30% of small businesses fail within the first two years. Why is this so? The answer is that entrepreneurs are risk takers. However, there are risks that could be avoided. A good marketing research will help you identify those risks and allow you to mitigate them.
• Clear data-driven insights – Market research encompasses a wide range of activities, from determining market size and segment to forecasting demand, and from identifying competitors to monitoring pricing. All of these are quantified and measurable which means that gives you a clear path for building unique decisions based on numbers.

Disadvantages

• It’s not cheap – Although market research can be done for as little as $500, large markets like the United States can run into millions of dollars. If a research is done for a specific product, the budget may be even much higher. The budget also depends on the quality of the research. The more expensive it is, the more time the research will take.
• Some insights could be false – For example, if you are conducting a survey, data may be inadequate or inaccurate because respondents can, well, simply be dishonest and lie.

Here are the essential steps you need to take when doing market research:

Define your buyer persona

Identify a persona group to engage, prepare research questions for your market research participants, list your primary competitors, summarize your findings.

The job of a marketing persona is to describe your ideal customer and to tell you what they want, what motivates them, what frustrates them, and what limits them. Finding out these things means you have a better chance of designing your products, services, marketing messages, and brand around real customers. There is no one right way to create a buyer persona, though.

For example, if you’re in an industry focused on education, you could include things like:

• Educational level
• Education background

It’s recommended that you create 3-5 buyer personas for your products, based on your ideal customer.

This should be a representative sample of your target customers so you can better understand their behavior. You want to find people who fit both your target personas and who represent the broader demographic of your market. People who recently made a purchase or purposefully decided not to make one are a good sample to start with.

The questions you use determine the quality of your results. Of course, the quality of your results also depends on the quality of your participants.

Don’t ask questions that imply a yes or no answer. Instead, use open questions. For example, if you are researching customers about yogurt products, you could ask them: „ What have you heard about yogurt ?” or “ What do you think of yogurt ?“.

Avoid questions that use numbers, such as “ How many times a week do you eat yogurt ?”

Avoid questions that suggest a set of mutually exclusive answers, such as “ Do you like yogurt for breakfast, lunch, or dinner ?”

Avoid questions that imply a scale, such as “ Do you like chocolate-flavored yogurt ?”

Market researchers sometimes call one company the top competitor, another middle competitor, and the third one small competitor. However you classify them, you want to identify at least three companies in each category. Now, for each business on your list, list its key characteristics. For example, if your business sells running shoes, a key characteristic might be the product’s quality.

Next, make a list of your small business’s competitive advantages. These include the unique qualities or features of your business that make it the best choice of customers for the products or services it offers. Make a list of these competitive advantages and list them next to the key characteristics you listed for your business.

You have just finished writing your marketing research report. Everything is out there quantified or qualified. You just have to sum it up and focus on the most important details that are going to make a big impact on your decisions. Clear summary leads to a winning strategy!

Related : How to Prepare a Complete Marketing Report: The KPIs, Analysis, & Action Plan You Need

Here’s how to prepare a market research report in 5 simple steps:

Step 1: Cluster the data

Step 2: prepare an outline, step 3: mention the research methods, step 4: include visuals with narrative explanations, step 5: conclude the report with recommendations.

Your first step is to cluster all the available information into a manageable set. Clustering is the process of grouping information together in a way that emphasizes commonalities and minimizes differences. So, in market research, this will help to organize all the information you have about a product, service, or target market and identify your focus areas.

A marketing research report should be written so that other people can understand it:

• Include background information at the beginning to explain who your audience is and what problem you are trying to solve for them.
• In the body of the report, include a description of the methodology – Explain to the reader how your research was done, what was involved, and why you selected the methodology you used.
• Also in the body of the report, include the results of your market research. These may be quantitative or qualitative, but either way they should answer the questions you posed at the beginning.
• Include the executive summary – A summary of the entire report.

The market research methodology section includes details on the type of research, sample size, any limitations of the studies, research design, sample selection, data collection procedures, and statistical analyses used.

Visuals are an essential part of the presentation. Even the best-written text can be difficult to understand. Charts and graphs are easier to understand than text alone, and they help the reader see how the numbers fit the bigger picture.

But visuals are not the whole story. They are only one part of the presentation. Visuals are a cue for the reader. The narrative gives the story, not just the numbers.

Recommendations tend to follow logically from conclusions and are a response to a certain problem. The recommendation should always be relevant to the research rationale, that is, the recommendation should be based on the results of the research reported in the body of the report.

Now, let’s take a look at some dashboard reporting templates you could use to enhance your market research:

• Semrush (Position Tracking) Report

Brand Awareness Report

Sales pipeline performance report, customer success overview report, stripe (mrr & churn) report, semrush (position tracking) report template.

This free SEMRush dashboard template will help you monitor how your website’s search visibility on search engines evolves on a monthly basis. This dashboard contains all of the information you need to make changes and improve the ranking results of your business in Google Search.

This Brand Awareness Report will help you to get a sense of your brand awareness performance in Google Analytics, Google Organic Search, and Facebook. Use this dashboard to track brand awareness the same way you track other marketing campaigns.

Are your sales and marketing funnel healthy and growing? How is your sales and marketing funnel performing? What are the key conversion rates between your lifecycle stages? With a pipeline performance dashboard , you’ll get all of the answers quickly.

This Customer Success Overview Dashboard allows you to analyze how your customer service team’s responsiveness impacts your business. Use this dashboard to assess the correlation between your customer service performance and churn rate. 

This Stripe dashboard tracks your churn rate and MRR growth in real-time and shows you which customers (and how many of them) you have at any given point in time. All you have to do to get started is to connect your Stripe account.

As we said earlier, there are no strict rules when it comes to writing marketing research reports. On the other hand, you must find your focus if you want to write a report that will make a difference. Here are some best practices you should keep in mind when writing a research report.

• Objectives – The objective of a market research report is to define the problems, identify key issues, and suggest recommendations for further research. If you answer them successfully, you’re on the right way.
• Don’t worry about the format – Be creative. The report could be in a form of a PowerPoint presentation, Excel sheet, interactive dashboard or even a video. Use the format that best fits your audience, but make sure to make it easy to read.
• Include an executive summary, scorecard , or a dashboard – This is really important because time is money, and most people don’t have time to waste. So, how to put everything important in a short role? Address all of the objectives and put them in a graphic dashboard or scorecard. Also, you can write an executive summary template (heart of the report) that can be easily updated and read by managers or CEOs.
• Use storytelling –  A good story always makes a great point because it’s so memorable. Your research report results can double the effect with a catchy story.
• Keep it short – It’s not a secret that we are reading so little in the digital era. Use a lot of white space and bullet points. Too much text on a page means less focus for the reader.
• Be organized – Maintain the order of information. It’s important for the reader to navigate through the report easily. If they want to find some details or specific information it would be great to divide all sections with appropriate references.
• Methodological information – Methodological details could be boring. Include only the most important details that the reader needs to know to understand the big picture.
• Use images (or other visualizations) whenever you can – A good picture speaks for 1.000 words! If you can communicate the point visually, don’t hesitate to do it. It would be a lot easier for those who don’t like a lot of text to understand your results. But don’t push them where you can’t.
• Create readable graphs – The crown of marketing research reports is a comprehensive graph. Make sure to design precise and attractive graphs that will power up and round your story.
• Use the Appendix  – You can include all secondary information such as methodological details and other miscellaneous data in the Appendix at the end of the report.

Market research reports are all about presenting your data in an easy-to-understand way and making calculated decisions about business ideas. But this is something easier said than done.

When busy stakeholders and executives grab a report, they need something that will give them an idea of the results – the big picture that addresses company wide-business goals.

Can a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF report meet those expectations? Most likely not. But a dashboard can.

Keep in mind that even with the best market analysis in the world, your market research report won’t be actionable if you don’t present the data efficiently and in a way that everyone understands what the next steps are. Databox is your key ally in the matter.

Databox dashboards are designed to help you present your market research data with clarity – from identifying what is influencing your business, and understanding where your brand is situated in the market, to gauging the temperature of your niche or industry before a new product/service launch.

Present your research results with efficient, interactive dashboards now by signing up for a free trial .

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What is a Marketing Research Report and How to Write It

In essence, a market research report is a document that reveals the characteristics of your ideal customers, their buying habits, the value your product or service can bring to them, and the list of your top competitors.

The marketing research report paints a picture of what kinds of new products or services may be the most profitable in today’s highly competitive landscape. For products or services already available, a marketing research report can provide detailed insights as to whether they are meeting their consumers’ needs and expectations. It helps understand the reasons why consumers buy a particular product by studying consumer behavior, including how economic, cultural, societal, and personal factors influence that behavior.

Furthermore, the purpose of writing a marketing research report is to make calculated decisions about business ideas – whether they’re worth pursuing or not. This requires one primary skill which is observing the pattern which is hidden in the User Generated Content (UGC) written in different tones and perspectives on the social web.

Simply put, writing a market research report is a vital part of planning business activities and serves as a neat way to assimilate all the information about your target market and prospective customers.

Now, there are two key varieties of marketing research report formats – primary and secondary.

Primary vs. Secondary Market Research

Let’s take a look at the main recipes of how to make a market research report in detail:

Primary Research

This method of marketing research involves gathering firsthand information about your market and prospective clients. You study your customers directly by conducting:

• Interviews (either by telephone or face-to-face)
• Surveys and polls (online or by email)
• Questionnaires (online or by email)
• Focus groups discussions with a sample of potential customers and getting their direct feedback

Some crucial questions that you need to ask your prospective customers in your primary research are:

• What are the factors that motivate you to purchase this product or service?
• What do you like or dislike about this type of product or service already available on the market?
• Are there any areas you’d like to suggest for improvement?
• What according to you is the appropriate price for this product or service?

Primary research also involves analyzing competitors’ strategies, so you can find gaps and weaknesses that you can turn into your strengths.

Secondary Research

The second method of writing a marketing research report is all about analyzing the data that has already been published and using the available information on the web. That is, secondary research is done from reliable reports and statistics found on the websites of other organizations or authority blogs in your industry.

Sources can be:

• Public: This includes all the free sources like social media and forums, Google Trends, YouGov, and government sources such as the United States Census Bureau.
• Commercial: This includes industry insights compiled by research agencies like Pew, Gartner, Forrester, and so on. Typically, these are paid.
• Internal: This is the historical market data your organization already has in-house, such as the Net Promoter Score, customer churn rate, and so on.

Secondary data can help you identify competitors, establish benchmarks, and determine target customer segments or demographics – people who live a certain lifestyle, their income and buying patterns, age group, location, etc.

Market Research Reports Advantages and Disadvantages

Before we discuss how to write a marketing research report, let’s quickly take a look at market research report benefits and also some of the limitations in marketing research reports.

Advantages of Market Research Report

Here are the top reasons why you should invest in creating a market research report.

1. Gives a Better Understanding of Your Customers

The answers to questions like who will buy your product, what are the customers’ pain points, what motivates their buying behavior, and so on will be effectively answered with a market research report. Essentially, it will help you map out the full profile of your ideal customer and consequently, allow you to create tailored products and marketing campaigns.

2. Helps Spot Business Opportunities

As already mentioned, market research will give you insights about your competitors’ strategies, so you can find gaps in their offerings that you can turn into your product’s strengths. You may also find other business opportunities such as potential partnerships with brands that sell complementary products, or an opportunity to better upsell or cross-sell your products. For example, a keyword research report from a SaaS SEO agency provides an opportunity to acquire organic search ranking by creating in-depth, high-converting, and funnel-oriented content.

3. Minimizes Risks

Starting or running a business is synonymous with risk. In fact, nearly half of all small businesses with employees don’t survive for more than five years. Conducting proper market research frequently will allow you to stay on top of trends, and not waste your efforts and resources in things that would likely be fruitless.

For instance, before you launch a new product, conducting market research gives you a much better idea of the demand for your product. Or if an existing product is seeing a big drop in sales, market research helps you determine the root cause of the issue.

4. Facilitates Data-Driven Decision Making

When it comes to business decisions – data over guesswork, always. So, based on your market research results, you can make more informed decisions regarding the pricing, distribution channels, and marketing budget of your products.

Disadvantages of Market Research Report

As with anything, there are a couple of downsides to conducting marketing research as well.

1. Could Be an Expensive Activity

Conducting a comprehensive, in-depth research is usually a costly activity in terms of both time and money. To research the right audience with the right questions requires you to invest a lot of time. If you wish to use data by commercial market research agencies or get help from one such agency in conducting primary research, be prepared to spend a substantial amount.

2. Insights Gathered Could Be Inadequate or Even Inaccurate

Another problem often faced in marketing research is a lack of respondents. While you can figure out who is your target audience, getting them to fill out surveys and questionnaires can indeed be challenging. Plus, you’re using data you collected for drawing conclusions, which may be unreliable.

For example, by the time you act on the data you collected, it may have become outdated. This translates into poor decision making and the whole process may become counterproductive.

How to Prepare Market Research Report

Now, here are some concrete steps and guidelines for writing a marketing research report.

Step 1: Cluster the Data

First off, compile all the relevant data you’ve accumulated from your primary and/or secondary research efforts. Survey results, interview answers, statistics from third-party sources – bring it all together and then analyze the information to sketch out the profile of your target market.

Step 2: Prepare an Outline

Next, create a skeleton of the report so that you understand what information will go where. An outline with sections and subsections will help you structure your marketing research report properly. A typical report includes an introduction, background and methodology, executive summary, results, and a conclusion with links to all references.

With an outline in front of you, start by writing the front matter of your report – an introduction that provides a brief overview of your business and the reason you conducted the market research. Include a summary of the market research process and the results you have analyzed. For instance, you might have been gauging the feasibility of a new product, so summarize that your market research report is for a new product launch.

Step 3: Mention the Research Methods

An important next step is to clearly mention the methods used to conduct the research. That is, if you conducted polls, specify the number of polls, the percentage of responses, the types of people or businesses targeted, and the questions included in the poll. Tag all the resources for demographic information, such as census data.

Step 4: Include Visuals With Narrative Explanation

Visuals such as charts and graphs are an important part of any research paper. They make sure that the findings are easy to comprehend.

So, create tables, graphs, and/or charts illustrating the results of the research. Accompany it with a narrative explanation of the visual data. Highlight the inferences you made based on this data.

Step 5: Conclude the Report With Recommendations

Finally, conclude your report with a section that lists actionable recommendations based on the research results to facilitate decision making. For example, all the numbers may point to the conclusion that your customers desire a particular feature that no other product on the market is currently offering. In this case, it is clear that it’s a good idea to invest your resources in providing that feature and gain a competitive edge.

At the very end of the report, include reference links to all the sources and an appendix for supplementary materials and further reading.

Marketing Research Report Templates

Before you go, check out some templates and samples you can use to better understand the marketing research report structure, and maybe even use them to kickstart your report instead of preparing one from scratch.

• Market Research Report for New Product Launch
• Market Research Report for Restaurant (competitor analysis)
• Social Media Market Research Report

Writing a marketing research report is a tried-and-true way to gain a solid understanding of your target audience and competitors while enabling you to make more informed decisions and minimize investment risks. Sure, it may take considerable time, effort, and even money to conduct thorough research and prepare a report, but when done well, the ROI of it all is well worth it.

Shahid Abbasi is a Senior SEO and Content Marketing Analyst at Growfusely, a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO.

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The Pros And Cons Of Market Research

by Hutch | Blog | 0 comments

Customers are at the heart of every marketing campaign. Marketing materials that fail to capture the attention of target customers will fail to lead to profit. Market research can identify which advertising messages are creating unique pain points in potential customers.

Targeted advertising messages can be adjusted to reach the exact individuals most likely to purchase a product or service. By creating customized marketing materials tailored to each customer type, companies can increase their chances of achieving outstanding business success.

This article will help you gather more information about the topic if you’re unfamiliar with market research. You’ll also learn how market research helps a business and what are the downsides of conducting this activity.

What Is Market Research?

Market research is the systematic approach to gather data on potential clients and target markets in an effort to understand them, beginning with who they are. It’s a significant factor in maintaining a competitive advantage and a key ingredient in business strategy.

Market research provides information that’s useful for decision-making and a base of knowledge about how to reach a large audience and build customer loyalty.

There are several ways a company can conduct market research. You can continue reading this to learn about comprehensive research methods. Here are also some of the ways businesses conduct market research:

Field Studies

Field studies rely on consumers’ descriptions of their shopping environment, like eating at a fast-food restaurant or visiting a boutique. Another widely used method is elicitation, where researchers go out into the marketplace and make direct observations of target customers, whether good and bad.

Representative Sampling

Representative sampling is another common type of market research. In this method, researchers randomly choose representative persons from the population; these represent the target consumers. These selected individuals are asked to fill out surveys.

These surveys give researchers valuable insights about buying decisions, such as how buyers decide what products to buy, why they make those decisions, and how much they want to buy.

Focus Groups

Another form of market research uses focus groups. Focus groups are homogenous groups that meet to discuss and exchange ideas. Participants of focus groups may be asked to share their views on a given topic and their overall impressions of a specific product.

These surveys allow researchers to obtain comprehensive information about how and why individual purchases are made and the attitudes and behaviors that guide buying decisions. But, because many purchasers are reluctant to share information, research groups can have low response rates.

Use Of Secondary Information

An alternative to surveys and focus groups is the use of secondary information. Secondary information comes from within the organization itself: from current workers, customers, or competitors. Secondary data can make adjustments to the market research approach that has already been conducted.

Secondary information can show where and how workers, customers, competitors, or other essential factors might have changed if the surveyor had completed the survey differently, for instance.

A straightforward way of collecting this data is to do a survey among your customers or employees. Just email them a link to a   survey form you’ve built on your website  and have them fill it in. A small reward – like a discount for customers, or cash for your workers – can increase response rates significantly.

What Are The Advantages Of Market Research?

Market research is one of the most critical and inevitable factors in every business. Here are ways market research can be beneficial:

Company Growth

Market research helps the company understand, analyze, evaluate, and pinpoint areas with the highest growth potential.

It plays a significant role in understanding consumer behavior or behavioral economics , preferences, buying behavior, and making changes based on the shifting change in all the critical factors of marketing like place, cost, promotion, and product.

With this information, the company can plan its promotion strategies accordingly to achieve its sales targets.

Increases Loyal Customer Base

Marketing research also helps in identifying the customers that have a high probability of increasing sales. This allows the company to build a new strategy to target these customers specifically for further growth.

For instance, it considers how people use a new product or how the current customers are using the product, how the market trends affect the development in terms of sales, how much demand there is for the product in the market, and others.

Development of Effective Marketing Strategies

Apart from analyzing the market trends and consumer behavior, market research also helps plan a marketing strategy. It helps in designing and executing a campaign accordingly that would ultimately help in increasing sales.

It’s also an effective way of understanding the present scenario and the product demands.

It can also provide information on which advertisements or marketing campaigns attracted the most customers and which are the ones that are not as effective. With this information, a business can avoid spending too much on campaigns that aren’t bringing many customers in.

What Are The Disadvantages Of Market Research?

Although market research has some significant advantages for companies, it also has some downsides. Some of the disadvantages of market research include:

One of the main reasons some businesses refuse to conduct market research is that it entails enormous costs. Market research can be intimidating for small companies after knowing all of the tools and processes needed to complete the activities.

It may be cost-effective to research independently, but it won’t benefit them in the long run because they don’t have the tools and strategies to gather essential data.

Targetting A Large Population

One of the challenges for market researchers is the lack of respondents for their studies. Asking people to answer surveys or forms can be tricky. That’s why it’s essential to conduct different strategies to gather as much information as needed for your market research.

Time-Consuming

A small business doesn’t conduct market research because it takes a considerable amount of time. Conducting market research entails a lot of preparation, and the gathering of data should be done extensively.

This is important because when you rush into doing the process, you might not have credible information to help your business.

Market research plays a vital role in businesses. Businesses need to develop a comprehensive understanding of their target market. Market research aims to know how consumers make buying decisions, what factors influence buying decisions, and how to create changes to increase product sales without significantly decreasing service or profit.

There are many methods you can use as part of your marketing research process.

You can ask people to take a survey or interview a focus group. You can also use the Internet, like using social media or Reddit as a marketing resource .

Market research has many advantages. It helps your company grow and become competitive as it finds effective marketing ways to attract more customers. However, market research also comes with a cost. That’s why many smaller businesses avoid conducting this activity because it can be expensive and time-consuming.

As a business owner, it’s essential to weigh out the advantages and disadvantages of doing market research.

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PWW Insights and Intelligence Blog

Published: July 23, 2019

Customer buying habits, needs and motivations are in many ways measurable, not mysterious. Today’s companies have more tools than ever to ground their innovative ideas with real market information — information revealing the feasibility of a new product or service as well as its roadmap to implementation.

Understanding the importance of market intelligence is the difference between strategic, competitive organizations turning their ideas into profit and those playing a continual guessing game. Before committing substantial resources — indeed, the future of your business — into the launch of a new product, service or branding endeavor, you must conduct intensive research into how customers will respond to that endeavor. Targeted market intelligence is how.

What Is Market Research?

Simply put, market research is when an organization identifies a specific set of information or questions they need to have answered to implement a successful and profitable business change.

This is a broad definition, and purposefully so. Market research is an expansive activity with numerous methodologies that can help a business do everything from launching new product packaging to picking music for commercials to converting customers away from the competition. Yet the purpose of performing market research is the same — to research and analyze the variables of a target goal or question, then create a business strategy informed by findings that’ll pave the way to that goal’s realization.

Using the benefits of market research, a company can better interpret:

• Customers , current or prospective.
• Markets , new or established, domestic or abroad.
• Competition , prevailing or up-and-coming.
• Products or services presently offered or in-the-works.
• Technology , public or private, emerging or existing.
• Entire industries , accounting for many of the variables above.

What Goes Into Thorough Market Research?

While the goals behind conducting market research vary for each enterprise, its overall process holds the same core steps:

• Outline the enterprise goals : Every good market research initiative begins by identifying your market research needs and goals . Organizations need to determine what information they truly require to answer a question, clarify indecision or better understand a business concept. Once compiled, that information helps build the roadmap for your market research methodologies.
• Bring in stakeholders : Identify the individuals and teams who have an interest in achieving a specific enterprise goal. Consider stakeholders those conducting the research as well as those who must receive, interpret and implement market research findings within their own domains to achieve that enterprise goal.
• Review budget allotment : Budget allowance influences what kinds of market intelligence methodologies can be conducted practically, as well as the length of analysis and additional resources or outside consultants to bring onboard.
• Identify necessary facilities and additional resources : Can market analysis be performed completely in-house, using internal information like company sales reports or accounting ledgers? Will surveys need to be drafted and disseminated? Do actual customers or the general public need to be brought in for a live focus group? Account for all facility and technical resources as early as possible.
• Conduct the research : Perform the market research methodology that gives the best chance to extract relevant, goal-solving information.
• Interpret results to make a business decision : Market research can unearth reams of quantitative and qualitative data your key stakeholders then chisel into actionable, effective enterprise solutions, levering market intelligence for its true function — better-run businesses.

What Industries Use Thorough Market Research?

It’s no exaggeration to say in today’s commercial world, nearly all industries deploy thorough market intelligence to their advantage. However, a handful of sectors see strategic gains in conducting continual benchmarking, monitorization and market entry or defense research:

1. Consumer Goods

From shoes to showerheads, smartphones to hair-styling products, everyday commercial goods make the consumer’s life tick. Retailers glean the vast benefits of market research to assist with new product testing, development, consumer segmentation, distribution benchmarking and more retail-centered market strategies .

2. Pharmaceuticals

The pharmaceutical industry is a heavily regulated, cost-competitive sector that undergoes near-constant evolution. Pharmaceutical companies keep pace by performing keen healthcare market intelligence studies into operational profitability and cost advantages, consumer beliefs, new treatment commercialization plans, current treatment and drug therapy development and by maintaining competitor profiles.

3. Technology

Our lives are increasingly dependent upon and tethered to software and hardware. This Internet of Things (IoT) reality drives the hyper-competitive tech industry to perform fluid research and development (R&D) initiatives, conduct pricing analyses, monitor product warranty and servicing metrics, understand their brand’s public perception, optimize consumer retention and user experience (UX) and much more.

4. Banking and Finance

Advances in financial technology, also called fintech, and other industry disruptors have catapulted financial service companies into a new era of competitive undertakings. Differentiation in banking and finance has never been more essential, with market research and intelligence providing service and operational advantages for retail and corporate banks, lending institutions, insurance providers, investment firms and more.

5. Manufacturing

Industrial and commercial manufacturing companies navigate an increasingly complex and profit-volatile industry. From performing threat assessments on domestic and international competition and profiling changing consumer material tastes to undergoing supply chain, production and distribution analyses, the disadvantages of not doing proper market research could spell life or death for those in this industry.

From petroleum-based oil and natural gas to the rapidly advancing renewables market, the energy sector carries both traditional and alternative offerings set to define how future societies run. Energy companies have a long list of reasons for conducting marketing research, beginning with understanding shifting consumer energy attitudes and tastes to developing profitable go-to-market strategies, fuel sourcing supply chains, brand and product evolution and much more.

7. Food and Beverages

The sheer variety of packaged foods and beverages available to today’s consumer alone warrants thorough market research. From individual convenience stores conducting layout analyses to see which shelving designs boost average basket sales to the beverage and snack manufacturers expanding their own consumer taste R&D studies, there’s no shortage of opportunities for market intelligence in the food industry.

Primary Versus Secondary Market Intelligence

While there are many market research methodologies for organizations to adopt, there are only two general categories those methods fall into — primary research or secondary research.

1. Primary Market Intelligence

Primary market research is studies or reports created by your organization, for your organization, using propriety information and specific research criteria aimed at addressing a focused business goal.

Proprietary information is the basis for overall analysis, allowing an organization to get precise, pinpointed answers on products, services, sales cycles, profitability and more. Examples of primary market intelligence research include:

• A mining equipment manufacturer conducting efficiency and output assessments on all its plants.
• An outdoor apparel label reviewing quarterly sales reports to identify the most successful product lines.
• An all-natural cosmetics company determining which new logo idea is most appealing to its customers.

2. Secondary Market Intelligence

As the name suggests, secondary research is non-proprietary, non-customized pieces of broad market research and industry analysis. It focuses not on a particular business’ products, services or brand perceptions, but instead on the larger trends and variables affecting an industry.

Trade associations, the government and third-party groups interested in industry activities are most often responsible for publishing secondary market research. Common secondary market intelligence examples might include:

• A report on Millennial smartphone browsing habits published by the Mobile Marketing Association.
• Public transportation ridership data produced by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
• Data on the top leisure spending habits in your state according to income bracket, published by the Pew Research Center.

What Are the Types of Market Research Intelligence?

Organizations have many options at their disposal to conduct thorough primary and secondary market research.

1. Consumer Brand Awareness Research

Brand awareness encompasses how widely recognizable your business is to target customers, as well as prospective consumers and desired markets. It’s an important tenet of a business’ overall marketing strategy and business growth likelihood since poor brand awareness correlates with smaller market shares and diminished growth outcomes .

Consumer brand awareness research identifies variables like:

• Brand identity : The words, phrases, descriptors and associations the general public ties to your company, positive or negative.
• Brand recognition : How quickly a consumer matches branded collateral — logos, color schemes, audio branding sounds, and more — to your business.
• Brand recall : The ability for the average consumer to name your products, business or collateral when discussing your industry.

2. Market Segmentation

Customer and market segmentation allow organizations to understand their customers better — plus identify segments with higher profit potential. Surveys and interviews with current and prospective consumers give insights into the values, habits, preferences, likes and dislikes of target populations, enabling an organization to morph their products or services to meet these motivations.

3. Research and Development (R&D)

R&D market research encompasses all the ways an organization tweaks and tailors their products according to market segmentation demands, cost-profit calculations and their overall brand identity. It allows a company to produce a superior product at a superior price point without sacrificing basic, profitable operational efficiencies.

R&D market research incorporates activities like:

• Packaging design and testing
• Product features and enhancements
• Actual product testing
• Product launch or re-launch improvements
• Post-launch product support

4. Advertising and Marketing Intelligence

Marketing research is pivotal to understanding what advertising channels, messages and platforms are your strongest, meaning they connect with audiences, generate the most leads, nurture the most loyalty and imbue the most brand identity. Advertising market intelligence lets you create campaigns and marketing tactics with proven, positive customer impact, saving significant time and resources.

5. Satisfaction and Loyalty Testing

Satisfaction and consumer loyalty are coveted — and measurable — markers that a consumer will return to your brand, time and time again. Loyal customers are also more likely to recommend your products or services to others, browse your website, make repeat purchases, interact with your social accounts, give positive online reviews and be open to cross or up-selling opportunities.

You can measure customer satisfaction and loyalty using surveys, focus groups and interviews identifying:

• Brand trust : How much consumers view your company as authentic, admirable, socially conscious and committed to its customers.
• Brand messaging : Are current advertising and marketing methods imbuing customers with the “personality” you want to be known for?
• Product or service appeal : Understanding what’s most important to the satisfaction of your customer — be that price, convenience, status, trendiness, safety or something entirely unique.

6. Market Pricing

Successful market pricing allows you to pinpoint how much target consumer segments would pay for a particular product with particular features. It involves a complementary blend of both primary and secondary research methods:

• Primary market-pricing intelligence gleans what aspects of your products, services or branding customers respond best to, and will, therefore, pay a premium to experience.
• Secondary market-pricing intelligence reveals what industry competitors charge for similar products or services, as well as generalized shifts in consumer tastes and values which inform product pricing. For example, the growing desire to be an eco-conscious consumer means certain segments will pay a dollar or two more for “green” goods compared to cheaper, non-green merchandise.

Top Marketing Research Methods for Businesses

The way an enterprise chooses to collect information, conduct research and compile data is known as its marketing research methodology. What type of methodology an organization adopts — as well as if it’s primary or secondary leaning — is a direct reflection of the strategic business decisions it wants insights into.

Organizations can conduct their market data collection using any of the following approaches:

1. Experimental Studies

Controlled experiments let researchers manipulate specific product, service, advertising or environmental variables, then measure how those manipulations affect the whole. This approach works particularly well during product R&D or pre-launch preparations and for advertising and market intelligence research.

For example, researchers can present multiple versions a piece of software or variations of a commercial, then let test participants fill out response surveys. Overall, measuring such variable differences in controlled settings helps signal what works well for a product or brand and what doesn’t.

Experimental market research can be done in two settings:

• Laboratory studies : Laboratory-tested market intelligence allows researchers to control nearly all product and environmental variables, therefore unearthing more quantitative, consistent findings. It works particularly well for commercial products, technology, food and beverages and is most often done with the assistance of a third-party research firm.
• Field studies : Field-testing market research takes place in real-life environments, such as in a retail store, manufacturing plant or an entire city. It’s great to test actual market conditions and feasibility of certain products, services or branding mechanisms, as well as experiment with price points and buyer intent before applying to larger settings.

2. Focus Groups

Focus groups are large, group interviews made up of pre-screened, volunteer consumers in target segments or relevant subject matter experts. Focus groups are a primary market research methodology ideal for extracting subjective or qualitative information about a brand or good — information that cannot be replicated in a trial-and-error lab setting.

Focus groups can be split into two categories:

• Quantitative-centered focus groups , where group members receive pre-written surveys or tests with standardized, numeric-based questions evaluated together after completing.
• Qualitative-centered focus groups , where group members are asked open-ended questions or given open-ended tasks for researchers to glean more subjective reactions and insights.

3. Primary Interviews

Primary interviews are one-on-one interviews conducted directly between researchers and a pre-screened candidate online, over the phone or face-to-face. That candidate has been selected for their congruence to your target consumer segments because they fit a market demographic or because they’re a subject matter expert who can lend interesting insights on market criteria.

4. UX Groups

User-experience groups are a subcategory of focus groups relevant for software, technology and some physical products. Members of UX groups are tasked with actually using a new product, often during the R&D phase. Using a mix of surveys, journals, individual and group interviews, researchers amass quantitative and qualitative data on the appeal of a product, from its user-friendliness to its actual task-enhancing ratings.

5. Benchmarking

Market intelligence benchmarking allows an organization to identify and measure targeted key performance indicators (KPIs) within their operations, then compare those to competitors. Nearly all businesses benchmark, but not all leverage benchmarked data into formal business growth plans to account for:

• Organizational structure comparisons
• Improved supply chain management
• Enhanced retail experiences and initiatives
• Refreshed sales strategies
• Overall cost reductions and maximized profitability

6. Internal Analyses

Completely internal market research turns a company’s attention inwards. It elevates static enterprise information into compelling and actionable ideas, ensuring your organization doesn’t collect data for the sake of collecting data — it wields it as a tool for innovation.

Internal data analyses can uncover trends and insights from:

• Product line data
• Accounting and financial planning spreadsheets
• Website and social media platform traffic
• Content-marketing analytics

7. External Analyses

Pure external analysis lets businesses understand the broader context behind an industry question or concern. Using only government publications, industry trade research and commercially available data, external analysis can review topics like:

• Regional or national market conditions, for risk-adjusted entry and defense.
• Emerging industry technology.
• Growing consumer trends, fears or behaviors related to their industry.
• Overall market or industry threats and disruptions.

Disadvantages of Not Doing Market Research

The importance of conducting market research goes beyond a few feel-good assessments. Market intelligence hands organizations a blueprint for creating the best version of themselves. Market research offers many benefits, and neglecting to do market research can hurt your company in several ways:

1. Never Learning Your Competitive Advantages

Businesses that know their strengths, capabilities and pain points are far better equipped to make strength-maximizing, risk-mitigating business decisions. It’s a form of self-awareness critical to creating strategic growth outcomes .

Market intelligence allows organizations to craft nearly every operation to their competitive advantage. It spotlights what processes or activities are currently on-brand, lean and successful while also identifying things your competitors might be doing you can integrate, siphoning customers, expanding your market share and furthering your competitive momentum along the way.

2. Forgoing Customer-Centric Marketing Models

Market intelligence lets organizations know what makes their customers tick. When done consistently, thorough customer and market segmentation become both an art and a science. Through customer-focused market research using focus groups, surveys, interviews, field studies and more, companies can glean new sales strategies, devise more impactful brand messages and advertisements and overall make keener investments into customer-facing platforms and touch points.

3. Increasing Strategic, Operational Risk

Instead of making decisions in the dark, performing market research grounds business decisions and reduces the chance of plans going awry. Organizations have precise insights into what works and what doesn’t, both internally and externally. Backed by this information, they can tweak processes and allocate resources to:

• Improve budget cycles
• Enhance decision-making ROI
• Speed up product or service times to market
• Develop stronger market entry or product launch strategies

4. Can’t Make Data-Backed Enterprise Decisions

Just because something has a number to it doesn’t mean it’s infallible. Yet data-backed enterprise decisions inspire more confidence since they’re composed of real-world, reliable data. Stakeholders, therefore, have more confidence in making business decisions, decisions which:

• Contain more preemptive, not reactive, plans, patterns and activities.
• Better predict the competition’s motivations and behaviors.
• Better predict customer’s motivations and behaviors.
• Mitigate risk and respond more effectively when market anomalies do occur.

5. Leaves Business Stones Unturned

It’s impossible for businesses to control every variable across all the inevitable changes in consumer expectations, technology, facilities, product and service lines, marketplace health and general society. With market research, though, business leaders can rest assured their organizations have done due diligence, keeping a pulse on these things as they happen — not after the fact.

What’s more, this “pulse” is scientifically validated, analyzed and put into effect in equally measurable installments — no cut corners, no sloppy implementation. Simply a well-run business crossing and T’s and dotting I’s before making significant strategic moves.

Gain the Advantages of Thorough Market Research With Proactive Worldwide

When an organization seeks new ways to be the best version of itself, Proactive Worldwide provides answers through globally renowned market strategy and analysis services committed to your exact goals.

Proactive Worldwide provides enterprise intelligence services and consulting in three core domains:

• Intelligence-Based Strategic Planning Services
• Competitive and Market Intelligence Consulting
• Customer Insights Research and Reports

Contact us today to see how intelligent market research can propel your organization to be where it should.

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The 8 types of market research: definitions, uses and examples.

13 min read What are the different types of market research that can help you stay ahead of the curve with your marketing strategy? Understand how to use each type, and what the advantages and disadvantages are.

Market research (also called marketing research) is the action or activity of gathering information about market needs and preferences. This helps companies understand their target market — how the audience feels and behaves.

There are 8 types of market research, each with their own methods and tools:

• Primary research
• Secondary research
• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Branding research
• Customer research
• Competitor research
• Product research

Let’s start our list by exploring primary and secondary research first.

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1. Primary research

Primary research is research that you collect yourself but going directly to the target market through a range of methods. Because it is data you create, you own the data set.

Two types of results — exploratory information (determines the nature of a problem that hasn’t yet been clearly defined) and conclusive information (carried out to solve a problem that exploratory research identified) — from participants are collected as raw data and then analyzed to gather insights from trends and comparisons.

This method is good for getting the views of a lot of people at one time, especially when time is short, but it comes with its own management issues. The interviewer must prepare a way to gather answers and record these, while engaging in conversation with many people.

Participants may be affected by the group setting, either from acquiescence bias (the desire to say yes to please the interviewer), dominance bias (stronger participants can alter the results from less dominant participants) or researcher bias (where the research leads or impacts the participant responses indirectly).

This provides a structured setting where the interviewer can listen to what’s being said and investigate further into an answer. The interviewer can also pick up on non-verbal cues from body language can help the interview understand where to deep-dive and broaden their understanding.

However, some of the same biases (acquiescence and researcher) still exit in this format. The method is time consuming to do the interviews and collect the data afterwards.

A survey is an excellent method for carrying out primary research as participants do need to be physically present with the interviewer to carry it out. The survey can be completed anywhere there is an internet connection, meaning there is flexibility for the participants to use different devices and for interviewers to contact participants in different geographical time-zones.Preparation is key, however, as the researchers must segment the market and create a list of participants to send the survey to. Hiring a panel or using existing marketing lists can help with this.

2. Secondary research

Secondary research is the use of data that has previously been collected, analysed and published (and therefore you do not own this data). An example of this for market research is:

Most information is freely available, so there are less costs associated with this kind of secondary research over primary research methods.

Secondary research can often be the preparation for primary research activities, providing a knowledge base. The information gathered may not provide the specific information to explain the results, which is where primary market research would be used to enhance understanding.

There is also a logistics planning need for a recording solution that can handle large datasets, since manual management of the volumes of information can be tricky.

Both primary and secondary research have its advantages and disadvantages, as we’ve seen, but they are best used when paired together. Combined, the data can give you the confidence to act knowing that any hypothesis you have is backed up.

Learn more about primary vs secondary research methods

The next market research types can be defined as qualitative and quantitative research types:

3. Qualitative research

Qualitative market research is the collection of primary or secondary data that is non-numerical in nature, and therefore hard to measure.

Researchers collect this market research type because it can add more depth to the data.

This kind of market research is used to summarise and infer, rather than pin-points an exact truth held by a target market. For example, qualitative market research can be done to find out a new target market’s reaction to a new product to translate the reaction into a clear explanation for the company.

4. Quantitative research

Quantitative research is the collection of primary or secondary data that is numerical in nature, and so can be collected more easily.

Researchers collect this market research type because it can provide historical benchmarking, based on facts and figures evidence.

There are a number of ways to collect this data — polls, surveys, desk research, web statistics, financial records — which can be exploratory in nature without a lot of depth at this stage.

Quantitative market research can create the foundation of knowledge needed by researchers to investigate hypotheses further through qualitative market research.

The next four variations of market research are specific to topics areas, that bring about specific information.:

5. Branding research

Branding market research assists a company to create, manage and maintain the company brand. This can relate to the tone, branding, images, values or identity of the company.

Research can be carried out through interviews, focus groups or surveys. For example, brand awareness surveys will ask your participants whether the brand is known to them and whether it is something they would be interested in buying.

Additional areas for brand research is also around brand loyalty, brand perception , brand positioning , brand value and brand identity .

The aim of research will be to understand how to know if:

• Your brand is performing in relation to other competitors
• There are areas to improve your brand activities
• There are positives to showcase to enhance your brand’s image

6. Customer research

Customer market research looks at the key influences on your target customers and how your company can make changes to encourage sales.

The aim of this research is to know your customer inside out, and continuously learn about how they interact with the company. Some themes covered by this include:

• Customer satisfaction – Exploring what keeps customers happy, as higher customer satisfaction is more likely to lead to increased customer retention.
• Customer loyalty – This looks at what experiences have happened to lead to greater customer loyalty across the customer lifecycle.
• Customer segmentation research – Discovering who the customers are, what their behaviour and preferences are and their shared characteristics.

Relevant desk research may look at historical purchase records, customer journey mapping , customer segmentation, demographics and persona templates.

Primary research, such as NPS and customer satisfaction surveys , or customer satisfaction interviews at the end of customer support calls, can also give more details.

7. Competitor research

Competitor market research is about knowing who your competition is and understanding their strengths and weaknesses, in comparison to your organization. It can also be about your competitive offering in the market, or how to approach a new market.

The aim of this research is to find ways to make your organization stand out and future planning through horizon scanning and listening to customer preferences.

For example, for competitive analysis, researchers would create a SWOT for your business and your competitors, to see how your business compares.

Primary research could interview customers about their buying preferences, while secondary sources would look at competitor’s market dominance, sales, structure and so on. With this thorough analysis, you can understand where you can change to be more competitive, and look for ideas that make you stand out.

8. Product research

Product market research is a key way to make sure your products and services are fit for launching in the market, and are performing as well as they can.

The aim of this research is to see how your product is perceived by customers, if they are providing value and working correctly. Ideas can also be formed about upgrades and future product development.

There are a number of avenues within product research:

• Product branding – Does the product brand and design attract customers in the intended way?
• Product feature testing – this can happen at various stages of development with target markets (in early development, between versions, before product launch, etc.) to check if there are positive reaction to new or improved features
• Product design thinking – what solutions would solve your customers’ current or future problems?
• Product marketing – Do the marketing messages help your product’s memorability and saleability, or can they be improved?

Primary research methods have a clear advantage in this kind of market research: Surveys can ask for rankings on the popularity or usefulness of features or conduct conjoint analysis, while in-person observation interviews (where the participant can handle a product) can be particularly useful in seeing what customers do with the product in real time.

How to use market research types in your company

In a good marketing strategy, it’s preferable to have a mixture of data across:

• Qualitative and quantitative research
• Primary and secondary research
• Your specific topic area or area of focus

With these three components, you can make sure your market strategy gives you a complete picture of your market’s operational data and experience data , — what your market does and why .

Economical experience data (O data)

This type of experience data is quantitative in nature (including operations, featuring sales data, finance data and HR data ). As it can be quantified into numerical values, it can be measured over and over, providing datasets.

There is the opportunity to use a data-driven approach to understanding the results and making predictions based on historical trends.

This sort of data can be measured more easily than emotions and feelings. But it can only tell you about past activities and what happened. It can’t tell you what will happen in the future and why things will happen — this is where X data comes in.

Emotional experience data (X data)

This type of experience data seeks to find reasons to explain emotional decisions and how brands ‘sit’ in people’s minds. In this way, this data is qualitative in nature.

Companies that have X data have a ‘mental advantage’ over other companies,  as they are able to understand the perceptions of the customer, their needs and values.

When you have tangible insights on the audience’s needs, you can then take steps to meet those needs and solve problems. This mitigates the risk of an experience gap – which is what your audience expects you deliver versus what you actually deliver.

Related resources

Market intelligence 10 min read, marketing insights 11 min read, ethnographic research 11 min read, qualitative vs quantitative research 13 min read, qualitative research questions 11 min read, qualitative research design 12 min read, primary vs secondary research 14 min read, request demo.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Market Research

Some advantages and disadvantages of market research are as follows. So let us check out its advantages and disadvantages to learn more about market research.

Some of the Advantages of Market Research are:

• Market research helps you understand your target market.
• Market research allows you to create products or services that meet your customers' needs, which leads to an increase in sales and revenue.
• Market research helps you identify your competition in the industry.
• It allows you to develop new strategies to compete more effectively, which can help you gain more market share. 
• Market research helps you track industry trends.
• This will help you stay ahead of the competition and make sure your products or services are aligned with the latest trends, which helps you maintain a competitive advantage.
• Market research helps you improve overall business performance.
• This can lead to increased customer satisfaction, employee morale, and shareholder value.

Some of the Disadvantages of Market Research are:

• Market research can be expensive and time-consuming.
• It becomes difficult for small businesses to afford market research.
• Market research can be inaccurate.
• Sometimes, because of this, businesses make bad decisions about their products or services.
• It can be biassed.
• Decisions made by businesses are not in the best interest of their customers.
• Sometimes market research studies can be outdated.
• Decisions made by the business are no longer relevant to their target market.
• Market Research

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Marketing Research - Limitations and Constraints

Last updated 22 Mar 2021

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Accurate, up-to-date information obtained by marketing research can be of enormous value to a business in gaining and/or maintaining its competitive edge. However, there are a number of reasons why, in reality, these potential benefits may not be realised.

Budgetary constraints

Gathering and processing data can be very expensive. Many organisations may lack the expertise to conduct extensive surveys to gather primary data, whatever the potential benefits, and also lack the funds to pay specialist market research agencies to gather such data for them. In these cases, organisations may be forced to rely on data that is less than ‘perfect’ but that can be accessed more cheaply, e.g., from secondary sources

Time constraints

Organisations are often forced to balance the need to build up as detailed a picture as possible regarding customer needs etc. against the desire to make decisions as quickly as possible, in order to maintain or improve their position in the market

Reliability of the data

The value of any research findings depend critically on the accuracy of the data collected. Data quality can be compromised via a number of potential routes, e.g., leading questions, unrepresentative samples, biased interviewers etc. Efforts to ensure that data is accurate, samples are representative and interviewers are objective will all add to the costs of the research but such costs are necessary if poor decisions and expensive mistakes are to be avoided.

Legal & ethical constraints

the Data Protection Act (1998) is a good example of a law that has a number of implications for market researchers collecting and holding personal data. For instance, researchers must ensure that the data they obtain is kept secure, is only used for lawful purposes and is only kept for as long as it is necessary. It must be made clear as to why data is being collected and the consent of participants must be obtained. In addition to this, there are a number of guidelines, laid down by such organisations as the Market Research Society, that, although not legally binding, encourage organisations to behave ethically when dealing with members of the public.

• Secondary research
• Quantitative research
• Qualitative research
• Marketing research
• Primary research

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Exploring the Pros and Cons of Research Reports

The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive exploration into the various pros and cons of research reports. With the recent proliferation in academic, commercial, governmental and non-governmental organizations engaging in various forms of research initiatives, it has become increasingly important for professionals to understand both the benefits and limitations associated with these data collection methods. This paper will review how different types of report formats can influence results as well as examine key considerations when planning or evaluating a research report project. In addition, we will discuss practical strategies for overcoming some common challenges that arise when utilizing this type of information gathering approach. By examining each component thoroughly, readers should gain an enhanced appreciation for what factors contribute towards successful outcomes while identifying potential areas needing improvement if desired goals are not achieved.

I. Introduction to Research Reports

Ii. benefits of research reports, iii. limitations of research reports, iv. advantages and disadvantages of various types of research report structures, v. evaluating the costs associated with conducting a research report study, vi. strategies for overcoming common challenges in generating useful results from a research report, vii conclusion: exploring the pros and cons of undertaking a research report.

Research Reports: A Comprehensive Overview

It is undeniable that research reports are essential for advancing knowledge in a wide variety of disciplines. These documents provide detailed summaries and analyses of collected data, offering researchers the means to communicate their findings with precision and clarity. Research reports may vary depending on specific field or domain; however, they all generally adhere to certain accepted conventions in terms of formatting, language, organization and content.

• Scientific Research Report
• Business-related Research Report

One type of research report particularly common among scientists is the scientific research report. This format requires an introductory section which explains the purpose of the document as well as any theoretical foundations upon which it was built. The body typically contains descriptions about methodologies used during experimentation along with interpretations made from results obtained from those experiments. Lastly, there is usually some sort of conclusion drawn based off these observations that presents what can be inferred from them moving forward into future studies.

Another popular form within academic circles is the literary analysis research report—often required by English professors when reading classic texts such as Shakespearean plays or 19th century novels like Jane Eyre . Literary analysis reports aim at delving deeper into themes explored by authors while also critiquing its implications given various historical contexts it finds itself situated within today’s world. Additionally included will likely be biographical details related to authorial background in order to garner greater understanding for how this influences writings produced throughout said author’s lifetime.

Advantages of Market Research Reports

Market research reports have become increasingly valuable for businesses and other organizations. Such reports enable a deeper understanding of customer needs, provide insight into competitive markets, and offer useful guidance on how to optimize product offerings. Additionally, they are invaluable sources of data that can be used to inform decision-making processes.

For example, a business utilizing market research might identify in which countries it should open stores or explore the effectiveness of its current advertising campaigns. A company also may find out what products customers desire most or uncover emerging trends before their competitors do so they can react swiftly. Furthermore, information from these studies allows firms to gauge customer satisfaction with existing services or goods – invaluable when considering making changes or launching new products entirely.

The limitations of research reports are significant. Firstly, there is the issue of bias , especially with qualitative studies. The researcher’s own opinions can significantly influence their results, leading to a lack of impartiality and objectivity in the report’s findings.

Furthermore, most types of research reports , including surveys or case studies tend to focus on a small sample size that may not accurately reflect an entire population. Even if larger groups are considered for study, it is impossible to represent every individual within them meaning potential areas of exploration will be left out.

• A great way to reduce bias as much as possible when producing research reports is through triangulation; collecting data from multiple sources and viewpoints.
• When selecting your sample size for any kind of survey or experiment based project, aim high where you can – the greater number participants included in your research means more comprehensive results!

In terms of research report structure, there are several key advantages and disadvantages to consider. From experimental reports, which rely on the researcher’s data collection as the primary source of evidence, to literature reviews that offer a synthesis of other scholarly works in the field, each type has its own benefits and drawbacks.

• Experimental Reports : These reports have great potential for uncovering causal relationships between variables because they can control many factors within an experiment or survey. However, it is challenging to capture all relevant information from participants in this format due to their limited scope.
• Literature Reviews : Literature reviews provide broader coverage than single-source studies by incorporating multiple perspectives and analyzing different bodies of work. While very comprehensive compared with other structures such as case studies, literature reviews do not usually offer unique insights since much of the evidence used is derived from existing sources.

When evaluating the costs associated with conducting a research report study, one must first consider which type of report they are completing. For instance, if an individual is looking to conduct a market research survey , there will be varying expenses depending on the sample size and method used. The cost of using an online platform for data collection can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars depending on the length and scope of the project.

• In addition to collecting data, researchers may need additional funds in order to analyze and present results through comprehensive reports or presentations. Hiring experts for this task could easily add several thousand dollars into budgeting calculations.

As research projects progress, common challenges may arise in the process of obtaining useful results from a report. In this section, we will explore strategies to help address these difficulties when working with qualitative research reports.

• Ensuring accurate data representation: Research should be conducted thoroughly and meticulously in order for it to produce valid conclusions. To guarantee accuracy throughout the entire project lifecycle, steps such as verifying all data entered into the system and double-checking calculations can prove invaluable.
• Managing time constraints: It is important that deadlines are met while producing a meaningful output which can sometimes cause difficulty if there are limited resources available or if an unexpected event occurs during the course of investigation. Therefore it is necessary to set realistic goals beforehand so that they remain achievable despite any potential disruptions.

The research report in question examined the pros and cons of undertaking a survey-based study. After considering both the advantages and disadvantages, it became clear that conducting such a study is not without its challenges. Nonetheless, with adequate preparation and attention to detail, researchers can maximize their chances for success.

Research reports provide an objective overview of data which allows all stakeholders to make informed decisions. They also offer great flexibility when it comes to structuring questions and gathering responses from respondents across different locations or demographic groups. Finally, survey-based studies are relatively inexpensive compared to other forms of research methods such as laboratory experiments or focus groups.

One major downside associated with these types of studies is that they rely heavily on self-reporting by participants who may be unreliable sources of information due to biases or lack knowledge about certain topics. Additionally, surveys can take considerable amounts of time before results are obtained; thus affecting turnaround times for projects relying on this type data collection method. Lastly, errors related sampling size could potentially affect accuracy levels within analysis.

Market Research: Need, Advantages and Disadvantages

Meaning of marketing research.

Marketing research may be defined as the mechanism which helps in linking the customers, producers and several other end-user to the marketer and help in finding and communication of all required information. It is the system that leads to the collection of data, analysis of data and then interprets the required information to the users.

Marketing research plays an important role in studying consumer behaviour and making adjustments according to the change in the various elements of marketing mix viz. promotion, place, price, and product. It is a very efficient tool for the marketers to understand the trends of the market that mainly consists of information relating to new product launch in the market, trends in consumer demand, pricing strategy of the competitor and available close substitutes of the product. These all information acquired through this process enables in the smooth functioning of the marketing process.

Need and Advantages of Market Research

Easy detection of market problems and opportunities.

The first and primary advantage of marketing research is that it give complete information about the market. It give details regarding the marketing opportunities about the product which decides its success or failure. Apart from this it also helps in identifying the competitive nature of the market, whether customers are satisfied or not, the sales level of the company and also the channel of distribution used.

Helps in Marketing Strategies Formulation

Doing business today is a very difficult task as it requires to conduct deep marketing research acquiring knowledge. Also, today business is not conducted only at a local level but at a global level which involves a very difficult task of managing a large number of customers and various channels used for distribution. And above all, it is a very difficult task to predict people needs. The marketing information gathered through marketing research helps in the easy formulation and implementation in pre-decided strategies.

Understanding of Customer Needs

Today the success of every business depends on its customers and therefore nowadays marketing activities are customer targeted.  Marketing research play a very effective role in collecting the information regarding the customer wants which help in designing the product accordingly so that the customer need and wants can be satisfied easily.

Improve Sales Performance

Every company performance is measured by its sales level. Sales level clearly depicts the performance level of the company in the market. Marketing research helps in understanding the sales territories and analyzing the sales force effectiveness. And if any problem is detected it helps in taking actions accordingly thereby helps in increasing the sales volume.

Helps in Launching of New Products

Marketing research plays a very effective role in determining the success or failure of the new product to be launched in the market. It facilitates and makes it possible for testing of the upcoming product in a market on a small scale and also help in getting the response of the customers regarding the new product. So it basically lowers the risk involved in the launching of a new product.

Helps in Evaluating The Export Potential

Nowadays business is not conducted at a local level only but at a world level. Foreign trade serves as the best source of earning a large amount of income. But doing business on an international level requires conducting a large amount of research and gathering information.

Marketing research helps in evaluating the export potential of the company product. It aims at collecting information from customers from different countries which helps in predicting export potential.

Support the Management in Decision Making

Managers at the top-level require all relevant information before making any decision. Unless and until all required relevant information is supplied to the management team their functions are useless. Marketing research plays a very effective role in the supply of all current and accurate information to the management team.

Disadvantages of Market Research

Market research takes time.

Market research takes time to analysis the new trends and fashion. Sometimes market research fails to analysis trends which gives negative response to the company.

Research Is Expensive

Market research is an expensive process, it takes time and huge money to analysis new trends of the industry.

Inaccurate Information

Modern time is changing time, fashion and trends change over the night. So, market research fails to understand fashion and trends of the industry.

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Related posts:

• Characteristics of Primary and Secondary Market
• Characteristics of Research Methodology
• Marketing Research – Meaning, Scope, Objectives & Process
• Methodology of Operation Research
• 9 Applications of Marketing Research
• Aims and Objectives of Research Methodology

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Integrated Primary & Secondary Research

2 Pros and Cons of Research

Advantages and Disadvantages of Primary Research

If enough information cannot be found through internal or external secondary data to solve the NPO’s problem, the organization will then proceed to design a study wherein they will collect Primary Data ;  information collected for a particular research question or project.

Primary research often is richer and more directly useful, but it also has its downsides. The term primary research is widely used in Academic Research , Market Research, and Competitive Intelligence.  Primary research aids organizations with obtaining information directly from sources themselves, instead of relying on the research of others.

Displayed in the table below is a detailed pro and cons list on Primary Research. It lists several advantages and disadvantages and provides brief information on each component.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Secondary Research

Like primary research, secondary research offers pros and cons. Similar to the table provided above, lays a table below displaying detailed pros and cons list on Secondary Research. It lists several advantages and disadvantages and provides brief information on each component.

Attribution

This page contains material taken from:

Learning, L. (2020). Introduction to Sociology. Retrieved July 27, 2020, from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sociology/chapter/research-methods/

Primary Market Research. (2020). Retrieved July 23, 2020, from http://kolibri.teacherinabox.org.au/modules/enboundless/www.boundless.com/business/concepts/primary-market-research-0-8219/index.html

Sagepub (2006). Research in Nonprofit Organizations. Retrieved from https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/9066_WymerCh3.pdf

Types of Data. (2020). Retrieved July 23, 2020, from https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/advertising-campaigns-start-to-finish/s08-01-types-of-data.html

New information the organization gathers directly from respondents they interact with, surveys, or alternative research methods.

An Open Guide to Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) Copyright © by Andrea Niosi and KPU Marketing 4201 Class of Summer 2020 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Market Research: Market Research Reports

Market Research Definition

Market research considers industry products, markets, and customers. Market research reports may include information about the industry's competitive landscape, industry trends, key competitors, industry size and outlook. Market research companies advise their clients about the positive or negative prospects for an industry or product. 

Market research reports are produced for either a specific client (likely to remain private) or for a collection of market research reports designed to appeal to a number of subscribers. Some market research companies may post industry news in a press release; however, you do not want to generate a report sale, as reports are very expensive. 

The University Library subscribes to two market research collections: IBISWorld, which is an excellent resource for small business research, and Passport (GMID), which is an excellent resource for global and country specific industry and product information. 

Market Research Collections

• IBISWorld United States and Canadian industry reports organized by NAICS codes; plus specialized US small business market research reports which are very relevant to Canadian entrepreneurs. New to our subcription this year is the Wizerd Tool, which is a premium filtering tool that allows you to find needle in a haystack industries that fit your ideal level and trend criteria. The Wizard Tool can help identify industries to fit your appetite based on facts and data, not just rumors or other secondary opinions. Many of the most advanced users access this tool for prospecting into new growth industries and to better implement their strategies. And also, the Canadian Financial Ratios. This collection helps you assess companies' strengths and efficiencies and benchmark them against industry norms. more... less... Access is restricted to current students, faculty, and staff of the University of Saskatchewan, and walk-in users, for educational, research, and non-commercial personal use. Systematic copying or downloading of electronic resource content is not permitted by Canadian and international copyright law.
• Passport (GMID) Market research reports with focus upon global/ national consumer markets. Also includes company profiles (emphasis upon products not financial fundamentals) and economic data. Dashboard tool can be used to create images of industry performance and company markets. more... less... Access is restricted to current students, faculty, and staff of the University of Saskatchewan for educational, research, and non-commercial personal use. Systematic copying or downloading of electronic resource content is not permitted by Canadian and international copyright law.
• ABI/INFORM Collection Includes Marketline and Business Monitor industry reports. more... less... Access is restricted to current students, faculty, and staff of the University of Saskatchewan, and walk-in users, for educational, research, and non-commercial personal use. Systematic copying or downloading of electronic resource content is not permitted by Canadian and international copyright law.
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5 Benefits of Market Research Reports

by Sarah Schmidt , on July 28, 2016

To illustrate the benefits of market research reports , we talked to a variety of professionals who use these reports in their day-to-day work. Read on to learn how these individuals use market research reports to their advantage.

1. Gather Industry Information Quickly

Max Robinson, Digital Marketing Manager at Aims Media Design in Glasgow, UK, uses market research reports to outline target audiences for clients before beginning any advertising campaign.

“Although we have a research team in place, we understand that there is a wealth of information out there that is relevant to our needs and has already been collected by another entity,” he explains. “Primary research is undoubtedly important, but in a fast-paced industry, we often need information quickly, and secondary market research is the best way to gather that information.”

Using market research reports takes much of the guesswork out of the process, saving Robinson “huge amounts of time."

2. Validate Internal Research 

Content Marketer Linda Pophal uses market research reports for her own needs, as well as for her clients. She uses these reports to research best practices, prepare RFPs, get ready for client meetings, and create content.

“Research reports save me time by providing insights into questions I might have but don’t have the time/resources to conduct primary research for,” she says. “In addition, I also find research reports can help me to validate information I may be gathering through primary sources."

3. Get a Holistic View of the Market

Nick Braun, Founder & CEO of PetInsuranceQuotes.com, also uses market research reports to double check his data. “We still do our internal analyses, but secondary reports guide our changes, and we look for ways to justify what third parties say so we aren’t myopic and caught up in our own data.”

In addition, secondary research reports help Braun stay up to date on the market as a whole. “These reports give us a holistic view of the market and allow us to benchmark all the companies in the industry, not just the ones we focus on,” he explains.

4. Use Objective Data to Make Informed Decisions

Another important benefit of market research reports is their impartiality. “Any third-party report is more unbiased, and so they provide a better picture of what’s really happening in our market,” Braun asserts. “It’s the best way to stay on the right path because we focus on the data and realities of our industry.”

Armed with information produced by sound research methods, you will have a more accurate understanding of the market landscape, issues that will affect the industry in the future, and how to best position specific brands to drive business growth . All of this insight will lead to actionable ideas and better decision-making. 

5. Strengthen Your Credibility and Reputation

By using objective analysis to make decisions, you will not only develop better business strategies, you will also improve your own professional reputation in the field and help others to have more confidence in your conclusions.

Braun explains it this way: “Instead of telling a client or partner, ‘This is what we’ve found,’ or ‘This is what we think,’ these reports allow us to say, ‘This is what the industry is doing,” and it lends more credibility and trust by not always being the sole source of data and information.”

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Download MarketResearch.com's free white paper  to learn more about the benefits of market research and the value it brings to organizations today.

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About the Author:  Sarah Schmidt is a Managing Editor at MarketResearch.com, a leading provider of global market intelligence products and services.

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11 Benefits of Market Research + Free Templates

The benefits of market research are long-proven. Yet still, there are many who focus on instinct instead of insight.

While intuition is all good and well, there’s no getting away from the power of cold-hard data.

In this post, I list 11 market research benefits, with real-world examples and six free research templates thrown in for good measure.

1. Better communication with customers

Why it matters: Effective communication is the cornerstone of good relations. And, with how much time, effort, and money it takes to win a new client, ensuring you stay in their good books isn’t just nice – it’s a necessity.

The first benefit of market research is the ability to learn about your customer’s likes and dislikes – so you can adapt how you position the business and its products accordingly. Tailored communications speak to customers in a way that resonates far better than generalized messages.

The one-size-fits-all approach no longer works. Delivering comms in the right format, at the right time, via the right platform can boost engagement and help focus on driving value. With it, customers feel appreciated and receive information that’s both useful and relevant.

These days, all it takes is a quick click, and customers can unsubscribe from communications. This is why businesses must ensure every communication counts.

Example: Market research surveys are an ideal way to quickly understand how customers feel about your communications with them. Be direct, and ask them about the content, frequency, and formats they prefer.

If you want to establish the best time or day of the week to email, you can use your email campaign tracking data to show you the best and worst times, based on open rates, and click-through rates.

2. Enables strategic, data-driven plans

Why it matters: Market research benefits all types and stages of business planning. It gives you the numbers and insights you need to make accurate forecasts. It can also impact key decisions that can help you develop and adapt your strategy.

Here are a few examples where market research can benefit data-driven decision-making :

• Deciding whether to modify or discontinue a product.
• Prioritizing new features to develop for an existing product.
• Establishing which marketing channels to invest in.
• Selecting which social media platforms to utilize.
• Choosing which new markets to enter or where to open a new retail outlet.
• Evaluating the impact of a cost increase or change to pricing strategy.
• Discover new partners, affiliates, or publishers to work with.
• Targeting a new persona or different segment of a market.

Market research serves as a trusty compass, helping guide and steer decisions that impact growth and profitability. Once you implement a new tactic or campaign, you can again benefit from market research to measure and track ongoing success.

3. Develop detailed target personas

Why it matters: It’s no secret that a comprehensive understanding of one’s target audience is fundamental to an organization’s success. Everything from product development to positioning and marketing is impacted by the effective development of target personas.

While most companies have a decent understanding of what their ideal customer profile looks like; a distinct advantage of market research is the depth of detail it offers about the preferences, behaviors, and habits of a target audience – based on actual facts and everyday actions they take online.

By doing audience analysis and consumer journey tracking , organizations can discover insights about their ideal customers quickly and in finite detail. So instead of having a static persona that doesn’t really change with the times; marketers can discover things like:

• Age, gender, and geography
• Audience loyalty & interests
• Cross-shopping behaviors
• Product search trends
• View audience overlaps with rivals
• Identify drop-off points in funnels
• Optimize conversion funnels
• Discover which marketing channels appeal to a specific audience

Grab our customer persona template to use a framework for this research – it’s at the end of this post, along with 5 other useful market research templates !

4. Reduce costs and save time

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of market research for a business is its ability to help organizations improve efficiency and reduce outlay – both from a time and cost perspective. While each business achieves different outcomes, doing proper research can help pave the way for process improvements.

A few examples include:

• Spending less on marketing channels that don’t appeal to a target audience or drive ROI.
• Decrease customer churn via surveys, enhanced support, or more suitable product offerings.
• Prevent you from entering a new market in a territory that’s already saturated.
• Testing the viability or appetite for a new product or service before making investment decisions.
• Reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) through clearer targeting and messaging.
• Identification of new partnerships or affiliates who can drive referrals to your business.

DocSend uses Similarweb to reduce marketing spend by 20% and reduced research time by 10% – as an added bonus it saw website traffic gains of around 10%.

Read more about how market research benefited DocSend here .

5. Stay ahead of the competition

Why it matters: These days, the competition is fierce in almost every market. Customers have many options to choose from, and outpacing your rivals is a constant battle. From new product or service offerings to campaigns and content – not to mention promotions and partnerships; keeping a keen eye on your market positioning is key.

A core benefit of market research is knowing what other players in your market are doing. More to the point, market research actually shows you how well these offerings are doing.

A competitive analysis framework is a great way to systematically record and track what your rivals are doing. It can help you spot opportunities, such as:

• Develop new marketing campaigns and creatives
• Adapt your product or service offerings
• Give insights into new content to write about
• Show you which channels work best for your target market
• Find underserved segments of a market
• See what customers like or dislike about your rivals
• Help you develop your unique selling proposition (USP)

Good market research can be the differential factor that gives you an edge in your market.

In this scenario, I want to analyze the competitive landscape of a social media management company. I chose Sprout Social to review as it’s considered a market leader.

See how much competitive intel I can grab in less than a minute

In a snapshot, I can see an overview of its traffic and engagement. This includes the total visits, unique visitors , a link to its apps, and a breakdown of traffic by channel. With a quick compare, I see how these metrics stack up against others in the market. Later.com and influencermarketinghub.com are two players who consistently outperform sproutsocial.com – which means I can delve deeper into their successes, campaigns, and content next.

From the platform, I can see how many referrals they’re getting, and from where. Which ad networks and campaigns they’re running, and copies of the creatives being used.

Next, I look at the most popular pages on Sprout Social’s site. This shows several pages on the topic of small business social media are achieving significant growth – indicating my target audience is responding to these pages, so I should be covering or promoting content on a similar theme.

So, in less than a minute, I’ve discovered

• How my competitor stacks up vs others in the market
• Which traffic channels are growing
• The best referral partners and advertisers
• What marketing channels are showing the best results
• Copies of their ad creatives
• What content topics are the most popular
• Top industry search terms
• Uncovered two other major players to evaluate

Software like Similarweb makes it quick and easy to see the insights and metrics that matter most. Here, you can discover where you can get a competitive edge, and keep track of market trends and rival campaigns.

6. Discover the best marketing channels

From email marketing to socials, affiliates, referrals, paid ads, and more; there are many marketing channels to leverage – and it’s not always obvious which is right for your business. Another key benefit of doing market research is the ability to hone in on the channels that deliver the best return on investment.

A trial-and-error approach can be costly. Not just from a dollar perspective, it can be a drain on your resources too. By first establishing the optimal marketing mix for your target audience or market, you can save time and money, and reach your goals faster.

Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence can show you which channels work best for your market and rivals. It also highlights the specific ad creatives and content being used for high-performing campaigns.

Here, you see a snapshot of the marketing channels being used across five competitive sites. It shows the biggest drivers of traffic are direct and organic search. By clicking on any single channel, you can get a complete breakdown of the respective details. I’ve clicked to expand social media, as just one example, here’s what it tells me.

As well as being able to instantly see the insights that count, I can click on any channel to see a detailed breakdown of performance. Next, I can compare each channel to see who is outperforming others – which tells me exactly who I need to take a closer look at.

7. Identify growth opportunities

The benefits of doing market research apply to those launching new products or entering new markets . However, periodic research can also help you spot growth-focused opportunities that may not have been considered before.

Another compelling entrant to include in the benefits of market research is its ability to unearth opportunities to grow. Whether that’s through finding new customers, markets, channels, or creative ways to go to market and get more eyes on your business. A good case in point is in the identification of new partnerships for referrals; something that often comes about when doing a competitive analysis .

The advantages of using market research for growth are ongoing, throughout the lifecycle of your business. For example:

• Reviewing competitor marketing channels could uncover key findings about a new affiliate site that’s sending a volume of traffic to their site.
• A guest post or piece of content generates a high level of interest and drives traffic to the site.
• Untapped segments for your products. Perhaps a rival is doing a better job of appealing to a different demographic. This, in turn, presents an opportunity to diversify your messaging or switch marketing channels. The same could apply to a new location or geographic region.
• New partnerships. Joint ventures between businesses that share a similar target demographic can be mutually beneficial – helping both parties reach a new ready-prepped customer base.
• Perhaps a rival is offering an add-on or upsell that you’ve failed to consider.
• You might also conduct market research surveys where customers tell you something they’d like but which you don’t yet offer.

Success story: See how AirBnB used Similarweb to uncover opportunities for growth in new markets.

8. Spot new or emerging trends

Why it matters: With how quickly consumer behaviors change and markets shift, it’s important to move with the times. Market research can help businesses stay in touch with what’s happening – something that applies to consumers, competitors, and the industry as a whole.

From changes to purchasing behaviors, new technologies, new products, or service features; researching trends and staying close to rising players in your market allows you to keep tabs on what things are attracting attention.

• Which keywords or phrases are trending in your industry?
• Is there a new player showing significant growth in your market?
• What are your rival’s highest-hitting pages?
• How are apps impacting your market – do you know which of your competitors have one, and is it successful?
• Which campaigns in your industry are working and gaining traction?
• Is there a specific asset, whitepaper, or offering that your target audience responds to?
• Are there any seasonal trends that impact your market?
• Can you see spikes in specific search terms or phrases?

While you can use digital research tools like Similarweb to quickly analyze a market, search trends, seasonal patterns, mobile app intelligence , and more – qualitative data, like surveys can be leveraged to understand customers and changing behaviors too.

Read more about how Wonderbly achieved its success here.

9. Makes it easy to evaluate and track your success

Why it matters: With the knowledge of where your business is performing well, or falling behind, you can set goals and direction more clearly. Benchmarking shows you industry standards, and maps out how rivals are doing; so you can measure relative performance.

For a business to grow, it needs to push the boundaries. The benefit of using market research here is that it shows you where and how big those boundaries are. A survey from PWC found businesses that set benchmarks achieve 45% more productivity and grow, on average 69 times faster than those that do not.

There are various types of benchmarking – each of which makes it possible to unpack and track the successes of those in your market and drill down into what success looks like for your business.

10. Inform market analysis – SWOT

Why it matters: A further benefit of doing market research is that it can show you any relative strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that exist between competitors and in a market. Greater awareness of these facts helps drive the right actions and gives clarity on areas of focus for the business. Without it, your business is susceptible to preventable mistakes.

With company and market research , you find out where opportunities and threats exist in your ecosystem. From environmental or technological factors to internal considerations; forewarned is forearmed. What’s more, a regular review of your SWOT, informed by market research, allows you to capitalize on new opportunities faster than others and keeps you in the strongest position where gaining a competitive edge is concerned.

Helpful: Read our complete guide to doing an industry SWOT analysis .

11. Inform a content marketing strategy

Why it matters: These days, the importance of having an effective, relevant, and successful content marketing strategy cannot be overstated. According to a 2020 competitive intelligence survey , companies have, on average, 29 competitors. So, regardless of your sector, in the digital world, it’s constant competition – be it for better visibility online, a higher CTR, or increased engagement.

So, how does market research benefit a business? And how can you stand out and get found online? With content marketing, of course.

An advantage of using market research to inform your content marketing strategy is that data doesn’t lie. Yes, it’s an old one but a good one. A data-driven approach to content marketing is a surefire way to uncover the most searched keywords , the right topics, and content to harness to your advantage.

You can use market research to uncover the following:

• The busiest pages on any website.
• Which topics and keywords drive the most traffic in your market?
• New topics or keyword phrases that are trending or appearing seasonably.
• Inform topic planning or theme building for a blog.
• Help you discover new opportunities for dedicated landing pages.
• What content or assets an audience engages with most.
• Which channels are the most effective to deliver content?
• The best time of day to post new content.

Success story:  See how Tourism New Zealand benefits from market research ; and how they use Similarweb to research content and keywords.  

Limitations of Market Research

Regardless of whether it’s for an enterprise company or an entrepreneur – time, cost, and experience are viewed as the biggest limitations of market research. But this is an outdated perception that is no longer relevant or true to life.

Here’s how things are in 2022.

• If cost is considered a limitation of market research – use secondary market research methods. Most of the time, the data can be found online, for free.

This guide to desk research shows you the best places to find secondary research data. 

• Should you view time as a limitation – use software like Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence to quickly view insights in almost any market, company, or product.

If you’re on a deadline, let’s say you need to do market research for a business plan , market research tools can help you get it done in a day.

• Perhaps you feel a lack of experience is preventing you from doing market research. Most market research tools require little to no training and are highly intuitive.

Use market research templates to guide you through the key data points you need to collect. 

Benefits of market research – In summary

Market research benefits any business, at any stage. From product teams to sales, customer support, marketing, operations, and management – there’s a relevant application in almost every department. However, many organizations choose only to use it for limited periods in limited areas of their business.

Similarweb Research Intelligence makes key insights accessible to all. And with the ability to impact an entire business, at almost every level, it’s a market research tool with the power to deliver immense value and insights at pace.

Stop Guessing, Start Analyzing

Get actionable insights for market research here

What are the advantages and disadvantages of market research?

The advantages of market research include things like gaining a competitive edge, data-driven decision-making, reducing expenditure, finding new markets to enter, trend-spotting, and developing growth-focused strategies. The only disadvantage is in how it’s conducted, and the time it takes to carry out the research. However, market research tools are designed to make the task of conducting research more efficient, and cost-effective.

Which goals can market research help you accomplish?

Market research can help you achieve key business objectives, such as growing your customer base, retaining a higher number of customers, improving marketing effectiveness, and increasing revenue.

How can market research benefit entrepreneurs?

The benefits of market research to entrepreneurs are plentiful. It can help startups and new businesses research the viability of a new product or service they want to bring to market. In addition, it allows entrepreneurs to accurately forecast demand , which can help both operationally and financially.

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Advantages And Disadvantages of Business Reports

Table of Contents

Reports are a crucial form of business communication.

They help in documenting important facts and data for businesses. However, at the same time reports can be time-consuming and expensive to prepare.

In the article, we have drafted the advantages and disadvantages of business reports with examples that can help you re-evaluate your decision of writing business reports.

What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of A Company Report?

Advantages of business reports:.

The main characteristic of a business report is that it is used as a tool for communication, analysis and decision-making. There are a number of benefits of business reports . They are:

1) Helps in making crucial business decisions: Good report writing is a key ingredient in making important decisions and taking steps towards the development of a company. The information provided in a business communication report is used to formulate strategies, take action and analyze complex problems.

2) Business reports act as a tool for managers: Business reports are a great managerial tool. They make it easy for the managers and executives in a company to oversee how the business is running. Managers use the components in business reports to achieve the following functions:  

3) Represent important facts and business data: The purpose of a business report is to communicate factual data and accurate information. Business reports rely on information collected through researching and consulting credible sources. For example, the stats about a company’s monetary standing are recorded in a financial report.

4) Overcoming business challenges: Any kind of business sees its highs and lows. Over the lifespan of a business, challenges and problems of various kinds may arise. Reports help in recording and analyzing problems. These reports can be referenced in the future to solve these issues from recurring. 

5) Recourse for investigation: Reports are crucial for documenting research, accidents, field studies, etc. The researchers conduct their studies and the key findings of their investigation are written in the form of reports. Along with this, they may offer solutions and recommendations for solving the issues that arise.

The above image is a real example of a conclusion and recommendation given within a business report.

6) Help to communicate important information: One of the prime benefits of a report is that it serves as a communication channel. There are many different types of business reports that bridge the gap between different sectors and executives of a company. They also reduce the administrative distance between different levels of management.

Disadvantages of Business Reports:

In the above section, we discussed the advantages of a business report. The importance of business reports in the effective functioning of a company is crucial . They are a vital part of any business. However, there are a few drawbacks and limitations to business reports come. They are: 

1) Business reports are not interactive: One major limitation of a report is that they are not interactive. Once a report is drafted and submitted, it takes some time for the manager to review it and offer feedback. This could cause delays in communication and lead to a waste of time.

2) Business reports can be biased: Report writing must always contain factual and accurate information for effective decision-making. A writer may slip personal bias and opinions into the report. This could change the nature of a report which is supposed to be unbiased and objective.

3) Extensive use of technical jargon: Business reports should be easy to understand and skim through for busy managers. However, sometimes a writer may include extensive technical language and “insider terms” in the report making its readability suffer.

4) Outlining is time-consuming: A report usually must follow a set format and guidelines. Before writing it, a writer must collect factual information from different sources and prepare an outline for the report. This information is then written accordingly in an introduction, body and conclusion format.

This process can be time-consuming. Even in the case of informal business reports , a format and outline have to be prepared.

5) Limited Time Span: As a company carries operations, the need for reports increases. A report is prepared for a specific time and purpose. After this purpose is achieved, the report becomes redundant. This makes the usefulness of a report valid only for a limited amount of time.   

6) Inaccurate data cannot be changed once drafted: The purpose of a business report is to convey factual data collected from credible sources. However, sometimes the data collected may be subject to change. It cannot, however, be reflected in a report that’s already drafted.

For example, an accident report may provide information about a mishap but more information related to the case could be found later.

Related Reading: 20 Importance of Business Report In Business Communication

Advantages and Disadvantages of a Research Report

A research report is used to document the key findings of a systematic research process and field studies . In this section, we will look at the advantages and disadvantages of a research report.

Advantages of a Research Report:

1) Identifying knowledge gaps: A research report is used to document the research already collected and also to identify areas that require further investigation.

2) Understanding the audience: A research report helps in understanding the customers and their needs. This information is used by a company to improve its services to its target audience. 

3) Precise information: Research information contains clear and precise information. All the content in this report is well-researched and collected from multiple reputed sources.

Disadvantages of a Research Report:

1) Insufficient Data: Sometimes while conducting research, the data collected may be insufficient. This makes the process of formulating strategies riskier as the data collected is limited.

2) Deadlines: It may not always be possible to form a high-grade research report as the writer is only provided with a limited time to research.

3) Research may be expensive: A research report can require a large number of funds as it can include work trips, running ads, conducting surveys and interviews, etc. 

Advantages and Disadvantages of Market Report

Market research is a must for any company. Understanding what the market demands and how to meet their needs must be a top priority. This is why market research is conducted.

We will look at some advantages and disadvantages of a market report.

Advantages of a Market Report:

1) Minimizes Investment Risk: When adequate market research is done, it reduces the risk for a company to invest funds towards a product or service as they have more knowledge to make decisions.

2) Helps strengthen company position: With the help of a market report, a company can better understand the demands of its customers and stay ahead of its competitors.

3) Identifies threats and opportunities: A company can identify channels which may cause them problems and try to eliminate taking unnecessary risks. Likewise, by studying a market report, they can also identify new opportunities. 

The disadvantage of a Market Report: 

1) Market research is expensive: Conducting market research can be quite costly. A company may even need to hire a separate research team to do it for them. 

2) Inaccurate Information: The information from marketing research can be inaccurate and poorly researched. This can cause potential losses to a company.

3) Information may become outdated: Due to ever-changing market conditions, a market research report may become outdated after a certain period of time. 

Advantages of Company Analysis: 

A company analysis is used to evaluate the performance of a company’s business activities. This is accomplished by taking objective metrics and statistics into consideration.  

Here are a few advantages of Company Analysis:

1) Studying Competitors: In the marketplace, a business may have to face competition from other companies. Company analysis helps a company study the competition and provides information to evaluate which areas can be improved.

2) Industry Analysis: A company analysis report can help in understanding current market trends, growth drivers, maturity of the industry, potential challenges and opportunities. 

3) Business Offerings: A company must always be aware of its customers and their demands. A company analysis is used to give a clear idea of the products and services a company offers to the market. 

Types of Business Reports

1) Informational Report: Informational report is defined as an objective report which leaves out detailed explanations and only mentions facts. Example – annual budget report, employee roles, attendance report, etc.

2) Routine Report: This kind of report is prepared at routine intervals for routine activities. The frequency of a routine report can be hourly, weekly, monthly, etc.

3) Formal Report: A formal report is a form of business report which contains detailed facts, studies and objective information. This is done in a structured format including sections such as table of contents, appendices, etc. 

4) Informal Report: An informal report is usually in the form of a letter or a memo. Its tone is casual and can directly be addressed to the reader. Due to its short length, it is to the point and leaves out heavy details.

Related Reading : 10 Differences Between Formal & Informal Reports

5) Progress Report: A progress report tracks the development of progress across the company. It can track the performance of employees, teams, departments etc. This is done to ensure the work is meeting the goals set by the managers.

Related Reading : 15 Types Of Business Report In Business Communication

Frequently Ask Questions

Q1. what is a business report.

Ans. A business report is a collection of data and analysis that provides important information to the company. It is a formal document used to communicate information in a systematic manner. The information includes statistics, facts, research analysis, arguments, recommendations, etc.

Q2. Importance of business reports in business communication? 

Ans. The business reports will provide important and useful information on spending, growth, and profits. Business reports facilitate forecasts for the future, and marketing plans, guide budget planning and improve the decision-making process. It helps to track the progress and growth and identify the trends or any other irregularities that might require further investigation.

Q3. Why does an organization need to write a report?

Ans. Business reports provide useful management insights that include information like an organization’s spending, profits, and rate of growth. Business reporting promotes transparency, and for public companies, an annual report is a legal requirement to provide shareholders, the government, and others with financial data and ownership information about the business. 

Q4. What are the benefits of the business report for the organization?

Ans. There are several benefits of a business report, and these include: 

• The report  provides consolidated as well as updated information
• The report  helps in internal communication
• The report  facilitates decision-making as well as planning. 
• The report  discloses some unknown information. 
• The report  gives relevant information to the employees. 

Q5. What are the main disadvantages of Report writing?

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Nordic Energy Research

Invitation to tender: Capacity – and Flexibility Markets

Nordic Energy Research invites applicants to submit their proposals for the tender "Capacity – and Flexibility Markets – an overview of different possible designs with their advantages and disadvantages". The…

Nordic Energy Research invites applicants to submit their proposals for the tender “Capacity – and Flexibility Markets – an overview of different possible designs with their advantages and disadvantages”.

The aim of the study is to contribute to an informed and coordinated Nordic implementation of the European regulation on capacity mechanisms and flexibility support schemes. The study shall analyse advantages and disadvantages of different designs and how they work regarding to the integrated cross border electricity markets and how those two markets/mechanisms can work together.

The study should address how those potential new capacity – and flexibility markets could be designed to address the above mentioned questions and what are their advantages and disadvantages from a Nordic perspective.

Submission deadline is 29 July  2024 at 13:00 (CEST).

Read the full tender text and apply on TED here

Read the full tender text and apply on Doffin here

The EU responed to the energy crises, with a review of the Electricity Market Regulation 2019/943, changing the provision on capacity markets in article 21 and introducing the new instrument of “flexibility support scheme” in article 19.

In a Nordic context, there is a growing realization that the changing and evolving market conditions, particularly the process to find a “new” balance between higher demand and higher supply, will make it difficult to ensure acceptable levels of firm capacity in combination with flexibility to ensure security of supply. How should the green transition be managed without risking a stable fossil free electricity supply? The considerable amount of new infrastructure for electricity production will be costly. How can the necessary investments be triggered in a cost-efficient way to ensure not only a stable but also a competitive fossil free electricity supply?

Assignment and available funding

The available budget is 1 100 000 NOK.

Nordic Energy Research acts as the contracting partner on behalf of the Nordic Committee of Senior Officials for Energy Policies.

For further information about the tender, please contact Senior Adviser  Andrea Stengel .

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