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The past two years have been challenging for the market research industry. As we look ahead to the year 2022, we uncover the top market research challenges faced by market research professionals and highlight how a market research tool can be the weapon of their choice to tackle those challenges.
Let’s face it! Market research professionals are experiencing a time where they have to adapt to a new paradigm now and then.
For them, staying competitive in a shifting landscape has become the need of the hour, especially after the global pandemic that completely confined how people interacted.
Also, with clients demanding greater innovation and a rise in the importance of big data, they need to keep adding to their toolbox to be efficient.
And that’s not all, the pressure to reduce cost and increase the pace of business adds to the existing set of challenges faced by the market research professionals.
These challenges must be overcome if they’re to deliver real impact to the corporate bottom line.
And when expanding the workforce or the length of working hours isn’t cutting it, it’s a sign that researchers need to adopt a market research tool.
In this blog, we are going to look at the top challenges faced by market research professionals and learn how a market research tool can help tackle all those challenges.
Let’s first take a look at the concept of market research before diving into its challenges.
Typically, market research is an organized activity performed by a group of people to gather relevant data & information about specific target markets or customers, to aid business growth.
It is one of the most crucial components of business strategy & decision making. It is a comprehensive process spread over various stages including:
Market researchers are people who perform both primary and secondary research to obtain the data and process it into relevant information.
At every stage, they face a potential challenge. The next section provides a list of the most common ones.
Conducting exploratory research seems tricky but an effective guide can help.
“We don’t have access to quick reporting”
“We have a limited budget for conducting research”
“We need to get insightful data but at a low cost”
“Vendor approvals are making it difficult to conduct research quickly”
“Consumer answers do not match consumer behavior”
These are some things one hears from market researchers when they are facing a challenge at some point in the research process. It could be a challenge related to costing, relevancy of data, research panel, etc.
We did some digging and found that the top challenges faced by market researchers include:
Often it’s not really a time constraint, it is actually budget and staff constraints that challenge researchers.
Small companies, unlike big conglomerates, find themselves in a position where they can’t go beyond paying a certain amount to panel vendors to gain insights into their customers. Or, they do not have enough staff to go and conduct on-premise surveys.
The next challenge that researchers face crops up in the form of waiting weeks or months for survey results and analysis that influence business decisions is not an option. Market researchers need to be able to get survey results within hours in order for their clients to target new opportunities.
Quality of data remains another challenge for the researchers. Since the collection of data can be huge, it may result in human fatigue which also, in turn, leads to the likelihood of having poor quality results. When data gathered is poor, the insights into the data are equally prone to being of bad quality.
You may collect a huge amount of data but it won’t make sense if it’s not coming from the right people. For researchers, it is important to tap into the right marketplace and segment panel using the right data points.
Even though that is the case, many times, researchers fail to reach the right panel at the right time which in turn, brings a flood of irrelevant data that adds zero to no value to the research.
There is a need for actionable insights that can help stakeholders take quick informed business decisions. Insightful strategic reports delivered within stipulated timelines are becoming an increasing challenge for market researchers companies globally.
In other words, the top market research challenges revolve around the need to improve efficiency while dealing with limited time & resources, and reaching the right research panels.
The most common solutions adopted by market research professionals when faced with challenges include:
While the first two solutions don’t seem to be more promising, the third solution i.e., turning to tools or automation can definitely help.
It isn’t simply about working harder or faster, but smarter. Switching to a market research tool can help you:
✅ Build research agility to deliver speed and efficiency
✅ Reach the right panel to meet the need of the targeted demographic
✅ Get relevant insights faster
For researchers who are willing to get faster insights, reduce research time from months to hours, and improve their research quality, we suggest adopting a fully automated panel research platform.
The next section talks about how a market research tool works, benefits researchers, and helps them tackle market research challenges.
Creating a build, test, and learn cycle helps speed up processes and deliver faster insights.
And that’s exactly what a market research tool does.
As we understand it, a lot of researchers’ time is wasted in trying to reach the right people who are willing to take their survey and in turn, offer valuable insights within days.
But, when you adopt a market research tool, it does all the work for you! And guess what, at a much lower cost.
For a better understanding of this concept, quickly hop on to the next section.
See Voxco survey software in action with a Free demo.
Let’s understand it with the example of Voxco Audience– a fully automated panel research tool by Voxco.
Voxco Audience exposes researchers to a marketplace of 10M+ research panelists spread over 50+ countries provided by trusted third-party panel providers.
It enables the researchers to find more targeted participants who have the knowledge they’re seeking in terms of user experience.
This way, the tool, with its robust set features, ensures quality results and enables focused learning that ties to consumer behavior.
Hop on to the next section to explore the many benefits of using a fully automated research panel.
With its robust set of features, Voxco Audience offers its users a range of benefits that include:
By letting you automate the most time-consuming tasks, it helps increase the productivity of researchers and thereby increases the overall output.
It allows you access to the ever-increasing robust set of samples and 60% of proprietary samples in north America.
With 90+ data & profiling points, you get access to curated & real profiles only.
It lets you collect rich, first-hand insights using live dashboards and custom in-depth reports along with one-click summaries to anticipate trends in real-time.
It helps reduce survey research time from months to hours along with high-quality responses with large proprietary samples.
Not only do you save more than 20-30% over an ad-hoc rate card, but it can save your team time in dealing with bids and approvals on every project.
Give more depth to your studies with eye-tracking, facial coding, and video open-ended questions.
It lets you integrate real-time feedback with operational data to make strategic decisions.
With features such as google captcha, duplicate IP check, VPN & Proxy protection, custom screening questions in place, it ensures top-notch data quality & security.
Exercise full control of panel vendor management from your dashboard.
Building agile skills by experimenting with smaller research sprints alone isn’t going to help tackle the challenges researchers face during the course of conducting research. Adopting a tool to manage most of your time-consuming tasks is probably the best way to go about it.
And, as you move forward, take time at the end of each survey for a short retrospective.
Look at your results- Did you get what you needed? Did you work too many hours? What went well? What was inefficient? How can you streamline going forward?
Review the results and make changes at the end of each survey cycle to improve the next one.
Automation is becoming increasingly an inevitable necessity of the near future. It can help researchers save hours of their time and tons of effort.
A fully automated panel research platform like Voxco Audience can help researchers gain a major competitive edge in the market research space by providing them with faster, accurate, and more insightful information.
See why 450+ clients trust Voxco!
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