Why Research
All industry-leading companies have one thing in common: a commitment to understanding, respecting, and evolving with their market.
Drive Better Marketing Results
If you feel like you’re chasing the wrong strategy, not reaching your audience, or struggling to deliver results, you’re probably operating off the wrong assumptions.
Research can unlock insights across audiences and stakeholders, source new hypotheses, and validate their application across an entire market.
That means no more wasted budget on the wrong strategy, the wrong messaging, the wrong channels, or the wrong audiences. Run your marketing campaigns with confidence by unlocking the right insights.
Unlock Stronger Decision-Making
When it comes to the direction of your organization, unknown variables can make key decisions difficult.
It can be tough to get buy-in from stakeholders and employees when pushing for significant change.
If you do earn their buy-in, how do you know it’s the right choice? Making critical business decisions without validating your assumptions can be harmful to the long-term success of your organization.
Conducting marketing research provides you with the confidence and data to know you’re making the right call — and objectively validates that decision with a third-party voice, which means a much shorter path to convincing your stakeholders.
Understand Your Market
Great marketers and leaders are anthropological. If you know your target audience well, you can easily answer questions like:
- Where they are and what channels are most effective when marketing to them
- What they need and what products or offerings are most compelling to them
- How to talk to them and what type of messaging works best on each channel
- What they like and which of your brand attributes they resonate with most
A statistically validated understanding of your audience can unlock higher tiers of marketing results by equipping you with the insights you need to choose the right strategy, from fundamental branding decisions all the way to what color your CTAs should be.
Give Your Audience a Voice
Understanding your audience is key to owning the right perceptions and presenting yourself as the best option in your competitive market.
Knowing what’s authentic and aspirational to your organization, what’s meaningful to your audience, and what’s distinct from your competitors can position you to establish a powerful brand.
Without validated audience and stakeholder insights, these critical brand decisions are built on subjectivity and internal opinions. The voice of your audience — the most important group to reach with your brand — isn’t represented.
Magneti understands that growth is the point of branding, but growth can’t happen without building a great brand story.
Their research is statistically relevant and revealing, shaping the branding outcome and moving our organization from where we were perceived to where we want to be in relation to the market.
The work Magneti does helped our organization script the story we want to tell and then create the visual, verbal, behavioral, and environmental collateral to communicate that story. Magneti learned our organization so well and with such passion.
Rose Lyda, Former Director of Marketing & Product Development at NSPF
Our Research Process
Together, we’ll build and execute the right research for your organization, then analyze and interpret the results with our team’s expert guidance.
There are three steps to effective research:
Identify the Most Critical Knowledge Gaps
From what decisions to make to what motivates your audiences, we can help you identify and answer your organization’s most critical knowledge gaps. Gaps like:
- I want to clarify our organization’s mission and vision
- I want to know if our goals match the needs of our market
- I want to understand our competitors and our market better
- I want to know what factors drive decision-making for our buyers and potential buyers
- I want to know if our messaging is reaching the right people
- I want to know if our messaging is compelling to our audience
- I want to know if we should invest in a new product
- I want to know if we should enter a new market
- I want to know what factors will improve our customer retention rate
- I want to know what factors drive employee retention
Choose the Right Research Methodology
Once you’ve identified the most critical knowledge gaps for your organizational or programmatic goals, we’ll help you navigate which research methodologies will source and validate the best insights.
You may ask research questions unique to your organization or audience that require new studies to source the right insights, or you may be asking questions that have been studied and answered already.
Primary research is conducted in real time to source insights for your organization.
- Primary research is custom and we can shape it together.
- Primary research typically takes a few months to conduct, analyze, and summarize.
Secondary research consists of gathering and consolidating research from past studies.
- Secondary research is often more cost-effective and available immediately for analysis.
- Since it’s already been conducted, secondary research is typically less tailored to your organization or your audiences.
- Secondary research is where most studies begin to ensure your budget is spent effectively.
Identifying the Right Audiences
If primary research is in the mix, the next step is to identify the right audience. There are a few different types of audiences we can match research with:
Customer (external) or stakeholder (internal)
If your research objectives center around internal messaging or organizational direction, then internal stakeholder input can be a key component to getting buy-in and identifying the right decisions. Depending on the question, this audience can be composed of your board of directors, seasoned managers, a mix of new hires and older employees — or a combination of people that fit multiple categories.
External customer input can help fuel your campaign goals, clarify perceptions of your organization, or provide a deeper understanding of your competitive space. This group can be made up of current and target customers in your market — or target customers that have never heard of you in a new market you’re thinking about entering.
We’ll often recommend a mix of both consumer and stakeholder input for objectives around company direction, vision, branding decisions, product launches, or positioning decisions.
Current, target, or lapsed
Most commonly applying to consumer input, matching your research objectives with an audience of current customers, target customers, or lapsed customers — or a mix of the three — will help source the most relevant, validated insights.
For research objectives around assessing company culture or hiring better talent, identifying the best mix of key stakeholder audiences can unlock a more comprehensive understanding.
For example, to understand questions about your company culture, speaking with a mix of new hires, current employees who have been at the company for at least a few years, lapsed employees, and even employees of competitor organizations can help provide you with a complete set of insights.
Incentives
Depending on the exclusivity of the audience you’d like to reach, incentives can help encourage target participants to engage in the research process — whether that means signing up for IDIs, participating in focus groups, or filling out surveys. Incentives are typically distributed in the form of cash or gift cards. We’ll collaboratively discuss whether incentives are required to accomplish your research goals and what potential implications you should consider before we start.
Matching your objectives to the right research methodology
Once we’ve established the right research objectives and identified the right audiences, the next step is to choose the most effective methodology. There are two key categories of research we consider:
Qualitative research
In qualitative research, we seek to uncover deep thoughts, perceptions, feelings, inclinations, motivations, and needs through a technique called interpretive phenomenological analysis (basically a smart way of saying we rely on a lot of validated techniques for behavioral and pattern recognition).
Qualitative research helps you:
- Understand the psychology and behavior of decision-making
- Build validated hypotheses and assumptions about your customers
- Explore individual and group dynamics
- Uncover new ideas
Quantitative research
In quantitative research, we measure these perceptions and insights. We quantifiably understand how universal perceptions and priorities are, and how to group and segment our key customers or stakeholder groups.
Quantitative research helps you:
- Measure how powerful certain insights and perceptions are across groups
- Determine how different factors relate to and impact one another
How to Choose the Right Methodology
We’ll often combine qual and quant methods to test hypotheses and assumptions about key customer or stakeholder groups, unearth felt and unfelt needs, discover key perceptions that can unlock decision-making, then measure how these validated perceptions are distributed across audiences and markets.
With this combination, we’ll use qualitative research to find new, validated perceptions and insights, followed by quantitative research to measure their impact across our current and target customer groups.
Once we’ve decided on qualitative, quantitative, or a mix of both, we’ll determine the precise format of the research.
For any given audience, you can identify a key perception and measure its influence. Imagine the power of your decision-making with this level of insight.
Qualitative research methods
- Focus Groups: A focus group consists of 3 to 16 research participants and can be facilitated in-person or online. By using careful research design, including discussion order, stimulus, exercises, and directed interaction, we capture stories and emotions to help us build rich, eye-opening reports. In a research setting, customers are free to reveal truths they would never say directly to an organization.
- In-depth Interviews (IDIs): IDIs are individual interviews with research participants that focus on revealing deep insights around behavior and perceptions. They typically consist of open-ended questions, with a goal to get participants to tell stories about their experiences, and a follow-up analysis that looks for points of emotion, emphasis, and pattern matching for insights from other IDIs.
- Ethnographic or Observational Studies: Ethnographic studies involve observing research participants in a real-life environment to interpret behavior and decision-making. Seeing how your audiences interact in real time can give you the insight to understand what works and what doesn’t.
Quantitative research methods
- Surveys: Survey design and implementation can show whether known assumptions or insights sourced through qualitative research are representative of significant portions of your audience. Knowing whether the reviews you receive or the anecdotal feedback you get from your customers is just a one-off perception or an opinion that applies to a significant amount of your customer base is key to making changes in the right areas. Depending on the need, Magneti can custom build surveys or implement existing, validated survey question language and structures like: Net Promoter Score Assessment & Analysis (NPS): A survey designed to measure customer experience and provide insight into why people are engaged or disengaged with a brand. American Consumer Satisfaction Index Assessment & Analysis (ACSI): A survey that provides information on how satisfied U.S. consumers are with the products and services available to them.
- Customer Database Analysis: Analysis of your customer database can identify opportunities and patterns to shape business decisions. A deep look into historical purchase data can help identify what type of target buyers you’ll find the most success with, or which demographics are most inclined to engage with different product lines.
- Predictive Segmentation: Magneti can build and provide frameworks for effectively identifying, targeting, and converting customer and target customer subsets.
Produce Insights With Strategic Guidance
Our research and marketing strategists partner to deliver your research results with clarity and guidance on what to do next.
Common outcomes and deliverables from our research include:
Persona Development
Identifying key, validated target groups for your marketing efforts, along with their motivations, common experiences, and expectations.
Market Sizing
Identify the size of your total potential market, the number of likely target buyers in that market, and their quantifiable likelihood to purchase your offering or service.
New Product and Pricing Studies
Quantify the interest level, likelihood to purchase, and competitive considerations of launching a product in a new market or changing your pricing in an existing one.
Predictive Instrument Development
Based on intended outcomes and potential outcome drivers, enable your organization to realize the long-term expected outcome of the actions you are taking today.
Conjoint Analysis
Understand the impacts of different product packages on your target audience by simulating buying decisions and isolating the factors that are most important to them.
Message Testing
Measure how well your creative messaging choices resonate with your target audiences, and what changes will make them more effective.
Latest Research Insights
We’re big believers in robust market research, and since you’re here, we get the feeling you are too. Find out why great research is worth its weight in gold below.
10 Reasons Why Research Belongs in Your Marketing
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Consider the final line of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: “There is grandeur in this view of…
How Colin Firth Dripping Wet Depicts Richer Market Research
In the opening chapter of the third volume of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” Elizabeth Bennet…
So, is research worth it?
For our part, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Here’s why.
The value of ongoing research
When you invest in creating a recurring, reliable pool of research participants, you can not only answer research questions quicker and more cost-effectively — you can position yourself as an industry thought leader by consistently bringing unique, validated insights to your entire target market.
Imagine your own version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Analysis — authored by you, applied to your industry.
Magneti can partner with you and establish the research ecosystem needed to position you as an industry leader, explaining industry trends, motivations, and behaviors at scale.
The risks of marketing without research
When you operate without validated audience insights, you risk pouring thousands of dollars into the wrong channels, targeting the wrong audiences, and making marketing decisions that can be harmful to the long-term success of your organization.
Without research, your leadership depends on hunches, anecdotes, and assumptions — a foggy picture of reality that could be obscuring the most important inputs.
Without research, a reliance on best practices or past strategies can put you miles behind your competitors.
Without research, your audience — the most important determinant of your organization’s success or failure — doesn’t have a seat at the table.
Invest in the research you need to make the right decisions. Challenge your assumptions. See the market clearly.