Conduct Marketing Research to Grow Your Agency or Consultancy
Marketing research is not just for clients. As an agency or consultancy leader, it’s equally important for you to understand your market, its wants and needs, the state of your competition, and your place in the marketing landscape. But who has time to conduct marketing research for their own agency or consultancy?
Market leaders, that’s who. The better you know your audience, the more easily you can turn prospects into clients. Most professional services firms, including agencies and consultancies, don’t know their audiences as well as they should. As a result, they’re missing out on opportunities to gain more clients and get more business from current ones.
Benefits of Conducting Marketing Research
There are some significant benefits for agencies and consultancies to conduct marketing research. If you conduct marketing research on a frequent basis, your firm can significantly benefit, compared to agencies that do no conduct research. Marketing research insights not only drive growth, they also impact profitability.
Firms that regularly research their client markets grow more than ten times faster than firms that don’t conduct research.
What makes conducting marketing research so effective? There are several ways that firms become better positioned to secure prospects and grow their client relationships through marketing research, including:
- Gaining a clear understanding of emerging issues and trends to determine which services to develop and offer.
- Identifying areas in which your agency or consultancy may have misjudged or misread clients, such as what market influences are keeping them from growing their relationship with your firm.
- Determining purchasing behavior patterns that you haven’t noticed since you are so deeply involved in your day-to-day client interactions.
Sample Research Questions to Impact Growth
All research starts with questions. Sometimes the simplest questions yield the most valuable insights. Here are two we love to ask early when conducting market research to help impact your growth and profitability:
Why do your best clients choose your firm?
Understanding what great clients find appealing about you can help you attract others like them.
What are those same clients trying to avoid?
This is the other side of the first question and offers a valuable perspective. The answer can provide clues as to how to avoid being ruled out during the early rounds of a prospect’s selection process. The answer can also help shape business practices and strategy. What is the real benefit your firm provides? Firms are often surprised to hear the true benefit of their service, as viewed through their clients’ eyes. Once they understand this, they are able to enhance or even develop new services with other real benefits.
Conducting Marketing Research Focused on Actionable Insights
There are many ways you can use marketing research. They include improving your reputation, generating leads, and securing more clients. Here are some examples of what conducting marketing research and revealing vital insights enables agency and consultancy businesses to do more effectively:
- Anticipate clients’ needs
- Adjust or redefine positioning to differentiate your agency or consultancy from competitors
- Introduce new services that prospects have indicated they want
- Use it to get former clients to return
- Offer new services to current or former clients
Additionally, you can boost credibility with your target market and increase your visible expertise by pulling data and results from your research findings to help your marketing efforts. Conducting marketing research can lead to writing blog posts and articles that address urgent market challenges, publishing a research study, and as potential material for public speeches, seminars, and webinars.
It’s time to conduct marketing research to reap its rewards.
