Market Research
A prerequisite to online success
Understanding your target market, customers’ psychographic preferences, customer
behaviour, competitor activity and the trends of your market of interest are essential
first steps in any marketing activity. Like the development of any advertising material
you need to ensure that your online message is not only consistent with your brand
identity but delivered in method and with a flavour suited to the expectations and desires of your
audience.
Using psychographic information
Traditional market research has focused on trying to build demographic profiles
of target audiences to determine appropriate marketing channels. However, as technology
is developed faster and information is distributed at an increasing rate, demographic
profiles are becoming increasingly irrelevant. What demographic similarities do
ipad users have? Somewhere between 13 and 70 years old, male or female, middle to high
income, student or employed… how do you target such a broad-based market from a
demographic perspective? The simple answer is that you cannot. Psychographic profiling
is the alternative and far more effective method of understanding the modern customer
base. The majority of ipad users are most likely early adopters and innovators;
they are most likely as interested in being fashionable as they are technologically
savvy. While this example is simplistic it illustrates that when formulating any
online strategy you need to thoroughly understand how your customers think
and feel so you can evoke a strong positive emotion from them the moment they are
exposed to your message.
How this applies to you
Synapse has unmatched experience in the psychographic profiling field of market
research - one of the founders of Synapse (Dr Matt Walley) completed his PhD studies
focused in the area of consumer and decision making psychology.
During the initial stages of working with your company we apply various research methods
to build a picture of how you understand your customers, how they
view your company and what they see as important aspects of your product or service
offering. This will begin to develop psychographic profiles of your customer base.
We then profile your competitors and contrast their strengths and weaknesses against
your organisation with consideration of the customer psychographic profiles. With
the knowledge attained from this exercise we are equipped to understand how to appeal
to your target customer base, what your competitors’ online communication strategies
are, and ultimately start to formulate potential strategies for capturing market
share.