Challenge of conducting market research — Doug Bell // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “There are many situations where we have a potential new product and this fazes other CMOs as wellor we have an existing product that could potentially fit well into an adjacent market or a new region. To make those decisions, what we are typically relying on is either subscription service who have a point of sale data or you are depending on customerone-off research and thats typically what most CMOs are dealing with.” -Doug

• “For a larger corporation, you might have your own research team, an in-house firm but for the most part if you want to make a good data-driven informed decision you need to understand enough dynamics of the market.” -Doug

• “TAM or Total Addressable Market is a good example of something you would want to seek out and we understand why. We want to understand how big is the pie. Is it an irredeemably small market and if it is,is the price point so high that it justifies going into the market.” -Doug

• “In sum, there is the idea of understanding how big the market is, there is the idea of understanding who else is in the market to try to figure out how much green space there is and theres also the notion of understanding who the customers are that are buying. So market research can really be used in a couple of different ways, you can do different types of research to understand your market.” -Ben

• “Lets start with sample sizes and how typically they can be very small. This is especially true for custom research and what ends up happening there is you start getting standard deviations away from accuracy.” -Doug

• “To the degree, that sample size is too small you are creating uncertainty and doubt within that sample size and for you to be able to afford a larger sample size, thats really the challenge.” -Doug

• “Part of this is understanding how many data points you can get access to, to understand the accuracy of the research that you are going to be doing. To me, that infers that if theres a lot of data points from which you can pull from, great. Look at a data firm or maybe some data that is already out there and you can do polling.” -Ben

• “When you are working with smaller data sets, maybe there are only ten potential customers in a new market but they are all billion-dollar customers and its a 10 billion dollar market, you cant do a poll.” -Ben

• “Im going to quote a market research firm, Im a bit of irony here but I think its appropriate. They do very good work in surveying managerial behavior and its something I rely on. The first thing we know is that 91% of managers believe that data-driven decision-making is really important. Thats not a shock in our current era but the challenge is that only about 57% are actually able to practice data-driven decision making.” -Doug

• “So it is that the larger brands have the ability to go pay or conduct their own research and using various resources.” -Ben

• “Smaller brands tend to use keyword research. You are using an SEO platform to take your keywords to roughly extrapolate out what a market or you could pull together focus groups. Is that statistically relevant? No. Is it terribly useful? Maybe in terms ofyour ability to creatsome directional understanding but at the end of the day, youre not really able to size the market nor understand competitive trends well. Its not something that will fill that need when youre thinking about moving into an adjacent market or a new region.” -Doug

• “At the end of the day, when you think about conducting your customer research unless you are one of the mega enterprise brands with a budget to be able to go higher or conduct the research in-house in a statistically significant way, you are really using other data sources that are at your disposal. These are either surveys that you can conduct yourself, focus groups where you are getting more qualitative than quantitative data or you are looking at your search data which is really the primary reason why we are bringing this topic up.” -Ben

• “Search data is one of the most valuable ways for you to size your market. We urge you to not ignore market research if you dont have the budget for an enterprise study, start doing market research in-house as being led by SEO data.” -Ben