Market research is a field that is constantly changing and evolving in the business world. Businesses, organizations, individual researchers, educational institutions, and experts rely on market research to stay ahead of the game.
In 2020, we saw huge economic turbulence due to the pandemic and that is why research functions only kept growing. Organizations have realized that they need smarter and more efficient market research.
But what are some other changes that we are seeing today? Take a look below.
DIY methods
Research has been considered a complex process that requires extreme special qualifications to get right. But we will soon see a shift towards DIY methods with modern research tools.
These will be simple platforms that are fairly easy to use. Some have already been introduced to the market.
Many companies, for example, have already started using the WhoIs lookup method. Marketing researchers often use WhoIs lookup for researching domain details for specific brand purposes or other purposes.
WhoIs API has huge and well-built WHOIS record data that can provide you with all of the WhoIs information. This data is valid for a wide array of industries against any domain name such as domain registration details, domain IP address, domain owner, email address, and so on.
The database is up to date with the latest WhoIs data so you don’t have to worry that the information isn’t accurate.
Social listening
Millions of people around the world are using social media networks every day for hours. This is a huge footprint that’s becoming very important for businesses.
It’s essential to monitor social media trends and then gather sentiments from conversations. Bear in mind that social media is highly emotive and that there is a broad array from which you can get to the stem of ideas, complaints, purchase behavior, macro and micro trends, and so on.
With social listening, you get to isolate important data and keep an eye out for short and dynamic signals around customer research. This is the future of this kind of research and it can help you identify actionable variables at an early stage.
However, to start seeing real benefits, you need to broaden your network first. Feel free to use automation tools to help you with that.
For instance, if you have a lot of customers on LinkedIn, it would be wise to use LinkedIn automation services that will allow you to easily send bulk messages, personalized invitations, and so on.
Video, video, video
The pandemic we’re still fighting today has made businesses move away from offices. A lot of people are working remotely and that brought various changes to some simple routines.
An average employee has grown accustomed to the flexible working lifestyle that is enabled by technology. And the need for this shift in work-life balance will undoubtedly continue in 2021.
Due to this habit change, the market research industry needs to keep adapting to people’s new and preferred way of doing work.
For instance, in the third quarter of 2020, mobile devices generated almost 51% of global website traffic. So, it’s obvious that we should expect to see an increase in the use of mobile-friendly and app-based surveys.
It’s also expected that video conferencing companies will keep growing in 2021. Zoom recorded 1.7m users at its peak in 2020. And since we still can’t see the end of the pandemic, people will still need Zoom and similar services.
This also means that we can expect that the benefits of video-led research in terms of flexibility will continue to help diversify research samples and also open up a lot of new opportunities for market researchers when it comes to results and the types of projects that can be executed.
