Crowdsourced Research: Minimize Cost and Maximize on your Investment

Marketing research is a vital step that can help ensure the success of any type of marketing plan, so why is it so often left out of the process? When targeting a market or market segment, how can any plan expect to be successful if it doesn’t take into consideration what the market is saying or where it can be reached?

Companies of any size need to make market research a part of their marketing plan, but with the high costs of traditional market research and the time often involved in obtaining final results, many businesses skip this vital step.

An Overlooked Option

Crowdsourced research offers companies, small and large alike, more affordable and faster processes for their marketing research needs. For a full view of the market, crowdsourced research combines monitoring tools, social networks, chat options, and smarter “smart” phones to build the lines of information for the research results. Crowdsourcing offers a multitude of benefits including:

• Real-Time Info Access: By monitoring social media and other digital sites for conversations and updates, it’s possible to stay abreast of the very latest information that drives your target market.
• Adaptation: Unlike traditional market research that is tied to specific criteria that can cost big money to change, using digital, real-time content allows for immediate adaptation to the movements of your market.
• Ongoing Communication: By engaging an audience within social media and digital sources, the conversation can continue long after the research had been obtained.

Don’t Think Small

Small and medium-sized businesses often have limited marketing budgets in comparison to their big-business cousins, so making each dollar count is important. Therefore, they are more likely to skip the market research step when building their marketing plan.

With the fractional costs of crowdsourced research and the ability to continue to use social media tools as marketing vehicles, small and medium-sized businesses can obtain the market research they need and expand their marketing plan for affordable rates.

All businesses need to focus on market research when building their next marketing plan. By implementing crowdsourced research as the first step of any marketing, executives of any company can rest assured that their investment will offer the best return.