Research and the B2B Marketing Mix

What is the role of market research for a B2B business? Is it understanding the category on a continuing basis? Is it digging deep into customer behavior? Is it about rediscovering the consumer decision journey with newer hypotheses and insights? Or is it the deployment of the oft used concept of A/B testing of concepts and campaigns in the ongoing sales and market enablement process? Let’s find out.

Market research is a dense subject. Sometimes bordering on being abstract and theoretical in its approach and findings. While it does gives you a sense of informed awareness, it doesn’t always give you a neatly packaged solution. Good research always points to the possibilities. It largely depends on how well you can interpret the research, given that the hygiene and compliance to basic requirements is done. What then is the role of market research for a B2B business?

Market research in our considered opinion is an invaluable element of the decision-making mix. An essential for possessing a brand. A guardian input for creating the relevant narratives (will explain in detail further). It is a tool that can ratify your intuition. It can also help you attribute reason to your seemingly uniformed decisions. For some leaders in the B2B space, research is a necessary post decision input that helps them strengthen their ability to gaze into the future. Frankly, good research begins with a sound hypothesis. And smart leaders know how to articulate those hypotheses which set the compass for the research.

Having indulged in this dialectic on research let us help you with how you can deploy research in the B2B marketing mix. Where all could you possibly use it? What benefits could accrue from it? And why you ought to make research a part of your success and brand creation mantra…

1. Market research can help you in these areas

From a long list here are some select areas.

1. Market understanding – Aids you in uncovering the landscape in your space. The research, loosely put can be a market audit. Give you details of the players – strengths, weaknesses, customers and the related perceptions. Operating market forces and the existing segmentation.
2. Persona building – In a B2B scenario, or for that matter in any consumer decision scenario personas matter. Understanding this is crucial to mapping the touch points and the decision journey. Plus, in a multi-layered decision making framework personas within one customer enterprise may vary, correspondingly the communication requirements. Research can step in here before you start investing in pre-sales and marketing efforts.
3. Asset testing – Digital assets can be tested on continuing basis. UI and UX comprehension, navigation and minimum acceptability testing, app likability, intuitive benchmarking and more vis-a- vis competition are distinct possibilities with an asset testing program.
4. Campaign testing – A/B testing and further research pointers are part of this action oriented module in research. It helps businesses understand what is working and what is not. Optimizes your presentations and ensures that the right customer experiences are being created, delivered and measured.
5. Tracking studies – At the core of the brand building process and the narrative construction this is a critical input. These are basically Point A to Point B studies. Where your brand was earlier (Point A) – you can define and decide the parameters that need to be studied. For example, you could list dimensions on which the brand needs to be measured. Comprehension, relevance, consistency, integration, perception (leading to perceptual maps and the oft used quadrant representations), customer experiences, channel perceptions and more. These parameters can be the checked on where you have reached after certain inputs. Or over a period of time (Point B scenarios).

2. Market research an overview

There are broadly two types of research – primary and secondary research. Primary is what you carry out and use. Secondary is what is done by others but you use it.

Some of the primary market research methods are:

• Focus groups – where you get a group of people into a room and ask them questions and trigger discussions on the topics of research. Moderated by a Coordinator who controls the flow of discussions to enable the exchanges stay on course.
• Surveys – where field executives step out with questionnaires to a predetermined sequence of questions to elicit answers.
• Interviews – an involved method where the subject of the research is examined jointly with the respondent through a structured interview guide.
• Observation – you’re largely a fly on the wall mode. Where the observer blends into the environment and observes the research subjects. For example, observing guest behavior in a hotel lobby, or travelers at an airport check in counter and so on.
• Experiments – these are basically done in simulated environments. For example, you could set up a UI testing lab and observe the behavior of the user.

Secondary research can be tapped into from a variety of sources:

• Published reports
• Extensive scanning of the internet for content
• Competitive analysis
• Buy reports
• Analyse internal data
• Social media for service feedback

3. Market research for the digital warrior

Online and and offline behaviors are the two spaces a digital planner has to address in the process of research. Let’s touch upon some important ones:

Online

• Brand audit
• Keyword research – keywords, keyword clouds, long tail keywords
• Visitor behavior – heat maps, time spent on site, bounce rate, pages visited, engagement and source of the visit
• Customer behavior – entry and exit pages on the website, enquiries/form fills, engagement with content
• Persona building
• Social media – engagement, amplification, sentiment analysis
• Comprehensive A/B testing for UI/UX and campaign planning

Offline

• Overall customer behavior in the category
• Category drivers
• Culture audit
• Leadership brand status marker
• Published research
• Tracking studies to understand behavior related to the brand and the perceptions
• Consumer decision journeys
• Touch point mapping that can help online and offline connectivity with regards to influencing the consumer decision journey

4. Market research for the leadership

For purposes of having an action-oriented plan to research let us assume that the leadership’s’ focus areas are product ideas, brand, culture and improving the customer experience. Here are some select research interventions that leadership can conduct on an ongoing basis.

• Product /service comprehension study
• Product/service impact study
• Brand perception study
• Brand proposition testing study
• Brand attrition and recapture studies
• Brand tracking studies
• Internal brand markers
• Culture capture and alignment study
• Ingredients of the customer experience study

Customer experience touch points mapping

5. Market research for a B2B start-up

Research that a B2B start up or a business that is in the process of rebranding needs can be best understood with these broad sections:

Packaging the product/service

• Name research
• Concept study – comprehension, perceived benefit and the problem it solves
• Product to proposition dynamics study
• Competitive analysis
• Expert opinion discovery

User behavior

• Potential user mapping study
• Customer persona styling study
• Consumer decision journey framework study
• Tracking digital behavior study
• Touch point mapping study

Perception markers

• Competitor perception mapping
• Brand tracking study

Digital asset assessment

• UI/UX labs
• A/B testing for campaign communication
• Engagement analysis
• Sentiment markers via social listening

Your B2B market research checklist

Here are some select questions to which you can add more as your experience in the space increases and you are able to figure out that research can be used to solve problems and take decisions.

• Is research part of your planning mix
• Find out if your product/service solves a problem or meets a need
• Have you identified your target segments?
• How much do you know about your competition?
• Have you got a grip of the customer personas?
• Have you understood the consumer decision journey?
• Keep track of your brand’s perception
• Touch point mapping to plan the communication and the brand interventions
• How well is your communication integrated across channels and windows of communication?
• Are the UI and UX intuitive?
• Does your brand identity establish itself?
• Have you done A/B testing to understand and plan the communication?
• Do you know the existing sentiment for your brand?

Ready to see how you measure up now? Get cracking!

Author : Raj Mohan Tella. October 18, 2021