Winning with marketing research - Industrial Ideas

Understanding customer behaviour with marketing research

In today’s fast-paced industrial landscape, understanding customer behaviour quickly and accurately is more crucial than ever. Yet many industrial companies continue to rely on their sales teams as the only channel for customer feedback and market sentiment. This can pose a heavy reliance on sales to shape strategy and future improvements.

Marketing Research with Purpose

Marketing research focused on improving the experience of existing customers can deliver breakthrough growth. Extending this to lapsed customers who have stopped purchasing for over 12 months leads to an avenue to redeem their business and make key changes within your operations, whether it be product quality, delivery times, or production lead times.

We have found that successful industrial companies who conduct regular marketing research studies on existing, lapsed and prospective customers gradually increase their customer satisfaction ratings year after year.

Customer-Led Marketing Research

Customer-led marketing research studies, in our experience, rest on three key pillars:

1. A discovery of key customer issues, challenges and pain points.
2. A transparent assessment of your organisation as a supplier.
3. Possible improvements to win a greater share of your customer’s wallet.

Customer Discovery

Identifying your customers’ key issues, challenges, and pain points will allow you to better understand their business, products, operations, services, and people. How can you better serve their needs if you do not understand their issues?

Marketing research in the form of a qualitative and/or quantitive study will help identify and examine each stage of your customer’s journey, from awareness to purchase and post-purchase. By understanding the customer journey, you can tailor your marketing efforts to meet customer needs at each stage.

Supplier Performance

Allow your customers to judge your performance as a supplier compared to other suppliers—your competitors. This will enable you to improve and innovate to increase this rating. Ask them what they want, expect, and need. What improvements are required to win more of their business? And why?

Depth interviews are an effective marketing research approach for industrial companies. Having these conducted independently will provide unbiased and transparent feedback.

Making Improvements

Improving what matters to your customers will allow your organisation to surpass competitors at every step. Concentrating on your key customers that are strategic to your operations is a clever way to grow and defend your market share.

Your unique offerings to these customers will create a competitive advantage that your competitors cannot easily duplicate.

Effective marketing research approaches and studies are the foundation of successful industrial marketing. We help our clients deliver value and grow with industrial marketing research that works. If you’d like some help with your approach to B2B marketing, let’s chat.

Other Reading: Winning companies do their research

INDUSTRIAL MARKETING
RESEARCH GUIDE

Learn how to uncover key insights to assist with your marketing strategy, planning and campaign execution. We’ll help you lay the foundation to develop an effective research strategy by selecting the appropriate approach, understanding the key benefits to be delivered to then link back to your marketing strategy and plan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Zafiris is an industrial marketer and founder of Industrial Ideas. Having built his experience in B2B marketing from the ground up, Peter understands what it takes to succeed with your marketing strategy. All client projects are personally managed by Peter to help industrials like you get the return on investment you deserve. Peter and team, work hard to become an extension of your business, to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts. Get your free 30 minute marketing consultation to learn more.