Why Does a Business Need Marketing Research: Digital Tools in the Russian Market

• Why Does a Business Need Marketing Research: Digital Tools in the Russian Market
• Is there a market demand for your product?
• If a product is unique, will there be a demand for it?
• Who are your competitors in the Russian market, and can you compete with them?
• Does a product require customization before entering the Russian market?
• What is the profile of your target audience in the Russian market?
• How to allocate the marketing budget for product promotion in Russia?

You can get an accurate answer to these, and more questions only based on the data obtained through marketing research.

Not every company can afford to conduct research based on, for example, focus groups and large-scale surveys. However, there are digital tools that allow businesses to answer some key questions and assess market potential within a relatively small budget. Below we will tell you about such analysis tools that are available in the Russian market and which we use frequently for our clients.

Online Survey Panels

Today, ringing up potential respondents or somehow interacting with them personally for conducting surveys is not necessary. There are many services that allow you to conduct online surveys: TIBURON Research, Yandex Survey, OMI. This being said, only those respondents who are your direct target audience participate in the surveys.

For example, on Yandex Survey, you can select audience features such as gender, age, interests, or geographic location. You pay only for those respondents who answered the key questions. Moreover, the service does not pay for participation in surveys, and users take part simply because they are interested in a particular topic or a particular product.

TIBURON Research, in turn, is very careful about recruiting survey participants and pays them remuneration. 550,000 active respondents from 14 years old from all cities of Russia with a population of over 100,000 people are registered on the platform. Young children are invited to take surveys with help of their parents.

Surveys through online panels allow to:

• conduct qualitative research to better understand consumer needs,
• evaluate the efficiency of marketing activities and advertising campaigns,
• evaluate the position of the company/brand in the market, including in comparison with its competitors,
• monitor customer satisfaction (with website, delivery, service, brand experience, etc.),
• understand how brand knowledge, intention to buy, image has changed,
• evaluate how well the advertisement was remembered, how well it conveyed information about the brand and product,
• compare the efficiency of channels, formats, creatives, determine the optimal display frequency,
• conduct any other surveys in order to obtain solutions for certain business problems.

Social Media Monitoring

Youscan, Brand Analytics, Medialogia, SemanticForce, and other services help companies hear their customers online, analyze brand perception and manage reputation. In fact, these are services that monitor brand mentions on various sites and in social networks and allow you to estimate the number of mentions and their sentiment, find a negative picture and quickly respond to it, find potential customers and answer their questions (for example, in social networks, review sites and on forums), monitor the overall brand information field and the activity of competitors.

Monitoring systems allow you to identify consumer insights and find answers to the following questions:

• What do customers value, and what prevents them from buying?
• How are advertising and PR activities perceived?
• Are there any product or service issues?
• Which of competitors' offers spark interest?
• And many, many other questions to better understand your target audience.

User Request Analysis Services

In Runet, Yandex, and Mail.ru services allow you to get statistics on specific requests on the Internet. The main feature of Yandex.Wordstat is that request statistics is presented in dynamics: you can get data on interest in a specific topic for the last 2 years. However, you can filter the data by country and region.

On the other hand, Mail.ru provides statistics only for the last month, but the report provides more detailed data than Yandex, in terms of gender and age.

Analysis of the data obtained allows to:

• see the demand for a product and its dynamics over time,
• compare the popularity of your brand with competitors,
• determine which keywords are required in advertising campaigns,
• identify the most popular key requests by brand, for example, to compile the semantic kernel of a site.

An important task that marketing research allows to implement is the ability to obtain the necessary data to create an effective marketing strategy in the market. Vadim Tilyk, CEO of RMAA Agency, revealed this question in detail at the webinar.

Do it Yourself or Hire an Agency?

Companies often try to conduct marketing research on their own. In this case, it is worth understanding that it is important not only to conduct research but also to draw the correct conclusions from it. To achieve this, the presence of sufficient expertise and skills that the RMAA Marketing Agency analysts have is required. Therefore, when evaluating the costs of marketing research and trying to minimize them, keep in mind that an incorrect analysis can lead to incorrect conclusions and subsequent major economic losses. Compared to this, the cost of research in the agency becomes less significant, and the importance of the quality and reliability of the conclusions increases significantly.

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