Like a wild frontier where artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, and other cutting-edge technological innovations are staking their claim, the market research landscape is undergoing transformative shifts, witnessing constantly evolving trends that customer-centric businesses must learn to leverage. As technology progresses, so do customers’ expectations from businesses and offered services, the ways they learn about different offerings, how they relate to what the enterprise world is giving them, and other aspects that bring about the need to remain relevant by being open to the arising market research trends.
It’s impossible to survive and triumph on the overcrowded business scene without researching to get under customers’ skin and hear their most profound and best-hidden thoughts. In light of the latest tech evolutions and transforming customer requirements, discovering and learning to profit from the following main trends in market research will lay the foundation for future success and relevancy.
Video content
The motto “video is king” is still as pertinent today as ever and unlikely to lose face to any other arising trend that the ever-developing tech realm may bring about. Research attests to this statement: only 9% of businesses are yet to make video content one of their marketing tools. With more than 2BN users every month, YouTube remains the reigning platform for video sharing and watching, with most businesses opening an account and uploading some form of content there, whether they’re “how-to” videos, vlogs, instructional clips, or other types of informational and brand-awareness harnessing material.
In light of the revolutionary platforms that have taken over the business world, several other platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, are quickly rising to fame. The latter, however, is posed to threaten YouTube’s supremacy with over 1BN users globally, out of which 17% registered on the platform only last year.
It seems like savvy enterprises cannot escape the video content wave that helps broaden their audience and serves as a route to success. Sooner or later, each business owner considers jumping on the bandwagon and finding ways to leverage the trend, should they want their venture to resist in time.
Transition to mobile online surveys
The market research industry has stood by what it knows best: online surveying. As of 2022, almost 9/10 businesses would routinely resort to online surveys for their fast and cost-effective result delivery and how well they caught on among tech users. Businesses are quietly but assuredly shifting to these practices, and one of the best things about these opportunities is that they’re easily conductible and assessable so that even businesses with fragile budgets and small marketing teams can explore this promising area.
Almost every consumer has used the internet at least once in their life for personal purposes. It is estimated that only around a quarter of the world has yet to access the online, with numbers growing in favour of those lacking the needed infrastructure or financial power to gain a sense of the virtual ecosystem. As internet adoption rates rise, so does the popularity and effectiveness of the online survey market, which experts predict to expand by around 16% yearly through 2026. Together with them, the trend of cooperating with teams specialized in giving insights into areas such as consumer behavior or expectations is growing to unprecedented levels, which is demonstrated by the growing number of small to large businesses adhering to methods like b2c market research services for example.
As such, as solutions to improve the user experience and survey length and access to these tools arise and are effectively implemented, businesses and customers are expected to profit from the smart mobile survey trend. Experts place guilt on these two aspects to avoid some customers carrying out similar surveys on their mobile devices. Still, this issue is gradually fading thanks to persistent efforts to profit from this opportunity and obtain customer feedback from more respondents.
Big data
Big data is unquestionably one of the hottest topics surrounding market research discussions, and everyone has an opinion on whether it’s more or less accurate and evidence-backed. In this complex and ever-growing area, big data analytics will no longer be an optional tool in the marketing strategy of clever businesses. It’s nothing to be surprised about, though. Statistics show that the value of the big data market is projected to grow from $241BN in 2021 to over $655BN by 2029.
Big data analytics, or the practices employed to monitor and analyze big data to gather critical information, such as prevailing trends and underlying patterns, can provide practitioners with the most meaningful insights. For similar reasons, specialized research and analytics firms rely highly on these tools and know how to leverage them to generate the best outcomes for businesses hiring them for marketing strategy development.
Big data enables the identification of trends and patterns that would otherwise be impossible to discover. This isn’t only a way to read customers’ minds and come up with the best solutions for their problems or needs but also to enhance the client-targeting marketing process.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning
Like big data, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are also disrupting industries and paving the way for the businesses of tomorrow. People grow increasingly comfortable with the idea. There’s a vibrant debate about how the innovations will affect low-skilled jobs and those whose tasks can be automated and thus operated by robots and machinery, which is why there’s increased emphasis put on the need to upskill employees and broaden the skill and knowledge portfolio for those who want to remain on top. Similarly, the effects will likely be the same for market research companies or businesses conducting brand enhancement strategies.
Organizations and enterprises able to catch up with the developments and make sense of ML and AI have higher chances of remaining relevant. This is critical in today’s competitive market, where the battle is carried out for the bigger slice of the pie. According to the World Bank, around 90% of businesses are small-to-medium-sized enterprises and account for more than 50% of employees globally, which emphasizes how fierce the contest for survival is among the brands that don’t rank among the biggest in the world.
Closing thoughts
The emerging trends in market research signal that keeping abreast of technological advancements is crucial for achieving success in today’s fiercely competitive business landscape. From continued use of video content to gaining direct customer feedback through online surveys, the four market research trends depicted above are poised to maintain their influence in the foreseeable future.