Sometimes when conducting marketing research, you find out that your end results does not provide the answers that help in decision-making and the data is not as intended to be. This could result from poor planning for the marketing research, which usually end up failing in meeting the research intended objective. In this article, I will be providing tips to start your research project with that will help to reach the intended goal of the marketing research project.
Make sure that everything you decide on for research planning and design will be reflected in the final research report. This means that you always want to think of the end results that you want to share in your final report. Identify the questions that your entire research project aims to answer that will drive the decision-making. Qualitative or quantitative type of study will best address the research objective? Is there a specific type of people that you want to include in your study and how many? Does the information you gathered will help the marketing team in their decision-making?
You will need to start with couple of blank papers and title each one with the table you want to fill on that paper once all information has been collected. After filling those tables, ask yourself, does this data that you collected answer your research questions and helps to drive decision-making? This will help you to build up the final report with the right information, where you would have looked at the data and make sure that there is nothing is missing or nothing to be removed.
Frequently, when planning for business development, the end results does not match the goals that intended. This could be due to choosing the wrong actions or missing some pieces of important actions. The tip provided above could be applied to other business aspects such as annual goals, KPIs, and metrics. The concept serves as a road map that helps in drawing the actions that will lead to achieving the end results you aim for. It will help you to evaluate the actions you need to achieve your goal and exclude the actions you don’t need along the way of the business development plan.