Marketing research

Marketing research is the process of learning about your audience and the industry. Marketing research uses analysis of demographics and business trends to determine the best ways to present and distribute your brand. It also includes feedback from customers, with the help of surveys, focus groups, or feedback, for example. Marketing research can help you create a strategy for market segmentation, the division of customers into audience segments based on their wants and needs.

Additionally, the American Marketing Association defines marketing research as “the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information—information used to identify and define opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate actions; monitor performance; and improve understanding of it as a process.”¹

Marketing research is important because it’s an integral part of a marketing strategy, and it provides you with the knowledge to better understand your audiences and provide information to your customers. Marketing research can assist with advertising by exploring if your customers are responding to your messaging. The goal of ads is to reach customers, so it’s crucial your messaging speaks to them and provides helpful information. Marketing research can help you determine if that’s happening or not.

Conducting marketing research can also help you learn about your brand’s buyer personas, specific groupings of customers with customized marketing strategies. Using marketing research to learn about buyer personas can ensure your advertising and public relations strategy speaks directly to them.

If you didn’t use marketing research, your business decisions could be based merely on personal preference or include biases, which is not the best way to make decisions for your audience or improve customer satisfaction.

Marketing research addresses the process of advertising and distributing products and brands, while market research assesses the source where these are being distributed. On the other hand, market intelligence is research on external factors in your industry, such as competitors, trends, or the economy.

Use marketing research when you’re launching a new product or launching a brand, when you want to improve brand loyalty, or when you have questions about your audience, for example. There’s no one correct answer for how to create a good marketing research report, but in general, the more information you have, the better.

There are many examples of marketing research from Amazon Ads. A key example is our 2023 Higher Impact study, where we explored consumer sentiments in connection with five industries to better understand how they feel about the role of brands around the issues of sustainability and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Here are additional findings for each industry from our marketing research.

The types of marketing research can be segmented in several different ways. First, there’s quantitative and qualitative marketing research. Quantitative research focuses on specific metrics, and it could include surveys or polls. Qualitative research is more ambiguous, drawing information from casual interviews or observations. Both of these types can be used when conducting primary research, garnered directly from your audience, and secondary research, from external sources.

Secondary research comes from external resources, such as U.S. Censuc results or articles with information on competitors. This kind of exploratory research is a great first step as well as less cumbersome to source. However, it’s often not as detailed or tailored to your brand’s specific needs.

First, determine what’s your goal or problem to solve with your marketing research. Then, you can begin to find the answers.

To do so, set the proper parameters for conducting marketing research. In order to receive actionable feedback, you need to ensure you’re asking the right questions to the right customers. You also need to ensure you’re interpreting the resulting information correctly. Sometimes marketing research can tell different stories, so it’s important to give it the attention it deserves and not make hasty assumptions. The review of your marketing research is even more important than conducting the research.

You can also use a third-party source for marketing research if you don’t have the capabilities to do it yourself. Tools from Amazon Ads that could help you get started with marketing research include Amazon Marketing Cloud, which lets advertisers find analytics and reach custom audiences, and Amazon Marketing Stream, which gives you hourly campaign metrics from a push-based messaging system.