The market research your company provides is key to helping your clients evaluate the feasibility of their new products or services. It’s a crucial stage of their product development and rollout – allowing each organization to discover its target market, collect opinions and make more informed decisions. The more effective the market research conducted by your organization – the better customer satisfaction, lower customer churn, and increased revenues for your clients.
Yet the market research space is fiercely competitive. Market research companies are expected to deliver unique and timely insights based on unique and timely information that the client couldn’t otherwise access. This makes quality market data a key to effective market research – and to return business from your clients. Ad hoc or manual data gathering from an ever-expanding list of digital channels leads to inconclusive or low-quality market insights and isn’t a viable long-term methodology. Even automated tools simply can’t deliver the market insights decision-makers need without a high-quality real-time data stream fueling your in-house expertise, up-to-date configuration, ongoing monitoring, and granular analysis.
Drill down: Market research in the digital age
Modern markets are characterized by one overriding constant: change.
Markets are dynamic entities that change based on socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors. The market research your company conducts enables your customers to gain a snapshot of where their brand, product, or service stands at any given time in comparison to hundreds of others competing to reach potential customers. It helps them understand the unique needs of their target audience, shapes decisions about pricing and features, promotions, and channels, and guides them in raising conversions for new customers and lowering churn for existing customers.
There are two types of market research – primary and secondary. Primary is directly customer-facing – using phone or email surveys, polls over social media platforms, questionaries disseminated by a professional agency, or even face-to-face or virtual focus groups.
Secondary research is wholly data-driven and most relevant to this blog post. By gathering data from the public domain, government, news organizations, blogs, social media, and even proprietary sources or internal sources – secondary market research provides ongoing insights about markets, public policies, and existing or emerging trends in specific markets.
Effective secondary market research also dives deep into competitor research. It is critical for your clients to keep track of mentions by their customers and media sources about their own products. But to create an effective product and business roadmap, keeping close track of the competition is key, too. Monitoring online reviews in near real-time, for example, can help a brand better understand how customers or prospects react to competitor products. This offers an edge when upgrading their own products – or developing a completely new product that better suits customer demands. And this type of information is especially valuable for organizations with hundreds of products they need to monitor simultaneously.
Clearly, web data is crucial for this secondary market research. But web data is no longer just a Google search by market research teams. Market research in the digital age is driven by a whole new class of data set, along with deep data insights derived from it.
Market research data challenges
Companies researching at scale and looking to derive actionable insights for their market research customers face serious challenges. Incomplete or inaccurate data can make market research simply irrelevant. Even the most advanced market research solutions or services fall flat without the right data to power them. And inconclusive or incorrect conclusions from market research provided to a customer can misdirect everything from product development to marketing and sales. It can literally threaten the future of your client’s business.
The challenge is that there is an explosion of new content every minute. A market research platform needs to scan this data clutter – literally millions of sources from social media, news sites, company sites, blogs, podcasts, influencers, and more. In addition, it needs to include accurate readership, audience, sentiment, engagement, and other metadata. For this reason, it’s crucial that the data powering market research conforms to four key criteria:
- Wide Coverage – To ensure maximum depth of market insights in today’s global marketplace, news sources need to be drawn from multiple counties, in multiple languages.
- Low Latency – A market research data stream needs to be fresh – with up-to-date data that’s noise-free and constantly gathered and updated by smart, adaptive web crawlers.
- High Quality – Market research is subtle – involving reading between (and beyond) the headlines. Only enriched data can deliver key insights and customer sentiments with full text, along with clean metadata that includes entities, sources, categories, author names, publication dates, and more.
- Historical Data – To capture a true market perspective, market research data needs to go back at least a decade – including historical data from news, blogs, online forums, and reviews from across the web.
News API to the rescue
To truly derive value from market research, data alone isn’t sufficient. Your organization requires insights derived from data gathered. To generate these insights at scale and in near real-time, it’s crucial to adopt technology that automatically discovers and classifies new sources of relevant data, while enabling granular data analytics with adaptable and automated classification.
To do this, and scale market research solutions so you can be sure they never miss important data points – it’s best to leave the news data collection to the experts. A simple, powerful and comprehensive news data API helps market research teams keep up with the volume of data and pace of market changes in today’s volatile markets.
Webz.io’s News API sifts through tens of thousands of news articles in real-time with filters, classifying them into over 200 categories and recognizing different types of sentiment at the document and entity level. News API draws on over 50TB of historical data from news, blogs, online forums, and reviews from across the web dating back to 2008 – offering a scope and perspective other News APIs just can’t offer. What’s more, our Reviews API provides even more in-depth information about competitor products – completing the market research picture.
Talk to one of our data experts today to see how News API can deliver real-time, reliable data for market research from across the web.
