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Market research was once the purview of only big companies. If you weren’t a Fortune 1000 brand, investing in any form of customer research was outside the scope of what many businesses could afford. Today, advances in market research technology have opened a whole range of services to even the smallest businesses. Small enterprises and soloprenuers routinely test ideas before they take them to market, saving tens of thousands of dollars and years of time developing products and services that fall flat with the market.

If you haven’t used market research to help steer the growth of your business, here’s a look at how it can help you achieve your marketing, SEO, and financial goals.

How market research intersects with content and SEO

As the disciplines of SEO and content marketing have evolved in depth and richness, they’ve quickly intersected with the domain that’s traditionally been known as market research. Entrepreneur provides a helpful definition of market research:

The process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a market, about a product or service to be offered for sale in that market, and about the past, present and potential customers for the product or service; research into the characteristics, spending habits, location and needs of your business’s target market, the industry as a whole, and the particular competitors you face.

The roots of using data in SEO projects are largely analytics-focused. Analytics tell us where people are coming from, what’s working, and what opportunities that we can exploit in digital marketing. Market research plays a surprisingly similar role in traditional marketing, helping you get to know your market, follow the trends, and determine strategic priorities for your brand and market. In today’s online landscape, the distinctions are dissolving as market research and analytics blend to help form the data-driven underpinnings that guide both marketing and bigger business decisions.

Many of the ideas traditionally used by marketing teams have been coopted into the content marketing and SEO worlds. The better you know your audience, the more effectively you can create appealing content ideas, make formats decisions, handle positioning and placement, and promote the content. The more sophisticated your keyword analysis, the better your SEO campaigns and content efforts will perform.

And finally, a strategic market research campaign can help you make important business decisions – from adjusting your strategy, to taking a leading position in growing market trends, to honing your product development efforts. Here’s a guide to helping you amplify the impact of your existing market research program to help grow your business.

Launching a market research initiative to support your digital marketing campaign

If you’re reading this and thinking that you’ve been marketing online without the aid of market research, let’s start there. A solid market research campaign plays an important role in a successful marketing initiative by giving you’re the information that you need to focus in on your audience and content. The market research needed to support a digital marketing initiative has two main focuses:

1. Decoding your audience’s most urgent concern: Understanding your audience has profound implications for your marketing strategy and beyond. From the perspective of developing your content and SEO strategy, it helps you answer vital questions such as: who are your customers? What are their most urgent and pressing concerns? What factors are they focused on in terms of making a buying decision. This information helps you decide what strategy will reach them most effectively on every point from design and copy to keyword research and content deployment.For help determining this information, see “Are You Using Your B2B Marketing Personas Effectively? ”
2. Focusing your content: Determining how your audience finds your site, what they read, and more is the core of a successful content marketing strategy. If you need more advice on this element of the discussion, I highly recommend you read 7 Ways to Find Out What Your Target Audience Wants and Create Epic Content.

It’s fair to say that this information can have far more reaching impact on the way that you do business. But it helps to understand the ways that businesses gather this information. Here are a few of my favorite techniques.

Keyword research: The world of keyword research is constantly evolving. What information are Google and Bing making available? What’s the best tool to dig in? Understanding what keywords matter for your space and how people are currently finding your site is invaluable information. For more information on how to gather and use this information, see The Definitive Guide to Using Google’s Keyword Planner Tool for Keyword Research.

Website analytics: Your website analytics program, such as Google Analytics, can tell you a lot about your visitors. What’s their demographic information, what’s bringing them to your site, and what do they do once they’re there? Mining your website analytics can help fill in the picture of where the gaps exist in your online marketing strategy. 15 Google Analytics Tricks to Help You Maximize Your Marketing Campaign offers further tips.

PPC-based research: Author Tim Ferriss, of The Four Hour Workweek fame, tells a great story where he used PPC advertising to test options for the title of his book. Using Google AdWords to test concepts and gauge interest in products and services – as well as refine the messaging in connection with these aspects of your business– is a smart strategy.

Auditing existing buyer data: You probably store a lot of information about existing customers, including who they are, how they buy, what they buy, when and where they buy, and what triggers that action. Mining your existing data will give you a very solid picture of who you’re selling to and the kinds of areas to focus in on in your research.

A/B testing: A/B testing is a kind of data gathering that lets you determine what’s most effective for reaching your audience. It can focus on e-newsletter headlines, designs for the landing page of your website, or the specific copy of a call to action. By pitting two options against each other, you’re able to determine which performs better and make incremental improvements to your website and overall marketing strategy.

What’s the role of competitor research?

Competitor research means slightly different things when taken in the context of SEO research and traditional strategic research. But ultimately the goal is the same: what’s your competition doing and how can you best them? Business and SEO are both competitive activities. Whether you’re competing for the top spot in Google or to make the sale doesn’t really matter.