Why Market Research Is Essential Before Launching Your Messaging Strategy

Abraham Lincoln famously said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I would spend the first four hours sharpening my axe.” The same principle applies to marketing — preparation is key to impact.

Market research sharpens your messaging and ensures your key points resonate with your target audience. But even so, many businesses either skip or underinvest in their market research, which results in generic, ineffective messaging that fails to connect.

When you invest in market research for your messaging, you’ll gain all the insights you need to shape effective, compelling communication so every ad, email, and social media post lands with the right customers.

Sharpening the Axe: What Is Market Research and Why Is It Important?

Market research is the process of collecting and analyzing key details about your target audience. With this information, you can understand each demographic’s most significant needs, preferences, and buying behaviors before initiating a sales conversation. 

Effective market research involves various research and analysis strategies, each of which can add new perspectives to your buyer personas. This comprehensive review will help you gauge your audience’s demographics, interests, and communication styles — all essential for a data-driven messaging strategy.

“If you want to create messages that resonate with your audience, you need to know what they care about.” — Nate Elliott, Marketing Advisor at Nineteen Insights

Types of Market Research

There’s no single correct approach to researching your audience. Instead, you’ll need to adopt multiple methods to hone in on your brand’s ideal messaging strategy. The most effective types of market research for messaging include:

• Data analytics: Data analysis tools, such as apps powered by artificial intelligence (AI), collect as much data about your target audience as possible, including their buying patterns. These analyses give you an in-depth view of your target audience using more information than any single person can keep track of. 
• Social listening: This is the process of monitoring social media and other platforms to gauge general perceptions of your brand, product, or service. It can also help you learn more about your market’s key demographics, interests, preferences, and most-used platforms. 
• Competitor analyses: These types of analyses study other businesses in your industry, including their key markets, marketing strategies, and available products and services. This can highlight the most effective messaging strategies already in use. 
• Focus groups: Focus groups let you present information, demonstrate products, and get feedback from a handful of potential customers or clients who meet your buyer persona. Open discussions and feedback give you invaluable audience insights for marketing messages, such as their top priorities and the way they talk. 
• Customer interviews: Customer interviews let you meet with potential customers one-on-one to understand the preferences and experiences that drive their buying decisions. 

Why Messaging Matters — and the Costs of Getting It Wrong

While market research is foundational for your marketing strategy, messaging is the output that turns your research into tangible business impacts. 

With comprehensive market insights, you can fine-tune your message to address your audience’s pain points clearly and persuasively to drive conversions. On the other hand, launching a messaging strategy based only on assumptions can put your entire campaign at risk. 

Beyond understanding who you’re marketing to, you should also know how and where to reach them, whether via social media, online influencers, TV ads, or another medium. Tailoring marketing messages using customer research will maximize your impact and control over the narrative.

How Health Campaigns Benefitted From Targeted Social Media Marketing

Recent health campaigns have used social media to boost public education. They used memes, hashtags, and social media influencers to reach “hidden” and at-risk audiences, such as young people of color. The campaigns’ messages were categorized by whether or not they contained brand indicators, such as an organization’s website. This categorization determined if each message would receive direct, influential, or organic marketing. 

Targeted messaging significantly increased these social media campaigns’ engagement and support, with some decreasing oppositional messaging by up to 25%. Some of the most effective strategies included:

• Boosting marketing during events popular with the target consumer, such as the Grammys
• Partnering with artists and singers to integrate branded content into music videos
• Using memes and short-form videos in messaging
• Raising awareness and creating interest with influencer-posted hashtags

These campaigns also highlighted the importance of customizing your message for your unique audience. For example, the campaigns that partnered with influencers managed to include branded content in up to 90% of their social media posts, which dramatically improved brand awareness.

The ROI of Market Research

Investing in market research has a tangible impact on a business’s performance compared with those organizations that don’t undertake it. For instance, personalized web experiences based on user insights can increase companies’ conversion rates by up to 30%, demonstrating a direct and measurable ROI. 

The best way to track your market research’s ROI will depend on your unique organization. Some metrics are as easy as calculating sales increases or tracking which marketing strategies led to webpage visits or signups. 

On the other hand, tracking your branding and other long-term goals may be more challenging because they have more indirect impacts. Measuring social listening, sentiment analyses, and focus groups can track your public perception over time. You’ll likely never have an exact dollar amount to compare to your initial costs, but the benefits of good branding are invaluable for your long-term growth. 

Key Benefits of Market Research for Messaging

Honing in on your messaging strategy with market research has numerous potential benefits for your organization.

• Higher sales and conversion rates: Customizing your marketing approach based on customer data can increase conversions, especially with direct calls to action (CTAs).
• Public perception: The health campaign examples revealed how targeted messaging can decrease oppositional messaging by 25%. Less opposition reduces the risks of misconceptions or conflict about your brand, products, and services. 
• Consumer engagement: Basing your marketing strategies on users’ behaviors and motivations can contribute to higher engagement, even beyond conversion rates. This engagement boosts your branding goals and ranking on social media and search engine platforms. 

How to Conduct Effective Market Research on Your Customers

Businesses need market research before launching ads to ensure their messages land as intended. With several ways available to collect customer research for your messaging strategy, you should aim to diversify your approach. The following steps can help your organization conduct practical market research for messaging. 

1. Consider the Audience Insights You Need

Reexamine all your current data about your market, including sales trends and any previous research. Consider what details you already know about your key demographics and customer bases — and then consider what details you don’t know and what potential demographics have been excluded.

Your market research should tell you the following information about your customer base:

• Market size: How many potential customers are in your audience base?
• Level of demand: How interested are people in your product or service? Is it a preference, a need, or a want?
• Price: How much do customers pay competitors, and how much can they afford to pay for your product or service?
• Market saturation: Do your target customers already have similar options for your product or service? How does your organization stand out from competitors?
• Age and other demographics: What age groups and demographics do people in your customer base fall in? 
• Location and delivery: Where are most of your customers located, and how would they receive your product or service?

2. Conduct Data-Based Market Analyses

Use data analysis tools to collect information about your public brand sentiment, market trends, competitor strategies, customer buying habits, and more. Advanced tools, such as AI-powered options, maximize the information you collect to give you comprehensive and usable insights. Compare this data with your previous research to see how your audience has changed and identify potential misconceptions. 

3. Develop Buyer Personas

Buyer personas represent what “ideal customers” could look like in your target audience based on your market research. They must take into account various financial, behavioral, and motivational factors.

For example, if a shampoo’s target audience is women between 30 and 60, one buyer persona may represent a millennial mother with limited income, while another represents a Gen X woman with more disposable income who is interested in controlling her health and hygiene.

Establishing a handful of buyer personas helps you make sense of your market research and data. Though each persona is fictional, they give you a good representation of the real-life people you’re messaging to.

4. Perform Market Research Testing 

Focus groups, customer interviews, and other strategies let you test your market research before the campaign launch. These strategies verify that your analyses and buyer personas actually represent your potential customers. Most importantly, market research message testing shows you which marketing strategies resonate the most with your audience.

How to Translate Messaging Insights Into Targeted, Compelling Content

Once you’ve sharpened your axe with research-driven data, you can move on to the true challenge: delivering your message. Follow these best practices to develop a customer-centric messaging strategy for your marketing campaigns.

1. Hone in on Audience Pain Points

Use your market research and buyer personas to spotlight customers’ key behaviors, motivations, and preferences. Frame these as pain points — negative experiences customers never want to have again — and consider how you can resolve them. 

These pain points should guide virtually every message and marketing initiative you implement moving forward to help you genuinely stand out. Customers don’t just need to know what you’re selling; they need to know why what you’re selling is better than every other option they’ve ever tried. 

2. Translate Pain Points Into Key Messaging Pillars

Use your market research to shape your value propositions and tone. For example, if you know people have issues with poor customer service in your industry, focus on service improvements and spotlight your high-quality support team in your marketing approach. Beyond that, make sure your website is easy to use, and your social media team is responsive so customers immediately feel welcome and confident in your brand.

3. Craft Headlines, CTAs, and Brand Voices That Reflect Audience Priorities

Bold messaging strategies will help your content stand out with potential customers, whether they click on your link or remember your brand name for later. Develop an actionable insights checklist as you research your audience with practical conversion strategies.

Effective messaging includes:

• Headlines, taglines, and captions with strong keywords
• Time-sensitive CTAs
• Social media posts that encourage engagement
• Brand voices that reflect your buyer personas
• Customer-centric content themes

4. Track the Impact of Every Message

Monitor every ad, promotion, and social media post to identify your most and least successful marketing strategies. This helps you hone in on your most popular content, such as videos that take off on social media, and adapt to changes in audience buying behaviors. Furthermore, you can avoid content that misdirects your message, confuses your audience, or contributes to oppositional messaging.

How Research-Backed Messaging Leads to Success

Dove’s 2004 Real Beauty campaign remains one of the most famously effective marketing initiatives. This campaign aimed to rework how people and corporations discuss beauty by focusing on confidence and activism. Dove’s approach resonated with countless women, started nationwide conversations, and contributed to Dove Beauty’s massive success today. 

The brand’s emotional connection with consumers has inspired various other campaigns in the years since, with some more successful than others. While many factors contributed to Dove’s high conversion rates, the company’s marketing campaign showed that it was genuinely listening to its customers — and they responded. This stresses the importance of market research in marketing.

The Bottom Line