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8 min

How to conduct B2B market research

Learn how to conduct B2B market research in this blog post

GrapeData
Nov 16, 2022
B2B market research

Introduction

To stay competitive, companies and organisations need to understand their customers. That's why it's so important to conduct B2B market research. Market research can tell you what your customers need and help you improve your sales and marketing strategies.

What is B2B market research?

B2B market research is a type of market research that focuses on business-to-business companies. It can help you understand your customers and the marketplace, as well as improve your sales.

You may be wondering what B2B is. Business-to-business (B2B) refers to transactions between businesses rather than individuals or households. For example, a company might sell goods or services directly to another business rather than consumers.

Types of B2B market research

There are several different types of B2B market research. Qualitative and quantitative research are two common types. Researchers gather qualitative data in a non-numeric way, such as through interviews or focus groups. Quantitative data, on the other hand, tends to be more numerical in nature (such as survey responses).

Primary and secondary sources are also important distinctions when it comes to conducting B2B market research. Primary sources include anything you gather yourself directly from consumers, like surveys or interviews. Secondary sources include published reports that analyse trends within your industry over time (e.g., sales forecasts), or historical data regarding past events.

Why conduct B2B market research?

B2B market research is a powerful tool that can help organisations better understand their customers and the marketplace. By conducting B2B market research, you can find out what your audience wants and how they want it delivered. You'll also gain insight into which products or services they're interested in purchasing. This may lead to new product ideas or opportunities for collaboration with other businesses.

Who conducts B2B market research?

A variety of people conduct B2B market research. Businesses do it, but so do individuals. In other words, anyone who wants to know more about their customers or potential customers can conduct market research. To learn more about this kind of research, check out our case study on how we helped a firm expand its services in open banking.

How to conduct B2B market research?

B2B market research is a process of understanding your target audience and gathering information about them. It's important to conduct B2B market research because it allows you to better understand what your customers want, which in turn helps you improve your product or service offerings.

There are several different types of B2B market research methods:

  • Primary Research - This is when you collect data directly from people in the target audience (for example, by asking them questions). This type of method can be expensive because it requires hiring surveyors who have expertise in collecting data from large groups efficiently and effectively.
  • Secondary Research - This involves using published sources such as reports, websites, and surveys that other companies or organisations have already conducted.

Before you start your research, it's important to define the problem. This will help you to determine what kind of information you need and how much time is needed to find it.

Once you have defined your goal and started gathering data, it's time for analysis. You should analyse all of the data that you've collected against your target audience. In other words, who do we want this product or service for? How does our target market differ from other markets? What are their needs and wants? Based on this information, develop a plan for how best to reach them (and keep them coming back).

B2B market research is a powerful tool to help companies and organisations better understand their customers and the marketplace

B2B market research has become an integral part of every company's marketing strategy. As business-to-business (B2B) transactions have become more complex, so has the need for sophisticated research methods and techniques.

B2B market research is important because it helps you understand your customers. It also helps you find out what they want and how they feel about your products and services.

B2B market research provides a deeper understanding of the market. This allows you to see where there may be opportunities to win new business or expand into new markets.

By conducting B2B market research, you'll be able to identify trends in your industry, as well as any new developments that could impact your business strategy going forward. This information will help guide future decisions about product development, pricing strategies, and much more!

Types of B2B market research

B2B market research can be conducted in a variety of ways. The most common methods are:

  • Focus groups
  • One-on-one interviews and surveys (online or by phone)
  • Telephone surveys

Questions to ask in B2B market research

Your primary focus should be on asking questions that will help you understand your target audience. This includes:

  • Who is your target audience and what do you want? 
  • What are their pain points?

You can also ask questions about specific demographics, behaviours, habits, and preferences in order to get a better idea of what makes them tick.

As you conduct your research, you should ask open-ended questions. These are questions that require more than just a "yes" or "no" answer. They allow for more in-depth responses from participants and will give you better insight into their needs and wants. For example:

  • What do you like about our product?
  • How would you improve the way we deliver services to clients?

You should also aim to ask questions that are relevant to your business as well as those relevant to the audience being surveyed (in this case, potential customers). You want these surveys to be useful in helping guide future decisions related to your business.

Technologies for conducting B2B market research

You can use a number of technologies to conduct B2B market research. These include:

  • Focus groups - A focus group is a group of people who come together to discuss and share their opinions about a topic in order to gain insights and feedback for the business. Focus groups are usually held in person or over Skype, but they can also be conducted online using video chat software like Skype or Zoom.
  • Surveys - A survey is one of the most popular methods for gathering information from customers because it's quick, easy, and inexpensive compared with other techniques such as interviews or observations. Surveys can be administered online using survey software; via mail; over the phone; or face-to-face at events.

Conducting B2B market research is important for finding out what your audience wants

You can't sell to an audience you don't understand. Market research helps you learn more about your customers. This is so that you can create a better product or service for them.

B2B market research is about understanding the needs of businesses, organisations, and consumers in order to improve their experience with your brand or product line. B2B (business-to-business) marketers use this information to develop strategies. These could be new product development, pricing models, sales initiatives, and advertising campaigns.

B2B market research vs consumer market research

B2B market research is the process of gathering information about your target audience and their needs. It can be done online or offline, depending on the nature of your product or service. However, in either case, it's meant to help you figure out what your customers want.

Consumer research focuses on understanding consumers' wants and needs so that you can create products and services that meet those needs. In other words, this type of market research helps companies develop offerings for consumers. These offerings could be products like iPhones or movie streaming services like Netflix.

In contrast, B2B market research focuses on understanding business buyers' wants and needs so that you can create products or services tailored specifically for them. One example is software-as-a-service solutions sold through Salesforce (CRM), which has become popular among businesses today.

Why do B2B market research?

B2B market research is an important part of any business. It can help you find out what your audience wants, what they need, and how to improve sales.

If you're selling a product or service to other businesses, it's important to know what their needs are. This is so that you can provide them with something that meets those needs. Market research will tell you exactly this by asking questions about what people want from the products or services they use in their day-to-day lives. This includes things such as pricing, quality, and ease of use. All of these will help inform future decisions regarding how much money should be invested into developing new products or improving existing ones.

Some additional tips for conducting B2B market research

Here are some tips for conducting B2B market research:

  • Understand your audience. It's important to know who you're trying to reach and what they need so that you can tailor your information accordingly.
  • Choose the right research method. The best way of doing this depends on your goals and resources. You might want to use surveys or focus groups, for instance, or maybe even go out into the field.
  • Choose the right research tool(s). There are lots of different kinds of tools out there. It's worth doing some careful research before making any decisions about which ones will work best for you and why they might be better than others available on the market today! 

How to analyse the results of your B2B market research

Now that you've collected and analysed your B2B market research, it's time to interpret the results. You'll want to make sure that you have enough data before making any decisions based on this information.

In order for your B2B market research findings to be useful, they need to be accurate and relevant. If there are any errors in either the surveys or the analysis process itself (e.g., sampling bias), then it might affect your results later on.

Market research data is an essential tool for businesses, allowing them to gauge the effectiveness of their sales strategies, marketing campaigns, and other initiatives.

To best analyse your market research data, it's important that you understand which tools are available to you. You can use several different types of tools to analyse your market research data:

1. You can use a data visualisation tool to create charts or graphs that show trends in your data over time. These visualisations may be simple line graphs or more complex infographics.

2. An analytics platform allows you to track events and user behaviour on a website or mobile app without needing to code anything yourself. Analytics platforms will also offer insights into how respondents are interacting with your research project.

Market research can tell you what your customers need and help you improve your sales

B2B market research is a powerful tool to help companies and organisations better understand their customers and the marketplace. It can be used to:

  • Identify new markets or new opportunities in existing markets
  • Improve sales, marketing, and product development efforts
  • Analyse competitive products and services, pricing strategies, and distribution channels

Market research is the process of collecting data on a market to gain a better understanding of what customers want and how they behave.

Data analysis is one of the crucial steps in the process, which aims to make sense of this information so that businesses can use it to make better decisions about their products, services, and marketing.

There are many tools available for analysing market research data, including spreadsheets and databases. The right tool depends on what kind of data you're working with: if you have categorical or quantitative data (quantitative being numerical data that can be added together), then you'll need different tools than if your data are qualitative (non-numerical).

Conclusion

Market research is one of the most important tools for any business to use. It helps you find out what your customers need, what they like and dislike about your product or service, and how they prefer to purchase it. This knowledge can be used to improve customer satisfaction and sales while also saving time and money on future projects. Found this article interesting? You may also want to check out: A beginner’s guide to run B2B market research surveys.

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