What would you say if we told you conducting research can save your company money? No, we aren’t offering free research – and if you find someone who is, we suggest you proceed with extreme caution – but here are six ways research can help your bottom line:

1. Validating New Innovations

You think you’ve come up with the perfect idea for a new product. You produce it and it fails. This trial-and-error approach is a waste of time and money. Conducting research early on will provide you with validated information on what products provide value to and are desired by your customers. Armed with that insight, you can focus resources on the ideas that will be most successful.

2. Guiding the Development Process

Rather than going into the development process without any or unvalidated assumptions, research can provide information to guide key design decisions, including aesthetics and useability, before the product is finalized. This saves substantial money, and headaches, associated with making changes to a product after it’s launched.

3. Helping Sales, Marketing Teams Plan

For B2C companies, using research to test your product with customers will help your team set realistic sales goals and determine an optimal pricing strategy. It can also assist the marketing team with advertising, offering insight into messaging and relevant channels. Just be sure to communicate your desired outputs with your research partner, so you get everything you want.

4. Confirming Product/Service Value

We’ve all been there – in a sales meeting or reading materials highlighting the benefits and features of a product or service. What do you expect? Of course salespeople and materials focus on that. What about feedback from those who have actually used it? That’s where research can help, providing objective, credible, third-party data about your product/service. You’ll show your offering’s true value and save your customer time from searching for unbiased feedback on your product.

5. Measuring Employee Satisfaction

Engaged and satisfied employees are a company’s most valuable asset – your company is pretty much nothing without them. You want to keep them satisfied because research shows (and common sense tells us) employee satisfaction and retention go hand-in-hand. Using research to measure and track employee satisfaction can address issues before an unexpected and costly employee turnover occurs.

6. Understanding Your Customer

The benefits of research in this example are two-fold. First, market research can help you understand your customer’s motivation when making a purchase and what factors they will consider for future purchases. By doing so, you will know how and when to market to them, so they remain a customer. And if they remain a customer thanks to your research, you save money and time versus having to win them back later!

In the end, research is a budget line item, but by using it in your business, you can eliminate several, potentially significant, costs in other areas of the budget. If you’d like more information on how research can help your business, contact us at info@unmutedci.com, we’re happy to chat!