Market research: Rising trends and challenges

As the Internet reaches more and more people, market research has undergone a considerable change. New ways of research have started creeping in which are less laborious, while being innovative and effective at the same time.

The emergence of social media as an important part of the Internet has been a major reason for the new trends of market research. Due to the potpourri of people available on websites such as Facebook and Twitter, companies can find their target groups easily. Therefore these websites perfectly serve the customer list which can then be easily divided as per the categories such as age, sex, location, etc. Facebook also provides extra information like the common interests of the customers, their job profile, their social media presence and much more. This replaces the tedious task of selectively inquiring about these categories from customers. There are also some marketing research online communities where you can conduct an online research as well as keep yourself updated about latest developments in the market by regularly conversing with fellow researchers.

Big data analysis has come of age after creating a strong buzz for a period of time. Software such as Apache Hadoop mine large bytes of data effectively and help in creating useful information from such huge chunks of rawness. That information can help your company make more revenue, cut down losses and make important predictions about your company’s success. Various IT powerhouses, most famously, Yahoo! and Facebook are using Hadoop to take care of their data which usually is bigger than several petabytes.

Few of the Market research companies in India have started a trend of providing the research reports in a very creative manner. Replacing the traditional way of providing the stats and results in a neatly formatted manner in Excel sheets, PDF files as well as hard bind copies, the reports are being presented as graphically designed pages, interactive videos, fancy Powerpoint slides amongst others. This makes the clients go through them easily and also makes understanding their company’s performance a fun process.

Due to the ubiquity of smart phones, market researchers in India are also relying on cellphones to conduct their researches. Apart from calling and texting, new applications have been developed to get the feedback of your customers. This saves the time and effort spent in conducting door to door researches. It is important for a web research company to keep abreast of all the new trends and to implement them quickly to stay one step ahead of the competitors.