How B2B Companies Can Leverage ScoreApp for Market Research Insights
ScoreApp is known for being brilliant lead generation quiz software. But it’s also a powerful tool for you to gather in-depth B2B market research insights.
Here’s how…
The struggle with market research for B2B companies
The benefits of good market research are well known. You can see your brand and offering through the eyes of your target audience, avoid investing in something no one wants to buy, discover new opportunities, and use competitive intelligence to give you the edge.
So why aren’t you doing that already? Or, why are you doubting the efficacy of your current market research?
Because when it comes to implementing a valuable market research strategy, B2B companies face several challenges. These include:
High cost
If you’re considering a B2B market research specialist to partner with you, you’re looking at a minimum spend of around £15,000 – with the top end averaging at around £46,000. Good B2B market research companies apply the right quantitative and qualitative methodologies to generate the primary and secondary evidence for meeting your research objectives. But these methodologies require a substantial investment for their expertise.
Finding the right people to ask
This is where the envy of our B2C marketing colleagues is totally understandable! Imagine…
B2C
You sell toilet roll, so your market is literally everyone in the world who uses toilet roll. You’re considering investing in a new range of scented toilet rolls and want to know if there’s a market for that. You can whip up a survey, or focus groups, in all your major markets across the globe.
It’s incredibly easy to find willing respondents who are the direct purchasers of your product, because there are so many of them. These insights tell you if there’s a product–market fit for the idea, before you spend money on creating prototypes.
B2B
Now imagine you’re a B2B company producing cloud SaaS software for the health industry. You’re torn between working up two possible new features and want to ask your end users which would be more useful to them. You know what companies currently buy from you and who you’d like to work with in the future. But exactly who is using your product? What’s their role? What’s their name? Do they have final sign-off power for new purchases?
B2B companies usually have a smaller share of a niche market, so you need to make sure your market research efforts are targeting the decision-makers with the right questions.
Asking in the right way: pitfalls of focus groups for B2B market research
Focus groups are a traditional market research tool. And for some market research they’re the perfect format – for example, if you want consumer opinion on five different aromas for your new range of scented toilet paper.
But focus groups are generally not the best option for B2B market research – either in person or virtually. The C-suite decision-makers you need to talk to don’t have the time for focus groups. They’re usually spread out across at least one country, if not around the globe, so finding a good time for everyone to attend can be challenging.
Senior B2B executives are not going to sit and discuss sensitive information with their competitors. And there’s no way to grant anonymity, as you could with exclusive information shared in a 1:1 interview.
It’s sometimes difficult for marketing teams to persuade others that there are better ways to carry out market research for their B2B business. Simply because it’s such a traditional method that’s very valuable in the right context. And entrenched opinions can get in the way of deciding a market research strategy at all.
Surveys are loooooong!
Surveys seem like a simple market research tool – until you decide to run one yourself. From a practical point of view, B2B market research surveys are a massive time suck because you have to:
- Choose an objective
- Decide on who you’re asking
- Write the questions – it’s surprisingly easy to ask too many, or just bad, questions
- Collect the data
- Collate the data
- Analyse your data for useful insights
- Write a report on those insights
And that’s all before you’ve factored in things like respondent bias, incomplete surveys and misinterpretation of the questions. There’s a reason why market research professionals command such a high price tag!
Emotional connections in B2B
When you run any kind of market research, you speak directly to the people within the company. Businesses can’t talk to other businesses – but humans communicate and connect with one another.
To be effective, B2B market research needs to embrace this idea of emotional engagement, which can be uncomfortable in a corporate space. This is where we can really learn from our B2C colleagues. Leading with human connection during market research gives you a deeper understanding than your competition of your target audiences.
Keeping pace with change
Useful market research isn’t a ‘one and done’ situation. The lives of the individuals in your database will change – which might move them into an audience segment with different buyer behaviours and nurturing needs. Without regularly monitoring and updating your audience research, you could lose your understanding of their evolving needs and pain points.
The economic environment quickly changes our market conditions. Having a continuous market research strategy keeps you abreast of emerging trends, unexpected developments, and their effects on the market. This knowledge gives you the agility to adapt your business strategy, no matter what’s thrown at you,
Data quality
In the world of B2B, there’s a limited supply of good-quality data because your product or service is for a niche audience. But the smaller source of high-quality target respondents is only one issue.
If you’re designing your own B2B market research, you need to account for bias and data integrity throughout the process. We’re just as human as our audience, and it’s impossible to eliminate bias entirely. But it’s crucial you don’t just look for data to back up your assumptions, otherwise you’ll miss out on valuable insights. You’re not going to get actionable insights from poor-quality data, or from looking through a narrow lens.
Too much of everything
The amount of publicly available data is overwhelming, and unnecessary statistics can clutter your thinking. You need a market research strategy that determines what’s valuable and filters out the noise.
Legal requirements
You need to ensure your market research complies with the data privacy and protection laws of every region you do business in.
With a list that long, it’s a wonder anyone gets any market research done in B2B sectors! Meeting these challenges head-on needs time, effort, resources, money, and expertise – and very few companies have this in-house.
The right market research tools can make a lot of these issues much simpler and quicker. Here’s how ScoreApp can make your life easier…
7 reasons why you should use ScoreApp for your B2B market research
As you can see, we really do understand the challenges you face when you invest in market research for your B2B business. Here are seven ways ScoreApp improves your B2B market research process.
1. Data collection at scale
Every response to a ScoreApp market research quiz is automatically captured, stored, and segmented within ScoreApp’s system. You get scalable data collection without the tedium of manual input.
ScoreApp fully integrates with popular CRMs and analytics tools, to avoid data silos and give you immediate access to lead data. Our interactive, data-driven approach can substantially accelerate audience growth and deepen engagement, without requiring heavy advertising spend.
2. Targeted insights
ScoreApp delivers targeted B2B market research insights with interactive assessments that capture detailed, respondent-specific data. ScoreApp quiz templates have fully customisable data fields so you can collect the real-time information you need to meet your market research objectives, for example specific to industry, company size, current trends, customer pain points, and product demand.
3. Engaging and non-intrusive
People love to talk about themselves. A ScoreApp quiz is a great way to harness this, because you’re offering immediate personalised insights, in exchange for their information and opinions.
Not only are they getting valuable information that’s relevant to their situation, the gamification of market research makes it way more engaging and shareable. Participants are happy to share their information and the quiz itself, and this organic reach will scale your data collection exponentially.
4. Cost-effectiveness
Compared with traditional in-house market research methods, or hiring a market research partner, ScoreApp is a budget-friendly option. ScoreApp’s pricing starts at £0 – you can try it for free! Our monthly packages are:
- Starter: $32
- Business: $65
- Pro: $107
And you can compare the full range of features with each pricing plan before you commit.
5. Customer segmentation
ScoreApp quizzes automate customer segmentation at a variety of levels:
- Demographic
- Psychographic
- Brand engagement
- Product or service preference
- Where they are in the buying cycle
- Identifying problems and solutions
- Where they are on their customer journey
- Their point in their customer life cycle with you
- Feedback and improvement
Imagine developing an understanding of your customers from all these different angles – your personalised segmentation will be spot on, and your automated email sequences will hold your clients’ hands all the way to the till.
6. Product development
Get direct feedback from your product users before you spend any money on development. Sharpen your new product/service/feature ideas in the market, not just in the conference room. Insights from a ScoreApp quiz will inform refinements to your ideas – and often throw up unexpected possibilities you can get to market first.
Launching a quiz before you launch a product validates your idea and helps you refine it to ensure a perfect product–market fit before you’ve even spent money on a prototype!
7. Campaign optimisation
With such a wealth of data insights, your marketing department can tailor campaigns to audience segments more effectively. You’ll know your audiences so well you’ll be able to create irresistible lead magnets, useful content, and the perfect messaging that speaks right to the heart of the problems they want to solve.
Conduct useful market research for your B2B company with ScoreApp
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to inform your business-critical decisions with robust, granular data. Using ScoreApp as your market research tool saves you the time, money, and hassle of managing your market research yourself.
B2B market research quizzes give you the deep understanding necessary to boost lead generation and drive sales by selling what you know your customers really want.
You’ve literally nothing to lose! Create your first B2B market research ScoreApp quiz for free!
