B2B market research helps companies uncover essential insights about their target business customers.
B2B market research involves gathering data and perspectives from current and prospective business customers. It is essential to discover:
- What products and services your target B2B customers currently buy
- Which B2B customer segments have the greatest needs and budgets
- What issues matter most to them and keep them up at night
- What influence purchasing decisions at their organisation
It means that companies and brands can answer questions to improve strategy and performance:
- How can we improve our existing products to better meet customer needs?
- What new products or services should we develop?
- What pricing models would work best for our target customers?
- Which new B2B customer segments represent the greatest opportunities for growth?
- How can we adapt our marketing and sales approaches to be more effective?
B2B market research benefits any company that sells to businesses rather than consumers directly, including:
- Technology vendors like software and hardware companies
- Manufacturers of industrial products
- Business service providers like consulting firms and insurance companies
- Professional services firms like marketing agencies and accounting firms
- Financial services companies
- Distributors and wholesalers of goods
It helps these B2B businesses in several crucial ways, including gaining actionable insights into your customers’ real needs, challenges, workflows and priorities within their organisations, identifying unmet needs or problems your offerings could solve for customers, and improve customer experience at every touchpoint by understanding what really matters to customers.
It can also build customer trust and loyalty by demonstrating you understand their business perspectives.
The key benefits of effective B2B market research include staying ahead of the competition by regularly gauging shifts in customer needs and priorities, making wiser investment decisions and optimising return on investment (ROI) and strengthening customer relationships by demonstrating deeper insight and empathy.
Effective B2B market research can provide businesses with a wealth of valuable insights that can help them make better decisions, improve their products and services, and grow their businesses.
The ultimate goal of effective B2B market research is turning insights into action: design, deliver and communicate offerings in a way that meets real customer needs and motivates buying decisions. Customer-centric strategies informed by true customer voices and viewpoints lead to greater relevance, increased purchases and stronger customer relationships.
For businesses that sell to other businesses, understanding target customers as fully and honestly as possible through market research remains essential. Those insights, when applied to shape offerings and approaches, give B2B companies their greatest opportunity to create value for – and enduring connections with – their business customers