The Role of Business Research in Decision Making: A Brief

The right data serves as an organization’s compass, pointing the way toward new possibilities. To get access to this data, Business research serves a vital function. By collecting pertinent data and gaining insights into industry trends, customer preferences, competitor actions, and market forces, organizations can make informed plans for growth and capitalize on emerging opportunities.

Wondering how? Let’s find out.

Research and Decision Making Go Hand in Hand

Considering the race to be successful, it is more essential than ever to base your decisions on careful research. Even before an organization lays off the first brick, experts have already begun the process of research including studying the market, niche, audience, and everything that comes in between. Thorough research provides the foundation for informed decision-making, which enables organizations to build sustainable success and growth strategies. In other words, research helps businesses identify problem areas, collect/analyze relevant data, seize new opportunities, and establish an objective in order to enhance decision-making.

With technological advancement, businesses have access to some of the best tools and methods necessary to gather information and put it to use. Not just that, it has also become very accessible to reach out to third-party business research services  who can collect the information on their behalf.

Best Decisions Need Data

Every business comes with a set of risks. However, research-driven decisions can help you eliminate the risk to a great extent while making you less vulnerable. With market research, you can get hold of new products as well as trends beyond your own organization and become more aware of significant variables such as:

• Emerging technologies
• Competitors
• Changing consumer preferences
• Socio-economic changes
• New guidelines and regulations
• Potential new partners or suppliers

Adequate market research helps you grab valuable opportunities – ones that help you develop your products, channel your services, establish yourself as a brand, and most importantly promote informed decision-making.

Steps Involved in Business Research

• Identify Problems and Current Issues: The first step in business research involves assessing the current business situation and identifying the underlying problem or business opportunity that needs attention. This helps you determine where research efforts should be focused.
• Define Research Objectives: Once you identify your current business problem, the next step is to determine the objective/goal and intended outcomes of the research. Clearly outlining the purpose and aim of research at the start leads to more impactful results. The goals help determine essential data points to gather, analysis methodology to use, and metrics for success.
• Identify Sources for Data Collection: As a next step, research initiatives require you to identify credible sources to collect relevant data. This may involve determining internal databases, external industry reports, publications, news sites, financial records (if conducting financial research), and data from other online sources.
• Choose the Data Research Method: Once the objectives are defined and sources are identified, the next step is to decide on the appropriate research methodology and data collection techniques aligned with the goals. Businesses use different methods for data collection, including data scraping, data mining, and data extraction.
• Implementation and Evaluation: This is the final and the most important stage where data collected is analyzed, results are assessed, and finally fed into the decision-making process. The methodology guides how raw data transforms into impactful findings and is then used for sound decision-making.

Types of Business Research

Brand Research

Brand research focuses on gathering data about your brand/company- its perception, awareness, brand loyalty, and position in the market. It typically involves checking brand presence, surveying, or taking feedback from customers, and analyzing brand awareness over a period of time. It helps you make informed decisions on branding & marketing initiatives.

Competitor Research

Conducting competitor research and analysis allows organizations to identify key competitors, positioning, offerings, pricing, etc. With these insights, companies can pinpoint gaps in their own strategy, implement necessary changes, and gain a competitive advantage. The data and findings from competitor analysis empower timely, informed strategic decisions to capitalize on opportunities

Customer Research

Customer research allows businesses or companies to get insights into customer demographics, needs, buying behaviors, and more. Collecting data from analytics and using techniques like surveys, interviews, focus groups, user testing, and data analysis uncover these valuable consumer insights. You can then make informed decisions around product development, marketing, pricing, and customer service.

Market Research

Market research is done specifically to better understand the target markets and customers. This is primarily done in order to test the viability before launching a new product or service. By collecting data and analyzing data on current market trends, customer behavior, and the needs of the target audience, you can take timely action and improve your business idea.

Benefits of Business Research

1. Expand Your Operations

As a business owner, you’d always want your business to flourish and grow exponentially. However, expansion means something different to everyone. For some, it might mean serving within the country and for others, it might mean expanding beyond national boundaries. Fortunately, business research helps you achieve both. With proper research, you can get hold of different strategies being adopted across diverse cities or nations and accordingly make decisions. However, you must adopt the right research method based on your plan of expansion. In other words, expanding internationally requires deep-dyed research since the regulations, market and even the currency are different.

2. Latest Marketing Trends

It goes without saying that research gets you to learn the latest and the most advanced marketing trends. In today’s fast-paced world, new ways of doing things are introduced almost daily. The best you, as a business owner, can do is get acquainted with them and use them in your business processes. By knowing what your competitors and the audience are up to, you can learn better ways of doing things and achieve better.

3. New Business Opportunities

Quality business research reveals untapped potential across industries by uncovering unmet needs and overlooked opportunities. For instance, healthcare research can reveal gaps in treatment approaches, opening up possibilities for innovative solutions. Market analysis can also identify promising, untapped customer segments for companies’ offerings. By highlighting these overlooked possibilities, comprehensive research empowers enterprises to create and capture new opportunities

4. Improved Customer Support

An important aspect of growing your business is reaching and hearing out to your customers as well as clients. The nature of your customer support offered determines whether the customers will come back or not. Research, whether in the form of surveys, questionnaires, or feedback, can help you gather information on customer behavior. Understanding what your customers think or need, will help you in addressing their needs, target your efforts, and ultimately achieve customer satisfaction.

5. Higher Employee Productivity

Another benefit that research brings to your business is training and educating your employees in a vast array of fields. In a corporate world that is seemingly more cutthroat than ever, employees must be well aware of the trends, tools, or methodologies in order to perform well. This means greater productivity and ultimately better business performance.

Business Research Methods

1. Feedback and Reviews

One of the most preferred research and data collection methods is conducting consumer surveys, collecting reviews, or asking for feedback on the products/services you offer. You can ask your immediate customers about your products/services – what they like, what they dislike, or what are their expectations. This not only helps you understand customer behavior, choices, preferences, and other insights but also helps you improvise your products or services as per consumer needs.

2. Raw Data

Another way to collect data is by using what has already been printed over the Internet or in magazines/journals. As there are thousands of online sources that act as valuable sources of information for business, using data scraping services, companies can extract that data and put it to their research needs.

3. Outsourcing to Experts

Research is a time-consuming process. Also, one needs to have the required skills and expertise to conduct proper research and gain insights. When you outsource it to a professional business research company, you do not just save time, effort, and money but get the best team of experts who dedicatedly work towards building your brand. Further, professionals are aware of all the possible methods of research and put their best foot forward to help you learn about the market, consumers, demographics, competitors, and a lot more. This, in turn, helps you fix problems with effective solutions and make well-informed business decisions. Most importantly, experts help you mitigate business risks while enhancing your sales.

SunTec Data: Your Business Research Partner

Every business, whether big or small, needs the right plan to succeed. This calls for deep business research in order to gain actionable industry insights and better understand customer behavior to make strategic decisions, beat the competition, and expand operations. With SunTec Data by your side, you get a comprehensive range of business research services  to help you gain a competitive advantage.

With 15+ years of experience, we have a team of business research experts who have been supporting global clientele with extensive business research services and analysis support, helping them better understand the target market, industry developments, trends, competitors, partners, and consumer behavior. All in all, our business research team does everything required to build a strong foundation upon which you can base smarter business decisions, carve out future strategies, and secure long-lasting success.