What’s the difference between qualitative and quantitative market research, and how do the two approaches benefit your marketing campaigns?

Marketing managers are beginning to recognise the importance of market research, but also struggle with the logistical and time constraints when running campaigns. Some are not sure how to carry out a market research campaign, and with others there is an element of complacency, in that they feel as though they already know their customers and so don’t need to carry out research.

Your customers and your customers’ opinions are constantly changing, and if you don’t take the time to understand how they think and feel about your business or your services, you are taking a leap into the unknown. Working with historical or anecdotal data is dangerous due to the dynamic and nuanced nature of customer behaviour, and you must look at new ways to engage and get to know them.

Qualitative vs Quantitative

Market research can form the basis of a strong marketing campaign, but you first need to determine what it is you’re looking to find out. Once you know what kind of answers you’re looking for, you can then decide on a qualitative or a quantitative approach. While qualitative data gives you a great deal of insight into specific thoughts and feelings of your customers, it’s hard to scale this data and apply it across your entire customer base. Quantitative methods such as surveys allow for mass data collection, and can provide a certain level of qualitative information too. Ideally, a combination of both approaches would be recommended to gain specific insight which can then be supported by statistics.

Whatever approach you do take, it’s wise to start working backwards from the answers you want. This seems a little disingenuous, but this will help you to form your strategy and the questions you will ask. It isn’t going to skew any data, but simply focus your data onto relevant topics.

If you would like more information on market research, or would like to know how Ant Marketing can help create and deliver successful marketing campaigns for your business, please get in touch.