There’s no news. The marketing world is dynamic and ever-changing, and tactics and technology will never stagnate.
For this reason, it’s important that your business stays up to date with new advancements in the industry- after all, the last thing you need for your organization is to fall back while your competitors gaining more terrain.
But how can you be sure you’re keeping your peace with the times? It’s that simple; as long you know your “why,” you can bear any “how”. But a great way to keep up with the latest trends and remain relevant is to keep your eye on marketing statistics. Whether you’re all eyes and ears about social media, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, video marketing, lead generation, marketing technology, sales, or advertising, we’ve gathered in one place some of the best trends believed to impact market research in 2020.
Chatbot Projects Will Take Off
In today’s times, the retail offerings are skyrocketing, which brings lots of challenges for a user to navigate through all of them. Though options such as filters and searches are provided by the brands, these options are oftentimes clumsy for a user to navigate. With that said, it comes as no surprise why chatbots have been taking off in popularity over the past few years. In the retail industry, they’re basically replicating the store’s real-life experience, wherein the clients have to post their desired product, and suggestions would be provided by the bot. Many retail businesses are already incorporating their chatbots application to numerous widely-used messaging apps to offer a rich customer experience and solve customer queries. We’ve also noticed a sheer increase in the number of chatbot survey software available to researchers.
It’s clear than ever that 2020 is going to be a year when we see more and more chatbot projects, both quantitative and qualitative, as they can be a powerful tool to reach a wide, demonstrative sample of users for research projects, and we’re looking forward to seeing the insights that stream from innovative chatbot studies in 2020.
Data Privacy Will Become More Pressing
Since mid-2018, GDPR, and tech leaders, including Apple and Microsoft, have been calling for a U.S version of the data protection regulation. Regardless of where in the world they’re based, market researchers will have to pay great attention to upright data privacy practices.
Data Graveyards and new Privacy Standards
Data Graveyards has quickly become the new buzzword for describing the state businesses are in when discussing the quality and quantity of data stored on companies’ servers. More precisely, Data Graveyard refers to repositories of unused data that brands are collecting in tremendous quantities, significantly jeopardizing database utilization, and becoming a cumulative issue and financial burden to those businesses.
But in 2020, we expect brands to raise awareness about how they process, manage, store, and secure their data, pushing legislative procedures to focus more on generating data quality and data governance industry standards.
The Need for Market Research Education and Training Will Increase
While the research phase for the product is essential and will remain the same, the introduction of new techniques and technologies means that market researchers are never done learning. And, now that many experienced market researchers retire and younger professionals enter the massive world of marketing, the demand for continuous training will only grow.
According to Lenny Murphy, Producer and Executive Editor at Greenbook, the democratization of data collection and analysis through various technologies will lead to a renewed focus on understanding top principles of market reproach as well as for deciding the “fit for purpose” match between business issues and techniques.
As new “fresh meat” comes into the industry, the necessity to shorten the learning curve will become crucial. Educational programs, trade bodies, trusted individual educators, and universities will be very much in demand to help address this need.
Machine Learning and AI Will Reduce the Need for Traditional Research Steps
Another subject that emerged from last year’s fall was that AI is the market research’s biggest buzz topic – and will stay that way for a while.
Now that market researches got even more comfortable with automated processes via AI-powered tech, certain traditional steps are no longer essential.
Top market researchers predict that more businesses are going to gain speed on the market by skipping traditional research approaches such as concept testing and ad as they begin to benefit from AI-generated content. Given that all content available today is created by all the possible consumer data, what level of testing will actually be needed? Marketers still consider testing a product is imperative, however, there will always be ways that are faster and simpler to do it than what currently exists today.
Market Researchers will Increase Their Agility with DIY Projects
There will always be pressure from both client-side and agency researchers to move faster and react to their product and marketing teams’ needs. However, GRIT’s recent report showed that both the agency researchers and client-side ranked time-related challenges as their biggest challenge. And, as their need for faster and better results increases, tools that enable a more agile approach will become imperative.
Agile/fast approaches will become even more important but also cost-effective for both entrepreneurs and brands. Tech businesses will come up with their own suite of products to optimize the DIY nature of research.
From booming AI-powered tech to tightening data regulations, trends that we’re now witnessing in the market research scene have the means and power to transform it. This, in turn, puts the customer front-and-centre so that services and products can be created around how customers actually behave versus what patterns predict or point to. This sums up some of the most drastic changes in the past decade in the market research space and even some that are predicted to follow throughout 2020 and the next year.