In today’s consumer climate with unlimited access to online information, market research is an essential revenue driver for every company. To succeed in this lightning-fast business environment, marketers must possess a high level of agility. In other words, they must be able to quickly adjust marketing activities based on changes in customer preferences and behavior.
However, the old-style market research processes center on the manual generation of multiple tables based on Excel/PowerPoint output, which is error-prone, inefficient, and time-consuming. Indeed, the overall manual effort can be so complex that analysis may be overlooked entirely, simply because no resources are available.
As a result, market research automation platforms become essential for agile companies and those marketers who want to remain competitive.
In the discussion of research automation prospects, nothing is more definite than hard data. The research on the effectiveness of marketing automation led by Nucleus Research suggests that by introducing marketing automation solutions, companies can expect to reach growth of marketing staffs’ productivity from 1.5 % up to 6.9 %, while sales productivity can be anticipated to normally rise by 4 %.
A properly implemented and timely application of statistical analysis and reporting solutions provides business value and competitive advantage across all industries. Data analysis and reporting tools give you the ability to start measuring what executives really care about and prove the impact of your marketing efforts on current and future profits.
Anticipated benefits of data analysis automation include:
Saved time and resources
One of the most obvious benefits of automation is the reduction of time for the generation of reports with analyzed data and the results review process. Research automation software also assists in saving human resources or decreasing the overhead of hiring people to do the work manually. Moreover, providing a standardized and validated means of data calculation and reporting enables an up-front analysis process. With research automation software marketers easily and quickly execute in-house data analysis without outsourcing.
Reduced guesswork and streamlined investments
Effective marketing programs are recurrently challenged to analyze data faster, verify findings, and forecast their activities for the entire company. Data aggregation capabilities of most data analysis automation platforms allow to bring together multiple data sources into an integrated format and directly jump to the analysis process without unavoidable manual errors. An often overlooked advantage of automation solutions is the increase in the bulk of analysis itself. After the process is automated, employees find out how easy it is to analyze the data. So they start doing it regularly. The ability to run statistics helps to identify behavioral patterns, predict future occurrences, and reorganize investments.
Faster revenue growth
Marketing drives revenue by helping you to focus on the right customer groups, to provide better positioning of your products and services, and to engage at the right place and time. Furthermore, the real value comes from retaining and extending the customer relationship over time, selling more of the same product (up-sell) and additional products to the customer (cross-sell). And here the automation suites empower market researchers to find accurate strategies faster than the competitors and boost profits.