Three quarters of businesses plan to boost market research budgets

74% of businesses are boosting their marketing and consumer research budgets this year, to better reach potential customers, according to new research from Stravito, a leading provider of knowledge management software for insights.

The research, which was conducted by independent polling company Censuswide, surveyed 200 business decision makers in large and medium sized UK companies in the last week of December 2020.

It revealed that 76% of business are set to overhaul their customer engagement strategy in response to the disruption and dispersal caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, suggesting that many companies are already anticipating 2021 to be the year that they ‘bounce-back’ from the difficult period caused by the crisis.

Interestingly, 82% of surveyed decision makers agreed that data-driven insights are a top priority for them in 2021, and a whopping 83% agreed that improving communication and relationships with customers will be critical to their business growing this year.

Similarly, 72% of business decision makers agreed that their company needs to improve its knowledge and research sharing capabilities in order to improve sales in 2021.

Thor Olof Philogène, CEO and co-founder of Stravito, commented: “In this pandemic era, connecting to consumers on a ‘human level’ is more important than ever, and demonstrating empathy and understanding with customer concerns and needs is imperative.

“This process must start with comprehensive market and consumer research to help inform business strategy and understand exactly how consumer behaviour and expectations has adapted over the course of the very eventful last 12 months. With workforces still distributed, and remote working here to stay for the foreseeable future, it is essential that research and business insights are made available to all departments and workers in a given company, so that there is no misalignment in knowledge or customer acquisition strategies. Getting instant access to all available market research at the touch of a button will also go a long way to preventing knowledge silos developing between already distributed workforces and departments.”