Social media and digital Marketing management is a mature business with huge competition, and a similar skillset across all service providers. Day by day, new freelancers, consultants, small agencies and established larger marketing agencies compete for the same set of clients.

If you make a living from managing digital marketing, social media ads, ClickFunnels, or anything online for your clients, then you need to think a few steps ahead. Here are a few questions that we bet crossed your mind:

• How will you remain relevant in the ever-increasing competition?
• How do you ensure better results and more professional services?
• What skills and know-how can you bring to your clients that they would not get from other digital marketing service providers?

Market research services is a fantastic opportunity for marketing and social media agencies – so why is it avoided?

Getting started with providing market research services is super simple. One can sign up to be a research partner with Market Sampler and access a set of pro-grade research management tools.

Market research is an area that digital marketers and social media managers do not focus on – and for good reasons, we will explain later on. It is common for large and mid-sized digital agencies to carry out market research and brand audits either as a standalone service or more commonly bundled into other services they provide. 

So why is market research not among the services of small marketing agencies and freelance marketers? There are a few reasons.

• Market research is known to be a complicated process that requires specialized skillsets – this is true
• Data collection is costly, and data quality from most survey platforms is questionable – this is also true
• Small businesses do not require market research – this is not true

The harsh truth and the single biggest reason small marketing agencies do not do market research is that it could potentially undermine the credibility of their strategies. Let’s talk more about this.

Doing market research can potentially harm digital marketing and social media self-proclaimed experts who work based on their intuition

The vast majority of digital marketing and social media marketing service providers tend to work with a similar process with most of their clients. 

The professional experiences and ideas that shape how a marketer works might be convincing to clients, but it does not guarantee that her strategies will work in all cases.

People who follow proven processes do not like changes. They look at a problem and think they know how to solve it with their skillset and toolset that they used in the past.

Having primary market research results at hand might shake them out of confidence, data might prove them wrong, and their clients might realize that their digital marketing was going in the wrong direction at all.

Meanwhile, in top-tier agencies, market research is a daily routine. Decisions and directions there are based on research data. In professional marketing and business planning, marketers answer questions with data, which is one of the reasons why professional agencies can deliver significantly better results – and why clients pay a premium for their services.

Data and evidence-based marketing planning sound a lot better to a client compared to “I know what to do, did it in the past.”

Including market research in your work as a digital marketing or social media company is a significant upgrade

Selling research and data as a separate service or bundling it into your services is a significant level up from basic marketing and social media service providers.

Now let’s talk about how someone can successfully integrate market research into their set of services. Before we get to that, let’s see why professional-level market research is a challenge for most people who don’t know the industry.

The problem with incentivized market research platforms and survey fraud

We mentioned that market research is expensive, and data quality is often questionable. It is true when someone uses basic or entry-level solutions like Google Surveys, SurveySparrow, or SurveyMonkey. 

The problem with such services is that these are getting responses from incentivized survey networks, which means these platforms are full of participants who only care about getting paid a few cents for completing surveys. This is why data will become expensive and low quality, practically useless.

The biggest problem of the market research industry is bad responses. Over 35% of participants on paid survey networks and “panels” are fraudsters abusing survey platforms to maximize their earnings. Another 40% are broke students who want to get a few dollars in their free time. A recent study showed that nearly 20% of respondents are bots. The ratio of genuine respondents is estimated to be below 10%.

Market Sampler solves this simply by not paying for responses. Our public survey delivery system reaches people who are happy to give genuine feedback. With our platform, you can distribute surveys to 4+ million websites or apps, with the ability to target people on premium placements like Forbes, The New Yorker, CBS, BBC, Cosmopolitan, and more.

Market Sampler is a professional-level market research tool for those who want reliable data without the price and hassle

Like graphic designers do not work with MS Paint, professional market researchers do not work with SurveyMonkey or Google Surveys. Adept researchers use Qualitrics, outsource their surveys to Lucid, or run micro-researches on Market Sampler.

Qualtrics is the industry-standard tool for professional market research in the Fortune500 segment. Using Lucid requires serious technical pre-requisites like APIs. Market Sampler is the tool for fast and relatively small-scale research at a low price.

Market Sampler was built for occasional researchers and marketing managers in small to medium enterprises, keeping segment-specific requirements and preferences in mind.

• One can buy data at a low price, like $0.6 per response
• Anyone can start professional-level market research from $50, which will get you over 100 responses with fairly broad targeting criteria
• The micro-survey creation tool can take questions in any language, and targeting is possible to any country in any language too
• Data delivery timeline, cost per response, and estimated response quota are calculated in real-time as you configure your survey
• A research status tracker tool is available to check your order status
• Market Sampler data is from public survey research, not from paid survey networks

The price end customers are willing to pay for a 1,000 response market research project is over $3,000 (USD). You can acquire this amount of data from Market Sampler at around $500-$600. Not a bad markup opportunity for buying and selling data, right?

Be an early adopter and extend your specialization with market research

Over 50 large marketing agencies use Market Sampler in the US and Canada alone. We do not yet have an extensive partner network among small and medium-sized marketing agencies. It is an excellent opportunity to start providing market research as a standalone service or to use research to enhance the quality of work.

Have you ever thought about offering market research for your clients? Do you think it is a good opportunity to add value to your business? If so, then register to become a research partner.