How to harness AI to support your market research

As use cases for AI sweep across almost every area of the digital landscape, the world has begun questioning whether there is any limit to its capabilities.

Effective marketing involves developing a true understanding of your target audience, creating personalised communications that resonate with each individual. One of the key stages towards achieving marketing effectiveness involves conducting market research – identifying who your target audience is, what they want, and how to reach them. It’s a critical stage before introducing your product or service to the market.

Market research stretches far beyond insight into customer needs. There are considerations to be made around competitors, market trends and key business metrics. It’s a rigorous, calculated assessment into the likelihood of success. The quality of insights surfaced hold a critical level of importance.

From content creation to code generation, and much more, the possibilities in AI seem endless. In marketing, it has become a useful tool as a starting point to the research process.

A solid supplement for desk research

Say you’re about to launch a budgeting app in the UK. It’s a competitive market with a number of established brands leading the way. Before launching, you’d need a detailed outlook into who your competitors are – including their strengths and weaknesses. What do their customers think of their product? How does success look like in this industry? Above all, what does your target audience want from a budgeting app?

Using ChatGPT, we can conduct desk research to gain insight into the current state of the market. Here are the following areas we will explore for a UK budgeting app:

• Competitor research

• Customer opinions

• Key business metrics

Here, we’ve asked ChatGPT to provide a list of the popular apps in the UK budgeting app market.

ChatGPT has provided us with a list of brands in the UK budgeting app market. This snapshot gives us basic information about the brands we should keep an eye on and summarises what each company offers.

ChatGPT, however, does not provide a list of citations. By citing the sources, it allows users to critically analyse search results. When we asked ChatGPT for the source of it information, it responded with “news articles, academic papers, and other publicly available information.” For Yard clients, building a strong brand presence online will improve the likelihood of featuring among these results.

We asked a follow-up question to determine the biggest competitors in the market. Although ChatGPT isn’t able to access specific market data, it’s a fast way to obtain base information for cross-referencing.

Here we can see a limitation in the quality of competitor research. Core factors such as market share, revenue, and growth rate would be useful information to have. Consulting with other sources such as the Companies House and ZoomInfo will provide a more accurate indication of the performance of these companies.

After some further research, it becomes clear that this list is not ordered in terms of market share. ChatGPT is unable to pull revenue data which illustrates why consulting other sources is necessary.

Following the research into the market leaders, we can use a brand name – in this case, Money Dashboard – to find out more information on the competition. The goal here is to determine more about what its customers like and dislike about its service.

ChatGPT has provided a number of useful features of Money Dashboard that its customers appreciate. Some of these benefits, such as analysis and insights, and account aggregations are essential components of a budgeting app that need to be included to stay competitive.

It’s important to note that the information currently provided within OpenAI, ChatGPT’s database, is taken from 2021. This is significant in a fast-moving, technology-led industry. Therefore, the data may not provide an accurate reflection of the current budgeting app market.

We then asked ChatGPT to summarise the downsides of Money Dashboard.

The answer given is based on common complaints and issues that have been reported. This information could form the basis for a very valuable piece of further research. With these prompts, a customer survey or focus group could help identify what customers really think of the app. This information gives you the opportunity to ensure your app excels in these areas.

Next, we asked ChatGPT for the key business metrics for a budgeting app.

This information gives an indication of how you could measure both short and long-term success.

Although there are limitations in the information obtained, ChatGPT in this case has – fairly quickly – provided a starting point for understanding the market. In terms of supporting with the gathering of huge amounts of data, ChatGPT has proved to be a valuable tool. Without a doubt, it has accelerated the research process, providing some interesting insights along the way.

Further prompts could ask ChatGPT for the sources of the information as demonstrated in this example.

Harnessing the power of AI

Incorporating AI tools into the research process can ensure an informed starting point. We’ve found tools such as ChatGPT is the ideal supplement to desk research – gathering interesting pieces of information for us to consider.

AI has the ability to significantly level up both the ideation and data-gathering aspects of market research. Effective in the heavy lifting and sifting of data, it’s an ideal secondary research tool. By harnessing the power of AI technology, marketers can accelerate time-intensive processes allowing more time for strategic thinking and creative execution.