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Market research – it's an essential for today's businesses that want to learn about their customers. 

However, market research presents an interesting dilemma. This research provides businesses with vast amounts of data about customers; but at the same time, mining this data for actionable insights into customer behaviors may prove to be exceedingly time-consuming, costly and difficult for even the most profitable company. 

So now the question becomes: How much should you spend on market research? 

Here are three factors you should consider when evaluating your market research spend:

1. Budget

Whether it's the costs of conducting an online survey or evaluating social media impressions, you'll need to budget for market research accordingly.

There are many theories on how a company should budget for market research. But no matter how much you budget, you should first use an evaluation process to determine what percentage of your total operating spend you should allocate to market research. 

Online marketing service A-Line Interactive points out this process should include:

• Taking a look at your overall budget.
• Determine how much you can spend on market research.
• Breaking down the numbers to determine how you want to allocate your market research funds.

And after you determine how much to spend overall, A-Line notes, you need to break it down into where to spend it as well. 

Where you allocate your funds depends on how you connect with your customers. And ultimately, businesses that are able to learn about their customers based on the data that is already available can better predict how to allocate their market research spend properly going forward. 

2. Return on investment (ROI)

Evaluating ROI can be difficult, especially when it comes to determining the effectiveness of a business' market research. 

ROI may depend on whether market research empowers a company to make better decisions relative to customer experience (CX) and customer satisfaction (CSAT). 

"With very few exceptions, market research projects should contribute to decision-making or solving business problems," business-to-business market research firm B2B International wrote in a blog post. "The output of research may be interesting, but it should always go beyond providing insights and assist management in making more informed and intelligent business decisions."

As such, it is important for a business to collect data it can use to monitor the long- and short-term impact of its decisions. Furthermore, a company needs to be able to understand how customers' perceive its actions, and whether these customers are willing to remain with a business for the long haul. 

3. Technology

Many technologies are available that can help a business better understand its market research. But when it comes to your business, only the best will suffice, which means text analytics remains the only choice to ensure your company can make the most of its market research. 

Text analytics goes beyond basic market research because it delivers in-depth information about a business' customers. It ensures a company can discover whether customers feel positively, negatively or neutrally about a business at a given point in time. And as a result, text analytics allows a company to learn from customer feedback and make more informed decisions to improve its CX and CSAT levels. 

Also, text analytics offers customer feedback from a variety of sources – everything from social networks to websites. With text analytics, a business can discover new insights into its customers and use comprehensive data sets to better understand and connect with its customers. 

Text analytics and Solution as a Service (SolaaS): A powerful combination for businesses

Text analytics alone is powerful, but when it is combined with SolaaS, a business can reap long-lasting rewards from extensive market research. 

Together, text analytics and SolaaS offer immediate access to experienced data scientists who understand the ins and outs of customer data. These data scientists empower a business and will work with a company to ensure it can maximize the value of the customer data that is available. Therefore, the combination of text analytics and SolaaS delivers immense value, ensuring a company can learn more about its customers, faster than ever before. 

Summary

Market research remains crucial for today's businesses, and there are many factors that must be considered to ensure a company spends the right amount on it. And with text analytics and SolaaS, a company can further enhance the value of its market research. Text analytics and SolaaS offer actionable insights into its customers, allowing this company to better support its customers for years to come.