"Customer and Market Research" is your essential course for transforming guesswork into data-driven marketing success. In today's competitive landscape, understanding your audience's needs, problems, and market choices is paramount. This course equips you to reach your customers with targeted messages that make your brand the only choice.

Across 9 comprehensive lessons and 27 pages, graded on assessments, you will learn to uncover actionable insights that drive business growth. You'll begin by defining useful research sources and types, then explore how to use research to identify and segment your market, and even scoop your competitors' place in it. Finally, you'll learn to use your hard-won insights to thrive in your chosen market.

This course will provide you with the critical customer and market research skills to:

• Master Customer Research Fundamentals: Discover why customer research is crucial for designing better products and marketing them effectively. You'll define customer research as the process of gathering information to better understand your target market, including demographics, psychographics, geographic information, and behavioural data. Learn about primary research (e.g., surveys, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, observational research, internal sales data) which offers customised, current data, and secondary research (e.g., statistics, reports from media, government, industry journals) which provides broader context and larger sample sizes. You'll determine when to use each or combine methods for a complete picture, ensuring you define objectives and minimise bias.
• Define and Segment Your Target Market: Understand that your product won't appeal to everyone. You will learn to define your target market as the specific group of potential customers most likely to buy your product or service, who share similar characteristics. This focus helps you invest marketing efforts wisely and avoid wasting resources. Learn a three-step process: evaluate your product/service (what problem does it solve?), analyse your customer base (who buys disproportionately, what characteristics do they share?), and examine your industry and competition (where are the gaps?). Move beyond general targeting to market segmentation, dividing your target market into subgroups based on demographics, geographic data, psychographics, and behavioural information. This allows for highly-targeted marketing, building customer loyalty and enabling agile strategy adjustments.
• Conduct a Competitive Landscape Analysis: Learn why knowing your competition is essential for a winning marketing strategy. A competitive landscape analysis is a structured method for identifying and analysing rivals' branding, messaging, products, pricing, marketing channels, strategy, and performance. The goal is not to copy, but to differentiate your brand and capitalise on competitor weaknesses or gaps. You'll learn to identify direct and indirect competitors, examine their branding and target markets, analyse their product positioning and pricing, discover their promotional strategies, assess their strengths and weaknesses, and finally, compare your company to highlight your unique selling proposition.

This course is ideal for sales and marketing professionals seeking to master customer insights, refine market targeting, conduct effective competitive analysis, develop relatable buyer personas, and optimise the customer experience. Stop guessing and start driving results. Elevate your marketing strategy and boost profits today with Sales and Marketing ProSkills.training.