Your consulting firm collects market research to provide better services to clients. Your firm might often use market research to provide your clients with significant insights and help them accomplish their objectives and goals, from sales initiatives to marketing campaigns. With several applications, understanding the importance of market research and its impact on your clients can help your firm provide stronger services.
Why Consulting Firms Need Reliable Market Research Providers
As you know, companies use market research to gather valuable data about their target markets and potential customers. It can be used to predict how successful a product or service will be by researching industry trends and interacting with consumers. Market research can take many forms, and all industries use it to understand their customers and successes better.
As a consulting firm, you conduct market research to give your clients stronger, more accurate advice to better understand their target market. Market research also helps you guide your clients through specific initiatives and goals.
The Importance ofMarket Research for Consulting Firms
For consulting firms, market research is essential for understanding your clients’ target audience and making strategic business decisions. While consultancies typically offer specific services to help clients, market research is used to drive decisions and create actionable plans for achieving goals. Here are some reasons to invest in the most effective market research solutions available.
Understanding Your Client and Their Industry
Regardless of the services you provide or your client’s goals, you will need to understand their industry to help guide their business decisions. Knowing as much as you can about the client can help them accomplish a range of goals, from increasing revenue to enhancing brand presence.
Client research will help you understand what your client is currently doing and what is working for them. You can learn about their brand perception, target audience and other vital information you will need to develop an actionable plan. Market research can also provide information they might be overlooking, like a market segment that can benefit from their product, service they aren’t marketing to, or a process they can make more efficient.
Learning More About Your Client’s Competition
While internal research on your client and their industry is necessary to solve common pain points, you will also need to know who the business’s competitors are and how to set your client apart from them. Comparing your client to competitors can help you to highlight what makes them unique.
Researching competitors can also provide you with valuable information you can use to help your client, like marketing trends and segments. If competitors are shifting their business models, you can help your client stay on par and use similar tactics.
How to Conduct Market Research for Consulting Projects
When conducting market research, you have many options, depending on the information you need to learn. With so many research techniques available, you can develop comprehensive understandings of your clients and their competitors, industries and target audiences. Some ways to conduct market research include:
Interviews: Interviews help you understand your clients’ target audiences. You can set up individual interviews or focus groups to receive feedback directly from customers about products or services. You can also conduct interviews with industry specialists, allowing your client to learn more about their field and market from experts.
Online surveys: Like interviews, online surveys are a great way to connect with your client’s target audiences while providing a wider reach. With online surveys, you can target and receive feedback from specific segments you might not be able to interview. You can receive large quantities of data and compile them easily into reports and graphics for efficient and straightforward analysis.
Bottom-up approach: You can use various techniques to find information about the competition, industry and target audience. With a bottom-up approach, you research smaller elements and use that data to provide insight on a larger whole. For example, you might want to know how much revenue a competitor makes, but that information can take time to find. Instead, you can research how much revenue an individual location made for an estimate of the whole company’s performance.
Top-down approach: This is an excellent option if you want a more objective angle to discover more information. With the top-down approach, you start on a general level and use that data to learn specifics. For example, if you want to find industry competitors, you might start researching the sector as a whole. You can then use that information to pinpoint prominent industry players, leading you to competitors that are more specific to your client.
Backward reasoning: Sometimes, clients have a specific goal and need help to get there. You can use backward reasoning to create a clear path to meet this goal. For example, if a client has revenue goals for that quarter, you might outline all the industry, customer and internal elements needed to reach that goal. This research type can help outline smaller objectives your client needs to reach before achieving their main goal.
Previous projects: Your firm has research data on many clients. If you receive a request from a client, check your previous projects to see if your teams have already researched similar fields or audiences. While you need data specific for that company, previous projects can provide your consulting teams with vital information on industries and competitors, helping you save time and effort when researching.
When your firm conducts market research itself, this is primary research. You obtain the information you need and use it directly. However, you can also use secondary research, which is provided to you by a third-party company. By using secondary research and the tools or services from third-party businesses, your firm can obtain market research more efficiently.
Provide Quality Consulting Data With Cint
Market research is essential for your firm to provide your clients with actionable solutions that help them meet their business goals. However, market research is an involved process, as well as an ongoing need for clients. Utilizing the right market research tools will help you quickly gather high-quality data. Contact Cint to request a demo today.
Get the low down on what Cint CEO Patrick Comer and VP of Trust and Safety Jimmy Snyder had to say about combating fraud while protecting the respondent experience.
What is brand lift? The focus of brand lift studies is to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. For people working with, for, or on the behalf of brands, a brand lift study helps with understanding how specific ad campaigns impact consumers’ perceptions of the brand in question. Brand lift studies measure perception in the…
Learn how to calculate and measure ad recall, brand awareness, consideration, message association, and brand attribute lift to optimize your ad campaigns.
Learn how reliable, accurate survey data leads to stronger decision-making, better targeting, and optimized resource allocation for effective insights.
Cint’s Wilson Peters (VP, Global Customer Success) and Delineate’s James ‘JT’ Turner (Founder and CEO) discuss the importance of research when it comes to connecting with consumers.
Explore how survey design, inclusive language, and community engagement can help us create research that reflects the full diversity of human experience.
Director of Product Management at Cint, Stephanie Gall, joined the EMARKETER podcast to discuss how to make better campaign decisions in periods of flux.
Feeling the pinch but still need to deliver? A panel of experts headed by Cint’s Laura Manning discuss strategic approaches to media measurement during a period of flux.
Live at the Advertising Week Europe event in London, April 2025, Advertising Week’s Katie Ingram and Cint’s Ariel Madway took the stage to unpack generational divides.
Survey design can have a dramatic impact on the quality of your research. Download our guide to find out how to improve survey experience for respondents and reduce drop-off rates.
Brand trackers and brand lift studies are valuable insights tools for measuring consumer sentiment about a brand. Let’s explore what makes these types of studies unique and how they can most effectively be applied to your needs.
Cint’s Jimmy Snyder, Vice President of Trust and Safety, and Shelby Downes, Senior Program Manager, discuss a range of approaches for taking action against the bots.
A panel of experts voice their opinion on what difficulties insights professionals need to be aware of in the year ahead — and how best to approach them.
A panel of experts voice their opinion on how market research and insights professionals will continue to foreground automation in their methodological approach.
Introduction Across the market research industry, more and more organizations and companies are using AI to speed up audience insights analysis. The reason is simple: AI can streamline previously lengthy processes. Formerly time-consuming work can now be done in seconds, with human beings on hand to ensure accuracy. AI tools save time and money but…
Knowing how to prioritize your limited budget while increasing the impact of your digital advertising will make the difference between success and just getting by this year.
At TMRE 2024 in Orlando, KFC’s Renee Reeves joined Cint’s Ryan Fletcher for a fireside chat on how building the right tech partnerships is the (not-so-secret) recipe for fostering a culture of innovation and setting your insights team up for success.
We speak with Andy Perricone, Senior Talent Acquisition Manager at Cint to find out how Cint avoids gendered language in job ads, why it matters, and how we foster inclusivity that attracts the top talent from all genders and backgrounds.
In 2025, global advertising spend is predicted to surpass $1 trillion—a milestone so monumental it could stretch dollar bills to the sun and back. However, beneath this record-breaking number lies a complex reality: while data is abundant, marketers and agencies still face significant challenges in unlocking its full potential. A recent research collaboration between Lotame…
As the festive season approaches, travelers worldwide are packing their bags for one of the busiest travel periods of the year – but not without a little help from technology. If the idea of using AI as your personal travel assistant sounds appealing, you’re not alone. This year, holiday travel trends reveal not only a…
Cint and Advertising Week partnered on research looking into the relationship between media influence and voter behavior leading up to this year’s US and UK elections.
From ordering food online to the rise in quick commerce, our comprehensive Diwali survey reveals how technology is reshaping the way people prepare for and celebrate Diwali.
From carnival chasing to pilates, and kitesurfing to kickboxing, our international employees at Cint talk about how their hobbies keep stress under control.
A conversation with France Lasnier, SVP, for UK, France, Central Europe and Louis Nix, Senior Analyst, Product Operations, on the importance of a data-driven approach for companies.
A conversation with Cint experts Dhruv Mathur, Vice President, Information Security and Caroline Tahon, Data Protection Officer, on keeping data as safe and secure as possible.
Push Digital, a campaign agency active in America’s highest stakes races and debates by leveraging their digital expertise to start conversations, persuade audiences, and turn out voters, partnered with Cint on a study to uncover gaps in voter support.
Using CintSnap, we surveyed 300 UK respondents on how they plan to engage with the iconic celebration and what aspects of the event excite them the most.
Using CintSnap we surveyed 300 people in the UK on how they plan to engage with the Games, most watched sports, and how brand sponsorship is perceived.
Using CintSnap, we conducted a poll with approximately 300 people from the UK to explore what they read, how they read, and what persuades them to take a punt on a new title.
HR, payroll and recruitment solution specialists Employment Hero conducted a survey with Cint to delve deep into how AI assistance could be a boon for payroll professionals across Australasia.
Maintaining data ethics is critical in market research, especially with the rise of AI technologies. Transparency, compliance with regulations, and educating employees ensure consumer information is protected.
Political scientists Andrew O’Donohue and Daniel Markovits conducted a survey with Cint to understand how prosecution of Donald Trump affected public opinion among independent voters.
From London to Malaga and Cairns, Ariel Madway takes us on a journey through Cint’s busy events season, her planning inspiration and what she’s most excited about.
Both CTV and linear TV advertising present big opportunities for advertisers. In particular, the booming demand for CTV ads. We look at what the TV upfront and NewFronts are all about and the state of streaming in 2024.
Your consulting firm collects market research to provide better services to clients. Your firm might often use market research to provide your clients with significant insights and help them accomplish their objectives and goals, from sales initiatives to marketing campaigns. With several applications, understanding the importance of market research and its impact on your clients can help your firm provide stronger services.
