How to Communicate the Value of Market Research

The return on investment of market research and insights work is notoriously hard to measure. After all, stakeholders don’t always share when they apply a specific insight to their decision-making process. And, even if they do, it can be challenging to assign a dollar amount to the value of the insight.

A consumer insight is likely one of several inputs, and the results of the business decision it guided may be longer-term. Different stakeholders may also apply the same insights to different decisions, further complicating outcome measurement.

With these challenges, it’s perhaps unsurprising that less than half of consumer-facing companies say they measure the ROI of insights, according to research from the Boston Consulting Group. But it’s a mistake for insights teams to decide that just because estimating the value of their contributions is difficult, it’s not worth doing.

Benefits when the research ROI is understood:

Teams that successfully communicate the value of their insights to business leaders are setting themselves up to reap benefits:

• Teams have greater control over future research priorities. When you gather qualitative and quantitative data about the performance of previous research initiatives, you’re able to make better-informed decisions about where to focus your research priorities going forward.
• There’s ongoing buy-in from decision-makers. Your decision-makers need to see the value of insights and, essentially, what’s in it for them when they leverage insights. The more bought in they are, the more likely they are to regularly incorporate insights into their decision-making process. As a result, they’re more likely to champion the value of insights across the rest of the organization.
• There’s ongoing investment from the organization. Your insights team needs to show that you’re delivering results that make your initiatives worth the ongoing investment. This is important at all times, but it’s critical during economic downturns when businesses are trying to identify areas where they can cut spending.
• Teams have a seat at the leadership table. Insights teams that demonstrate the value of their work are more likely to have an executive team member championing them or to have a direct reporting line to the C-suite. Leadership buy-in is a characteristic of advanced maturity insights functions. And, according to Forrester Research, advanced insights teams are more likely to report revenue growth of 20% or more, prioritize innovation, and improve their customer experience.

There’s no perfect equation to measure the ROI of insights, but there are strategies you can use to estimate qualitative and quantitative ROI – and communicate that value to your stakeholders.

How to communicate the value of research to stakeholders

1. The value of research based on achievement of objectives

Your insights team should be working closely with line managers to establish business objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) before starting any research project. The KPIs you identify should connect to your objectives and be predictive of success against those objectives. For example, if you’re conducting ad testing to determine the best ad to drive new users to an app, one of your KPIs might be growth in average monthly users (after launching the winning ad). Make sure you get specific with your goals (e.g., to drive a 20% month-over-month increase in new users by launching a new ad campaign) so that you can clearly determine if your research initiative helped you meet or exceed those goals.

2. The value of research based on risk mitigation

Another way to think about the value of insights is to ask the question, “What would have happened if we didn’t conduct this research?” This may be an appropriate way to frame insights value when the research your team conducted helped mitigate risk. For example, consider a scenario where a marketing leader commissions a study to determine if there’s enough interest in a product to justify entering a new market. If research into that market revealed negative sentiment or limited interest in the product, the leader could make the informed decision not to enter the market at that time. The value of the research, then, could be determined based on the money the company saved by avoiding an unsuccessful launch to an unreceptive market.

3. The value of research based on reach

In organizations with advanced insights maturity, insights are made widely available to stakeholders across the organization, not just the line managers who commissioned the research. This opens up new opportunities for decision-makers across multiple functions to leverage insights. For example, if a study revealed that customers were using a product differently than intended, this information could influence both how the marketing department crafts its messaging around the product and how the R&D department designs the next version of the product.

One way insights teams can track reach is by housing their research reports and other final documentation in an insights management platform with built-in engagement analytics. This will allow them to show their leadership team how many views, shares, and comments each research asset has over a specified time period. Insights teams can also use these engagement metrics to point to cost-efficiency based on insights usage. After all, the more decision-makers that view and leverage your insights, the more cost-effective your research contributions are.

Win stories communicate the return on your investment in research

While it’s important to be able to communicate the value of your insights through quantitative metrics, it can also be powerful to illustrate value through qualitative win stories. Storytelling allows you to be more persuasive by tapping into your audience’s emotions and can make the information you’re sharing more memorable. It can be especially impactful when you’re sharing stories about how stakeholders across your organization used specific insights to make decisions that had positive outcomes.

To collect these stories, encourage your stakeholders to document their wins after using insights – and make it easy for them to do so. If your insights management platform allows them to comment on posts, you might ask them to add comments explaining how they used a research report or insight to make a decision, or you might create a win story template in the platform so that they can quickly populate relevant information and then publish it.

Insights value is complex. Communicating it doesn’t have to be.

The value of insights can look different depending on what your business objectives are, what kind of risk you’re trying to mitigate, or what decisions you’re attempting to inform. Understanding the different lenses through which you can view insights value will help you determine how to effectively communicate that value to your business leaders (and hopefully save you from getting bogged down with trying to find the “perfect” ROI equation). And when you’re able to effectively communicate value, you’re setting your team up to be recognized as strategic advisors and a source of competitive advantage.