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7 Ways an Outsourcing Research Team Assists Boutique Consulting Firms

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TransForm Solutions

Boutique consulting firms have a number of responsibilities with very few staff. This creates problems in carrying out repetitive tasks that consume a lot of time.

Smaller firms and boutique consultancies usually hire staff for the most important responsibilities, and to ask them to engage in online research, and other kinds of research activities would be non-productive.

Precious staff time is better devoted to core business tasks, and to engage in the specific tasks they were hired to do. Most importantly, research teams help you to gather the data you need for marketing more efficiently.

One of the biggest problems that boutique firms face is the lack of data to conduct market research and derive insights. If you own a boutique consulting firm and were wondering why you should choose an outsourcing research team, we make the reasons clear in this article.

1. Gather all the details you need to know about your prospects

Most agencies find it difficult to put all the details related to their prospects together. An outsourcing research team can wade through social media posts and online forms to gather and create a complete database of your prospects' email address, company information, and social media handles such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

While you can ask your own staff to do this, you will simply waste time that they can use for more intensive and process-oriented tasks.

In addition, it is all about gathering data that actually matters to your marketing database.

33% of marketers feel that accurate data collection is more important than just gathering all kinds of data.

2. Create a niche marketing database for personalized approach

Many agencies stick to generic databases that actually do not help in either marketing or sales activities. Boutique agencies especially need access to a niche crowd, which calls for a niche marketing database.

An outsourcing team will help you to put a niche marketing database together by gathering information about geography, industry, company size, and domain popularity. In addition, data can be gathered based on buyer personas and psychographic data.

All this helps you to focus on your core business building activities, in a more personalized manner. Forbes recently revealed that 88% of companies use data collected by other agencies.

3. Learn more about your competitor's offerings

You may think you know everything about your competitor, but there is always more to learn and document. To excel in your marketing, you will need more specific information about your competitors' financial information, products, pricing strategy, and specific data that can be used in competitor analysis.

It is a well-known fact that competitor analysis is one of the most important activities to enhance your agency's profits. In fact, information about your competitor can literally turn your business around if it's facing difficulties.

Take a look at this article to learn how to do competitor analysis right, and you will always remain ahead of your business peers.

4. Data scrapping can be done remotely

One of the most monotonous tasks is to engage in data scraping. When you data scrap, you are essentially taking them from websites, saving them to excel sheets, and making them available for later use.

Some businesses may also need scrapped data to be saved in other formats as specified. your internal staff need not do these kind of repetitive tasks, and can focus on tasks that require more cognitive effort. A reliable external vendor will help you in data scrapping so that your excel sheets are always ready with the data you need.

Learn how data scraping is done for large amounts of data in this article.

5. Thorough social media research

While marketing database takes information from various sources to put prospects' Twitter and LinkedIn handles available, there is more to social media data research. A thorough social media data research can give you valuable insight about your customers and prospects.

Sources can include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and various web forums. Many specialized forums may just be the place to learn more about your consumers.

This takes time to collect and document, but a reliable vendor will help you do this with no man-hours of your staff wasted. Social media research can also provide insight related to trends, and help you predict outcomes better.

6. Conduct better market research

Market research is an important part of boutique consulting firms, and for a good reason. Understanding a market thoroughly helps consulting firms to provide better serv to their clients.

As an agency, you may need data related to insurance details of the prospects, demographic details, software programs that they use, and even their online buying patterns. All this helps you to create better research designs, and come up with more accurate market insights. While market insight is glamorous, collecting and gathering data aren't.

That's where external vendors come into picture. They gather all the data you need, and help you to conduct market research quickly and efficiently without experiencing the monotony you might face if you did it all by yourself.

With global marketing services spending expected to be around $458 billion in 2018, it makes sense to spend your share wisely. Base your marketing on cold and hard data, which an external vendor like ours can collect easily.

Get an external vendor to do your research

Indeed, it is no surprise that outsourcing your data research requirements to an external vendor saves both time and expenditure. You can focus all your resources on your core business activities instead of browsing for days and months in order to gather elusive data.

Outsourcing research teams are experienced in gathering even the most elusive data and put it all together in an attractive manner.

Seeking the help of an external vendor will help you to reach your target audience with more specific and custom messages that will result in sales and profits. This is something that is important not only for boutique consulting firms, but just about anybody who wants to reach a certain target audience.

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