B2B Market Research and Strategy: Multi-Criteria Decision Making Applied to B2B Market Research

The business-to-business (B2B) industry boasts a tremendous market size that easily surpasses that of the business-to-consumer (B2C) industry. B2B e-commerce sales are particularly staggering and estimated to reach $6.6 trillion in sales by the end of 2020. Since B2B marketing is on a significantly higher scale than B2C and the target audience is much different, B2B marketing and market research requires a unique approach. 

Market research can be thought of as a subset of a company’s overall marketing research strategy. Market research specifically focuses on overall market trends, areas of expansion and condensation, competitive intelligence, and supply chains. Such market analysis is necessary to inform good business decisions, especially when dealing with other businesses. Unlike individual consumers who may be swayed with opinion, other businesses are much more likely to rely on hard data, so you’ll need to provide evidence of your claims if you hope to sell to them. With a good management information system (MIS), you can provide hard data thanks to reliable market research reports. 

What Is Market Research For? 

In the B2B industry, market research reports can help companies better define their target audience and identify ideal buyer personas. Additionally, market research helps discover new business opportunities and determine the viability of the market for certain products and services. It helps companies improve what they offer and leads innovators to design new consumer goods. It also helps to predict economic shifts before they happen. 

Put simply, the insights gained from market research reports help B2B companies create desirable products that stand out in the market, find businesses that need them thanks to regular assessment of market opportunities, and protect themselves from unfavorable trends or market shifts. 

Where Does an MIS Come In?

An MIS is a type of decision support system (DSS) that uses multi-criteria decision making to assist with B2B market research. Essentially, the system can pull internal and external information from collections of databases to present research reports based on specified knowledge base rules. In other words, marketing managers can set their MIS to return industry reports based on pre-determined criteria. 

An MIS can collect and analyze data far faster than a research team could manually, and regular use of an MIS ensures your business is up to date on all relevant developments whether you’re a larger B2B company or a smaller one with a relatively niche market. An effective MIS collects data from an aggregate of thousands of sources, including other businesses and government agencies. Intelligence gathered includes income, expenses, and spending trends for all U.S. markets. 

What’s Included in a Market Research Report? 

Market research reports show the scale and growth trends for different industries and are condensed into three basic sections. 

Sector Overview: This includes a description of the researched sector and displays its overall national income and expenditures. It also lists an estimate of companies within the sector as well as the NAICS codes of sub-industries and the sector’s growth trends over the past five years. 

Customers and Income: This includes information about the sector’s customers and which industries are buying more (or less) from this sector. It also includes a map that indicates customer density and customers by region. 

Suppliers and Expenditure: This section shows the commodities the sector is buying and how much they spend. It also includes a map of suppliers by region. 

Information contained in a market research report is great for competitive analysis. You can see how your business compares to others in your industry, and customer information can be used to predict new market trends. By emulating what your competitors do right and improving upon their weaknesses, you can establish your business as the clear solution for your target audience.