Boost your marketing response rates with research
Imagine it were possible to precisely judge the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, would that give you an edge? When I was a director of advertising, seeing an agency’s creative proposals for the first time was one of the best parts of the marketing process – closely followed by one of the worst – assessing whether their creative ideas were good enough and giving something that passed for intelligent feedback.
No such difficulty when someone presented a Media Proposal; there was research which had numbers and calculators that told me whether it was viable or not. And when someone presented an audience segmentation proposal; there were facts and calculators that told me whether it was right or not.
Can we learn lessons from other marketers?
Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the science of ensuring that a website reaches its largest audience. As so much traffic on the internet is achieved through Search Engines such as Google, the key to being at the top of potential customers’ searches is to understand and include in the website the same proportions of keywords that customers will use in their search. Direct marketing is no different.
So if you imagine creating a website to promote say, research you would prepare for ‘site optimisation’ before you even start to formulate content. You could run a keyword search to analyse the words and phrases used by customers who searched for research and include the right proportion of them within the site. This ensures that your new website is most fitting to the Search Engines and results in a higher ranking.
No self-respecting Webmaster would start to create a website before being fully awareof these audience ‘touch-points’. And, by the way, this process has also heightened the likelihood of the website engaging more with the audience who reach it – because its content and structure has been shaped in part to match the audience’s own keywords.
Applying data driven solutions to the assessment of marketing communications
And yet in conventional campaign development, marketing professionals are assumed to manage a much more complicated match than that. The expertise, judgement, the gut-feel, the ‘soft data’ and post-rationalisation of Planning and conventional Market Research are contributing (somehow) to a decision not only on what the audience keywords are but also leading us to a structure, to a format, to a personality and to a creative style that we hope will best engage that audience.
Luckily the Webmaster has access to online tools that actually measure and analyse keywords that are easily identified. Whereas we are relying on much more approximate and subjective analysis of our audience key motivations and preferences.
Wouldn’t it be useful we could use a type of ‘Optimisation’ tool for the development of our marketing communications? What if we could rigorously check out things we thought were unmeasurable? What if, like the Media Plan we could look at a campaign and know whether it will hit the customer buttons more effectively? And why it does? And how to make it even better?
Research for Marketing
If your background is similar to mine then market research was something that provided interesting information, but was hard to use to influence marketing campaigns. It was even harder still to find ways to evaluate the effect that research made, assuming that it made any at all. However there is a new specialist breed of research that has evolved in the last few years. It’scalled research for marketing and is research specifically for results driven and direct marketing. It’s different because it is used to drive, guides and evaluate the creative process and then predicts the likely results.
So if you would also like to be able to anticipate response rates before running a costly campaign perhaps you should consider using some form of research for marketing.
A complimentary pdf report on research for marketing, which features some revealing case studies is available from espconsultancy.co.uk
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