What you can discover from Marketing research
Have a blueprint of your customer
All marketing professional know that ‘if you don’t appreciate your audience, you don’t comprehend your business’ in today’s competitive marketplace this is not enough. To be successful we will need to appreciate their desires, attitudes and habits otherwise it is almost impossible to predict their behaviour. And if increasing your profitability is important, then the ability to surmise behaviour is really the only thing you need to comprehend.
Otherwise you may not know how to respond if you see changes in your audience acquisition patterns. And because it’s so difficult to hang on to customers, if you can’t respond quickly, you may have to resort to increasing your budget for new customer acquisition. Unfortunately, though most business owners like to think they appreciate their customers, many are really only guessing, using their instinct and experience to make a judgement. And when it comes to forecasting sales — whilst this strategy is ok, when things go right or badly it becomes impossible to analyse, so an empirical understanding beats gut instinct almost every time.
Advertising research combines the best of both Qualitative and Quantitative.
The market research profession typically divide their activity into qualitative studies (interviews and focus groups, with free-flowing and open-ended discussions) and quantitative research (usually surveys). But this might not help you with some of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make about your marketing – the style and content of the commercial, radio script, direct mailshot, leaflet, phone call or sales pitch used to get new customers. If you really want research that can be systematically applied to suggest, guide and measure the style and content of your marketing material then traditional research just isn’t the answer. In order to be able creat meaasges that your audience may respond to then the best starting point is to take their needs, values, attitudes and wants and distil them into your marketing. To do this you will need research for marketing to give you the best combination of the traditional research methods. That’s because it uses qualitative style research to provide the ‘content rich’ behavioural information which is then processed using a more traditional, rigorous quantitative analysis. The conclusion is detailed information that is scored for importance – not unlike the way that tag or though cloud software is used to prioritise themes on a website.
Marketing research enables you to prioritise the most important and relevant audience themes and replay them back into the marketplace. Guess what? This style of market research although simple can have a major effect on response with many companies reporting 15%-30% increases in response rates.
Use marketing research to surmise roi rates – and save a fortune
Not only does research for marketing help to increase your response, it can help you to avoid making expensive mistakes. That’s because this form of research can be used to figure out the effectiveness of a communication even before you have to make a commitment and put into production. This type of pre-testing of creative styles and messaging can save not only money but time and will provide rigorous, metrics to convince others that things need to change to ensure higher response rates.
A free booklet on advertising research is available to all marketing professionals who wish to improve their response rates from espconsultancy.com the research for marketing specialists.
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