Effective marketing starts with a strong knowledge of your customers: the kind of knowledge that gives you unique insights into what they want and how to satisfy them better than the competition.
The most reliable source of fresh customer insights is good marketing information. Useful marketing information may come from a variety of sources both inside and outside your organization. Marketing information is generated by a variety of different activities, including marketing research. Marketing research is a systematic process for identifying marketing opportunities and solving marketing problems, using customer insights that come out of collecting and analyzing marketing information.
The mechanics of marketing research must be controlled so that marketers uncover the relevant facts to answer the problem at hand. Control over this fact-finding process is the responsibility of the marketing research director, who must correctly design the research and carefully supervise its execution, to ensure it yields the customer insights the organization needs. A marketing information system is a combination of people, technologies, and processes for managing marketing information, overseeing market research activities, and using customer insights to guide marketing decisions and broader management and strategy decisions.
The business environment is increasingly competitive. With something as simple as a Google search, customers have unprecedented opportunities to explore alternatives to what any single company offers.
Likewise, companies have ample opportunity to identify, track, and lure customers away from their less-vigilant competitors. A regular infusion of fresh customer insights can make all the difference between keeping customers and losing them.
Marketing information and research are essential tools for marketers and the management team as they align strategy with customer wants and needs.
Every marketing concept and every element involved in the marketing management process can be subjected to a great deal of careful marketing research and inquiry. Some important questions include:. Another area in which research is critical is profitability.
Organizations need to forecast sales and related costs in order to understand how their operations will be profitable. They also need to plan competitive marketing programs that will produce the desired level of sales at an appropriate cost. The analysis of past sales and interpretation of cost information are important in evaluating performance and providing useful facts for future planning.
All these activities rely on marketing information and a rigorous marketing research process to produce insights managers can trust and act on. Many marketing decisions are made without consulting marketing information or the use of formal marketing research. For example, a decision maker may feel she already knows enough to make a good decision.
The time required to investigate a question or conduct formal marketing research may not be available. In other cases, the cost of obtaining the data is prohibitive, or the desired data cannot be obtained in reliable form.
In a few instances, there may be no choice among alternatives and therefore no decision to make because there is little value in spending time and money to study a problem if there is only one possible solution. But in most business situations, marketers and managers must choose among two or more courses of action. This is where fact-finding, marketing information, and research enter to help make the choice.
Marketing information and research address the need for quicker, yet more accurate, decision making by the marketer. These tools put marketers close to their customers to help them understand who they customers are, what they want, and what competitors are doing. When different stakeholders have very different views about a particular marketing-related decision, objective information and research can inform everyone about the issues in question and help the organization come to agreement about the path forward.
Good research should help align marketing with the other areas of the business. For example, at any given time marketers should understand how they are doing relative to sales goals and monitor developments in their industry or competitive set.
If the cost of conducting the research is more than it will contribute to improving a decision, the research should not be carried out. In practice, applying this cost-test principle can be somewhat complex, but it provides useful guidance about when marketing research is worthwhile. Ultimately, successful marketing executives make decisions on the basis of a blend of facts and intuition. In , the management consultancy McKinsey published research about the difference between organizations that produced top-performing products and those that produced under-performing products.
The use of marketing research was a striking differentiator:. More than 80 percent of the top performers said they periodically tested and validated customer preferences during the development process, compared with just 43 percent of bottom performers. They were also twice as likely as the laggards to research what, exactly, customers wanted. Carrying out marketing research can involve highly specialized skills that go deeper than the information outlined in this chapter.
Managers who understand the research function can do a better job of framing the problem and critically appraising the proposals made by research specialists. They are also in a better position to evaluate their findings and recommendations. Periodically marketers themselves need to find solutions to marketing problems without the assistance of marketing research specialists inside or outside the company.
If you are familiar with the basic procedures of marketing research, you can supervise and even conduct a reasonably satisfactory search for the information needed. The first step for any marketing research activity is to clearly identify and define the problem you are trying to solve.
You start by stating the marketing or business problem you need to address and for which you need additional information to figure out a solution.
Next, articulate the objectives for the research: What do you want to understand by the time the research project is completed? At times, the problem you really need to solve is not the same problem that appears on the surface. Collaborating with other stakeholders helps refine your understanding of the problem, focus your thinking, and prioritize what you hope to learn from the research. What are the questions you need to answer in order to get to the research outcomes?
What is the missing information that marketing research will help you find? The goal at this stage is to generate a set of preliminary, big-picture questions that will frame your research inquiry. Dan has turned to you for help, since you know a thing or two about marketing. You begin by identifying the problem and then work to set down your research objectives and initial research questions:. Once you have a problem definition, research objectives, and a preliminary set of research questions, the next step is to develop a research plan.
Essential to this plan is identifying precisely what information you need to answer your questions and achieve your objectives. Do you need to understand customer opinions about something? Are you looking for a clearer picture of customer needs and related behaviors? Do you need sales, spending, or revenue data? What budget and resources are available? Once you have clarified what kind of information you need and the timing and budget for your project, you can develop the research design. Some types of information are readily available through secondary research and secondary data sources.
Secondary research analyzes information that has already been collected for another purpose by a third party, such as a government agency, an industry association, or another company.
And if it currently is not, is there possibly a way to introduce a connection to an event or occasion? Purchases made for weddings, holidays, etc. But there are also very interesting examples of how companies have connected to occasions and stages of life in very ingenious ways. And if your offerings naturally fit into this category, you may want to experiment with broadening usage to other times by using benefits sought, lifestyle or attitudes segmentation as well.
Primary market research , mainly in the form of attitudinal surveys, is analyzed via factor analysis by a statistician to find patterns and groupings. For this method, you will need to have a sense of where the differences or dichotomies may lie, so you can probe in those areas.
This research may be followed up with a qualitative study to dig deeper into certain areas. Again, you will need to have a sense of the dimensions or elements of difference. And you can just intuit the differences and test through an inexpensive digital means, or have a statistician conduct the more formal analysis. This is obviously even more subject to error, but for small budgets, it is probably better than a stab in the dark, in that it can be directionally correct.
We start with the end in mind. We work with you to establish clear, measurable outcomes and determine the right mix of data, tech and creative to keep moving your business forward.
We keep you updated on the status of your campaigns and work with you to make strategic changes for better results. As such, we work relentlessly to help your growing company become an industry leader. The amount of data, tactics, and approaches the marketers have to face daily increases the need for a strategic partner. We provide the surety of a big digital marketing agency but deliver results with the mastery, commitment, and passion of an in-house team.
Psychographic Market Segmentation. These characteristics may include: Personality traits Beliefs Values Attitudes Interests Lifestyles Social status Opinions These shared attributes may be observable or not. Get the Most Out of Your Research The way you go about executing psychographic research depends on the size of your addressable market, your budget and your time horizon.
Whichever method you choose, it must deliver a segmentation model that does the following: Be practical. You must be able to take action on the insights provided. Clearly identify customer segments.
Organize information on influencing audiences in another table for later use in the SBCC strategy see Influencing Audiences Template under templates :. Review the notes about each audience and try to tell the story of that person. Audience profiles bring audience segments to life by telling the story of an imagined individual from the audience. The audience profile consists of a paragraph with details on current behaviors, motivation, emotions, values and attitudes , as well as information such as age, income level, religion, sex and where they live.
The profile should reflect the primary barriers the audience faces in adopting the desired behavior. Include a name and photo to help the creative team visualize who the person is.
Answers to the following questions can lead to insightful profiles that help the team understand and reach audiences more effectively:. The audience profiles will feed directly into the creative brief process and will be an integral part of the SBCC strategy.
See the Samples section for an example of an audience profile. Audience Characteristics and Behavioral Factors Template. Audience-Focused Literature Review Template.
Conducting a Social Marketing Campaign. Print PDF. SBC How-to Guides are short guides that provide step-by-step instructions on how to perform core social and behavior change tasks. From formative research through monitoring and evaluation, these guides cover each step of the SBC process, offer useful hints, and include important resources and references. The information provided on this website is not official U. Skip to main content. Search form Search. How-to Guide. A complete audience analysis looks at: Socio-demographic characteristics such as sex, age, language and religion.
Geographic characteristics like where the audience lives and how that might impact behavior. Psychographic characteristics such as needs, hopes, concerns and aspirations.
Audience thoughts, beliefs, knowledge and current actions related to the health or social issue. Barriers and facilitators that prevent or encourage audience members to adopt the desired behavior change. Effective communication channels for reaching the audience. Why Conduct an Audience Analysis?
Who Should Conduct an Audience Analysis? Estimated Time Needed Completing an audience analysis can take up to three to four weeks. Learning Objectives After completing the activities in the audience analysis guide, the team will: Determine the priority audience.
Determine the influencing audience s. Describe the priority and influencing audience s. Develop an audience profile for each priority and influencing audience s. Step 2: Select the Priority Audience. Step 3: Identify Priority Audience Characteristics. Step 4: Identify Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices. Step 5: Identify Barriers and Facilitators. Step 6: Consider Audience Segmentation.
Step 7: Identify Key Influencers.
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