“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest,” writes Benjamin Franklin. For marketers, marketing research and analysis is an investment that pays off. Build your market intelligence from the basics (market scan and brand audit), to more advanced research (customer and product analysis). Once you’ve implemented a marketing campaign it, too, requires analysis to determine additional paths for the best return on investment.
Market Scan
A market scan is a snapshot of the market landscape that analyzes market trends and gives you perspective on your current market position. To paint the whole picture, look for market and industry trends, perform a competitive analysis, and take analyze key audience segments (including demographics and psychographics). The best place to start your market scan is on the web or by looking through any prior research. Once you have a clear scope of your current market position and tomorrow’s leading trends, it’s time to peel back another layer to develop key customer insights.
Customer Analysis and Insights
To get started with customer analysis, evaluate your target customers across market segments to prioritize target audiences. Synthesize any existing consumer intelligence to refresh your current insights. From there, identify information gaps and determine the best way to gain new knowledge. For example, do you fully understand customer need-states and decision drivers? Do you know the key levers in going from awareness to trial to purchase to loyalty? Typically, you’ll need to do qualitative or quantitative research and analysis to answer the advanced questions. Great marketing researchers will develop hypotheses of potential answers in advance, so that the research can focus in on specific questions
Qualitative customer research and analysis involves focus groups, one-on-one interviews or sometimes diads or triads. The big benefit is real-time customer feedback with the ability to deeply explore specific issues. Quantitative customer research and analysis can be done quickly and affordably via the internet. If you want a rigorous survey, hire an expert market research firm. If you are comfortable without a scientific / mathematically rigorous survey, you can use SurveyMonkey to implement a fast, online research campaign. For best results, target high priority audiences and ask closed-ended, objective questions.
Product Analysis
Customer and market analysis will build great intelligence. Ultimately, the customer is buying a product and the product offering needs to have a strong value proposition. Drill down into the features, functionality, and benefits of your product that makes it appealing to the customer. And don’t forget about pricing. Adobe Creative Suite 4 provides a snapshot of their product offering by including features and pricing in the following chart:
In this case, Adobe touts distinct software packages based on a segment’s unique needs. For instance, a novice web developer would choose Web Standard package while an advanced developer would select the Web Premium for its advanced functionality. Adobe identified its segment (web developers and designers), their need states (web-only design software, etc) and created a distinct software packages to meet them. This is a great way for you to look at your brand’s portfolio of products and do a comparison against competitors.
Brand Audit and Message Analysis
Brand audits and message analysis examine how companies connect with consumers through brand marketing campaigns. For instance, Apple’s iPhone 4 brand marketing campaign touts the devices’ “magical and revolutionary” experience, whereas Motorola’s Droid X boasts its many high-performance features. To find brand messages beyond websites, explore consumer reviews on Epinions and consumer chatter on socialmention or search trade magazines for print ads or brand spotlights.
Return On Investment (ROI) Analysis
To track performance of your efforts you need to determine the ROI. Track your spend on social media, search engine marketing, print, content marketing, and other channels and determine how you’re going measure the ROI for each brand marketing channel. A helpful tool to track referral sources is to ask the question: where did you hear about us? Google Analytics can outline where digital users are finding your site and if they’re buying your product. As you measure ROI, include an analysis based on lifetime value of a customer to reflect the long-term value you are creating.
Image by Carlos Paes from Stock.Xchng
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