Research Tips & Trends In The New Marketing Era

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), One to One Marketing, Targeted Messaging—these newest marketing buzzwords all focus around one concept: intimately knowing your audience and understanding their needs, sometimes even before they do. How does any company expect to understand the needs of their customers so definitively? While there is no specific scientific method that produces 100% accuracy, there are many methods currently being employed to help marketers gain market share and customer loyalty through understanding their customer-base and they all start with RESEARCH!

Marketing research can be broken down into primary and secondary research. Primary research is conducted to discover original, proprietary information while secondary research relies on data that already exists. Primary research can be broken down into two sub-groups: qualitative and quantitative. When conducting qualitative research, like focus groups, the information gathered is based on thoughts, feelings and perceptions about a product, the results of which are not intended to be indicative of how others might feel. The outcomes of quantitative research, on the other hand, are intended to be representative of the target audience as a whole. For example, you might use qualitative research to form your hypothesis about how people feel about a product, and then use quantitative research to determine whether or not that hypothesis is indicative of the target audience as a whole. Types of primary research include:

• Product Testing
• Focus Groups
• Customer Satisfaction
• Copy/Creative Testing

Secondary research can be less costly and provides information that enables marketers to profile large market segments, geographic areas and even advertising activities of the competition. To conduct secondary research, you utilize existing, accessible data. Published reports, directories, government sources, trade associations and their publications, and database services are all places where secondary research can be extracted. An added plus is that this type of research can be turned around very quickly, usually within a few days. Examples of Secondary Research include:

• Target Audience Profiling (Demographic, Psychographic and/or Media Profiles)
• Industry Publications Reports
• Competitive Reports such as Ad Spending and Placement
• Zip Code Searches with Area Demographics

Knowing which type of research is needed for a given project or campaign is key to its success. If you do not have the experience or knowledge to determine the research you need, it is best to rely on the expertise of marketing professionals, like those at Bouchard Marketing. This can make the difference between a successful campaign and a flop. For example, taking the results of a qualitative primary research effort and extrapolating them to the larger population can lead your marketing efforts astray and result in wasted advertising dollars. Bouchard Marketing can determine the most cost-efficient and appropriate research tools needed to help make every campaign a success.