With some careful planning, relevant content writing, and a few links to related web pages, it is a straightforward process to create a good marketing campaign. But a great and successful campaign will only come with great insight. Insight on your chosen target audience, as well as insight for the marketplace and future trends.
Good research and insight provides a significant competitive advantage to organisations. Many business leaders will agree that insight provides better planning, more certain decision-making with reduced risks.
There are many ways to gather insight, no matter what budget or resources you have available your organisation should be looking at how they can best utilise them to make sure they are one step ahead in their industry.
To deploy a research project, you should follow these basic steps:
- Agree the objective for the research, and what questions need answering from your findings.
- Start to gather the data for this market or audience.
- Analyse the data and use it to draw up a report/presentation to provide evidence, insight and recommendations to meet the original business objective.
When it comes to starting the project, I have always found it works best to use the business objective for the project and the findings required and create a blank presentation with each page having a heading for each finding you are looking for. This is a good way to lay out how you think the result might look.
When you start gathering the data, much of this might be desktop research and there are many tools you can use for this (as well as Google search!) including:
| Company Websites – HR Pages, Annual & Financial Reports, Brochures and Product Information | Tradeshows and Conferences, speaking slots |
| Local Newspapers, Articles | Social Media: Linked In, Twitter, Facebook (search using hashtags as well for opinions) |
| Customers | Suppliers |
| Glassdoor (for reviews on places to work) | Ex-employees |
| Sales teams | Mystery Shopping, buy the products |
| Memberships of Industries/Societies | Advertising |
| Lawsuit Information | Companies House |
| Internet searching on company, strategy, executive names/CEO | Research access tools such as Euromonitor, Datamonitor, Mintel. |
| Kantar Worldpanel | Office of National Statistics |
Another key area for intelligence gathering will be from customer facing colleagues (using CRM), as they will have insight on:
- Customers’ needs, fears and wants
- Sales forecasting
- Contracts won and based on what criteria
- Contracts lost and why, internal or external decision
- Perception of your business as well as competitors
- Complaints received and trends in those.
If you are going to use internal colleagues it is a good idea to construct a set of questions so you make sure you have captured all the information you want.
For interviews with customers, if required to meet the objectives, once again it is a good idea to compile a set of questions but you may want to consider employing a Market Research organisation for this who are specialists in this type of questioning.
There are also other tools you can employ, including surveys, polls, self-complete questionnaires which can be low-budget depending on the number and method for deploying them.
You can adopt many tools to document your findings including the Boston Matrix, SWOT analysis, ANSOFF matrix and maps to show geographical locations. Your final report/presentation should also feature the methodology for your research.
Great insight should leave your potential customer believing that you really understand them, better than they understand themselves!
LAB Marketing 