5.01 – Conducting Research That Delivers Actionable Insights
Research provides valuable insights about your customers, competition, and industry, helping you make informed decisions about brand positioning, messaging, offers, engagement activities, media purchases, and more. Many tools allow you to test ideas before executing at scale, revealing which elements—such as headlines, offers, and calls to action—will perform best, helping you maximise your budget.
Customer Surveys
Customer surveys using tools like SurveyMonkey, Crowdsignal, and Constant Contact have long been the foundation of market research for brands both small and large. However, securing enough responses to collect meaningful data is becoming increasingly difficult.
A report by Delighted, an experience management platform by Qualtrics, showed the following response rates from their 2021 data:
- Email surveys: 6 percent
- Website surveys: 8 percent
- iOS SDK-mobile app surveys: 16 percent
Despite declining interest in completing surveys, it’s crucial to engage in various methods to stay on top of consumers’ attitudes, preferences, and purchasing criteria. With traditional methods like on-site, live focus groups decreasing in use, finding new methods for gathering information is essential.
Guidelines for Gathering Consumer Insights
Following these guidelines will help you gather valuable insights about consumer attitudes, expectations, and purchasing criteria, enabling you to make wise decisions and communicate with all customer segments effectively.
Monitoring Social Chatter
In a world where trends change almost daily, so do consumer demands and interests. Social media outlets capture consumers’ thoughts, likes, shares, and other expressed interests, allowing continuous monitoring of the issues, attitudes, ideas, inspirations, and aspirations most relevant to your customers. Browsing responses to posts related to your business category on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn can provide valuable insights for your brand, messaging, and customer experience strategies.
Identify the social channels your customers use and follow for information, social interaction, and news. Common social media platforms include:
- TikTok
Observe the news, stories, photos, and videos trending on these platforms and note the themes with the most engagement. Monitoring and engaging in dialogue with customers and prospects provides some of the best insights you can get. It’s like studying anthropology, as you become familiar with the language, values, and culture of the time in which you operate.
Take advantage of your own social media followers by asking them for opinions, suggestions, and ideas about topics related to your industry. Polls on LinkedIn and Facebook can offer insights into customer feelings and trends worth researching further. However, keep in mind that these informal polls may be biased, as they reflect views from people connected to you through common experiences or associations.
Using Social Listening Tools
Social listening tools enable brands to monitor what customers are saying about them online. You can track personas reflecting your customer segments and listen to their collective dialogue through various sites. These tools also help identify customers at risk of leaving, new opportunities, and those spreading negative feedback about your brand. Additionally, they offer a unique opportunity to respond to unhappy customers or misguided consumers in real time. These platforms, typically offered as Software as a Service (SaaS), include:
- Brandwatch
- Mention
- Falcon.io
- HubSpot
- Sprinklr
- Sprout Social
- Hootsuite
Listening to reviews on Google My Business, Yelp, and other review platforms is also helpful. Make it a regular practice to read reviews on these platforms. Negative reviews about quality or customer service can significantly impact brand reputations and need to be addressed. Responding to posters publicly on review sites shows all visitors your commitment to resolution or offers a defence if warranted.
Following Relevant Blogs
Monitor blogs by research firms, industry authorities, and influencers. Identify the voices your customers listen to the most. For example, if you’re positioning your products for minimalist living enthusiasts, subscribe to the most popular blogs on that topic.
After identifying market influencers, subscribe to their blogs and develop content and story ideas that support your products, encouraging these bloggers to write about them. Like journalists, they’re always looking for new ideas, products, and insights to stay relevant and gain more followers. These influencers should be on your recipient lists for press releases, news bulletins, and story ideas.
When seeking input and information on websites and in virtual communities, be honest about your role and why you’re asking for advice. Transparency often encourages people to offer their views gladly and freely.
By leveraging these strategies, you can conduct research that delivers actionable insights, driving better decisions and enhancing your marketing efforts.
