“Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.” – W. Edwards Deming
In this era of digital marketing, we have more insights than ever before.
Think of the best marketers you know, do their decisions come from a place of opinion or insight?
By using qualitative and quantitative research, you minimise risks and optimise performance.
Automation in Market Research
When we think about marketing automation, we think of communications, whether in email automation, text message automation or otherwise. We rely more and more on automation in our communications and customer service tools. But there is also a growing trend of automated market research tools.
Good quality market research helps us decide on whether we choose to automate our processes. But also, the market research process itself can be automated.
So, for this article, let’s put ‘automated communications’ aside. And instead, let’s consider how digital techniques can automate and speed up the market research process.
Building Customer Personas
To engage with your audience, you must get to know them. Still today, big brands hold regular focus groups keeping track of how consumers perceive their brand.
So what do we need to know about them?
- Their needs and goals – what do they want to fix in their lives? What do they want to achieve?
- Where do they hang out – which device do they use to access their social media profiles? Do they prefer communications by post or email?
- What do they enjoy doing? What books do they read? What hobbies do they have and what television programmes do they enjoy watching?
- What barriers are there to them becoming a customer of yours?
Find the answers to these fundamental areas. And when you do, you’ll know more about how and where to position your marketing efforts and help you decide your message.
SocialBakers.com is a perfect place to start. Their platform helps you build specific personas of your audience. It provides a deep analysis of their behaviour and the content they enjoy consuming. Here is a free template ready for you to use to start building your customer persona. It’s a great starting point to get familiar with their research, analysis and management tool.
Getting to Know Your Existing Customers
What better way to attract new customers than to ask your existing customers why they choose you? You’ll not only find out the positive things, but you may also discover where you could do things a little better.
Your existing database can help you thrive in future. And a simple exercise would be to send a customer survey out to your database. Decades have now passed since the days of manual data collection. When you had to sort through endless printed cards of customer feedback, inputting results in Microsoft Excel. Instead, with the touch of a button, you can send your campaign out to unlimited audience sizes.
SurveyMonkey is a good place to start.
The platform allows you to design a range of questionnaires and surveys. You can send them to as many or as little of your audience as you wish. The platform gathers all the results for you automatically and you choose how you want to view it. You may want a PowerPoint presentation, a series of graphs or an infographic. Or you may want to keep it in a Microsoft Excel document if that’s still your thing!
Building a survey with SurveyMonkey has some great quirks. A favourite of ours is the ability to randomise the order of available answers. It also recommends best practice for wording your questions and displaying answer options.
Then, when you’ve started gathering the data, you can integrate your survey with an automation platform to send targeted follow-up messages to your respondents, based on how they answered. That’s a great way to show you’re actually listening to what people say.
If you’ve never tried using a survey tool, SurveyMonkey offers a free basic plan to get you started. Gathering high-volume primary research findings has never been easier!
Driving value with automated insights
Insight-led marketing campaigns are campaigns for more than a quick boost to sales.
When you gather credible and reliable information from facts and figures, you’ll start to see better returns on your efforts. Insight-led campaigns can lead to the very best new initiatives.
Think about it for a second
Imagine you’d sent a survey out to all those customers or clients who stopped using your services recently. And in your findings, you discover they all left not because of the lack of value you deliver but because they simply cannot afford your high price tag in one payment.
The research shows you that it’s not a drop in price they want, it’s an alternative payment option. So as a result, you could offer more payment options to them without devaluing the incredible work you do. They may even be willing to pay more as part of a longer-term payment plan…
Marketing automation: Want to learn more?
It all starts with a phone call with the Airbase team.
Get in touch today for a free consultation.
