The success of your business plan relies heavily on the relationship your consumers have with your brand and offer. Effective marketing is how you establish and maintain that connection – but how do you know if your marketing will be effective?
Conducting market research to establish vital business intelligence will guide your choices and optimize the performance of your marketing efforts so you can grow your business with confidence.
One problem: Not all market research performs equally well.
We are going to dive into 3 types of market research and why we do things differently at BottomLine.
Reactive Marketing
This is the equivalent of the “act first, ask questions later” style of marketing. You can get some valuable feedback from the analytics provided and you should listen to these insights as you move forward in your marketing. However, this is not an ideal to start as it can quickly look a lot like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks – ill-advised if you’re looking for statistically significant results from the get-go. This is why we, at BottomLine, encourage starting with proactive marketing through scientific research and results-driven marketing decisions.
Conceptual Research
Most marketing firms lead with conceptual research when creating and launching their marketing plans. This involves conducting studies (like focus groups) to gather preliminary information to form a hypothesis about how your product, service and promotional assets may perform. Conceptual research is valuable, however, it is also costly and time-consuming. Once this conceptual research is completed, most firms will conduct empirical research to validate their original findings.
Empirical Research
At BottomLine, we always start with empirical research to form a hypothesis about the potential performance of a business’s marketing strategy. While this seems backward compared with other firms, the advantage of this research order is crystal clear. Empirical research involves gathering information from already existing secondary sources which provide a statistically valid basis on which to launch a further investigation to validate the planned marketing strategy. This saves time, money and resources in your back-end promotional development and sets you up for success before diving into any idea headfirst.
Conducting marketing research sets you up for business intelligence success and leverages science to increase the efficiency of all of your marketing campaigns. As with reactive marketing, if you start conceptually then it’s much like starting from scratch. You need to conduct expensive preliminary research before having any statistical evidence to support your marketing endeavours which is temporally and financially impractical.
Meanwhile, if you begin with empirical research, you save time and money while you effectively gather statistically significant information that will allow you to predict the probability of success for your unique marketing circumstance. Going against the grain never made more sense!
Marketing without research is like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks. Find where your brand is hitting the mark – and where it isn’t – with a Digital Assessment. Send us a note at info@wearebottomline.com to learn more and get the ball rolling!