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How Proper Market Research Can Help Digital Marketing Companies

October 8, 2013

From understanding the vocabulary of your market to learning from the practices and mistakes of your competition, market research is a powerful tool for any digital marketing company looking to improve efficiency and work smarter. With the abundance of information available online and through traditional market research methods like the ones seen here by IIM, you can stay one step ahead of the competition instead of spending your time trying to catch up.

Market Research for Digital Marketing Companies

Market research is the process of gathering information related to market trends, consumer behaviors, demographics and other relevant information. Traditionally, market research is separated into two major categories: qualitative and quantitative. Quantitative research is typically used to derive trends and quantifiable data from a given market or source. Common methods include surveys, analytics and other tools that based around gathering measurable data. Qualitative research delves deeper and tries to discover the underlying reasons why the trends discovered through quantitative data exist. These studies typically involve focus groups, in-depth interviews, observational studies and ethnographic research. Much like marketing, market research is changing rapidly thanks to new technologies and the Internet. Mobile market research utilizes mobile devices to distribute polls, ask questions and analyze usage. Social media research mines the millions of social posts across various platforms to uncover trends, analyze emotion and discover more information about consumers and market trends.

Five Ways to Improve Marketing Efficiency through Market Research

Digital marketing is all about generating a response from your intended audience. Market research offers numerous ways to improve conversion rates, strengthen your calls to action and improve the strength of your copy or other promotional materials. These five methods offer easy to implement ways to use market research to boost your digital marketing efforts.

1. Learn the Language of Your Audience — A large component of successful marketing is speaking to your audience in a way that connects with them, triggers emotions and establishes trust. Social media market research offers an ideal platform to observe and learn the language of your audience. Mimicking this language in your promotional copy and advertisements is a simple way to boost clicks, conversions and other important metrics. Getting started is a simple as establishing a list of terms that match common products or services in your market and tracking the conversations that are trending.

2. Improve Engagement through Increased Relevance — From what they ate for breakfast to the thoughts that keep them up at night, people are posting an increasing amount of their daily activities and thoughts online. This allows you to uncover trends, such as common concerns or activities, which can be integrated into your digital marketing efforts.

3. Learning from Your Competition — One of the great aspects about social media when it comes to market research is the transparency of most platforms. If a company posts information publically, it is available for the world to see. Check their current campaigns across various platforms and research how they are utilizing social media, video and other media formats. Comparing it to your methods will help to identify strengths and weaknesses to your current approach. Conducting split testing using competitor methods is a simple way to gauge potential benefits.

4. Following the Consumer for Maximum Impact — Each social media platform has its own look, feel and loyal user base. Understanding the trends and topics that are popular on various platforms and planning your marketing plans accordingly will improve engagement and increase the chances of social sharing. This reduces the time investment requires to obtain results and helps to position your clients as authoritative sources within their platforms as well. Best of all, researching multiple platforms allows you to follow these trends and users as they transition from one media or platform to another for increased exposure.

5. Identify Influencers and Find Opportunities with Market Research — With a rise in popularity of social media and Internet usage, word of mouth has shifted from local community centers and households to platforms such as Twitter or Pinterest. Discovering the major influencers in a given market or audience and building authority and relationships with them is a great way to boost the range of your digital marketing efforts. Best of all, you are working to improve thestanding and authority of your own endeavors as well.

Market research offers a bounty of tools for digital marketers who are looking to improve efficiency and boost returns. From uncovering the biggest influencers in a market to keeping ahead of the latest marketing trends, these tips and tricks offer easy to implement strategies to improve your marketing results.

99770-18df7062d647d584c049cf40387ae3205358f78c-Willie_Pena

Willie Pena is a writer who enjoys writing about market research and digital marketing. He prefers the Oxford comma. Connect with him on Google+, LinkedIn.

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