What Techniques Are Useful for Conducting Market Research in Advertising?

What Techniques Are Useful for Conducting Market Research in Advertising?

In the dynamic world of advertising, market research is key to crafting strategies that resonate. We've gathered six insights from Founders and CEOs, starting with analyzing customer feedback for trends and culminating with segmenting the audience for effective reach. Discover the techniques these experts employ to ensure their advertising efforts are data-driven and impactful.

• Analyze Customer Feedback for Trends
• Utilize Social Media Listening Tools
• Host Targeted Focus Groups
• Survey Customers for Direct Insights
• Segment and Target Fintech Industry
• Segment Audience for Effective Reach

Analyze Customer Feedback for Trends

Having spent four years at Amazon as a software engineer on the Fulfillment Technology team, I’ve found that leveraging customer feedback loops is invaluable. By systematically analyzing customer reviews and support tickets, you can uncover trends and pain points that directly inform targeted advertising strategies.

This approach ensures your campaigns address real customer needs and preferences, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.

Utilize Social Media Listening Tools

One technique I've found incredibly useful for conducting market research is leveraging social-media listening tools. These tools allow us to monitor and analyze conversations, trends, and sentiment across various social media platforms, providing valuable insights into our target audience's preferences, pain points, and behavior.

By tracking mentions of our brand, competitors, and relevant industry keywords, we can gather real-time feedback, identify emerging opportunities, and spot potential issues before they escalate. This data-driven approach to market research has been instrumental in shaping our advertising strategies, ensuring that our campaigns are targeted, effective, and aligned with the ever-evolving preferences and expectations of our target audience.

Host Targeted Focus Groups

One effective technique has been hosting small focus groups with our target audience. These intimate sessions allow us to dive deep into their preferences and pain points. For example, a recent group revealed a desire for more personalized content, which we then integrated into our campaigns. Hearing directly from our audience in a relaxed setting provided invaluable insights that shaped our advertising strategies and resonated more with our clients.

Survey Customers for Direct Insights

Conducting surveys among our existing customers is valuable in market research. It shows our audience's preferences and needs first-hand.

When we started, we would assume too much about our customers. To get authentic data, we created a simple online survey and provided a small incentive through discount codes. The questions were direct, focusing on customer preferences, buying habits, and product feedback.

The results were surprising. We discovered the most valuable product features and the features that needed improvement. The survey also revealed many customer media habits, shaping our advertisement priorities.

By analyzing the survey data, we created effective ads. They spoke to the customer's pain points and highlighted their main interests. Moreover, we also reduced our marketing budgets as our strategies became more targeted. Thus, conducting these surveys helps us keep up with our clients' changing needs and ensures that our ads are always relevant.

Segment and Target Fintech Industry

I work at the company Ronas IT. Our company is engaged in the development of mobile applications and web applications for various businesses. I want to share a story that helped our company increase the effectiveness of advertising and attract new clients, who, with our help, got quality results and scaled their business.

We identified that one of the promising areas in our service segment is the Fintech industry. This industry best demonstrates business development, and the number of startups and large companies that want to create new products is a vivid confirmation of this. Therefore, we decided to start advertising services for this line of business.

The goal of the campaign: To attract new customers and provide quality and relevant services.

Strategy:

1. Segmentation: We started by analyzing the potential target audience that would be interested in our services. Thus, we identified two areas of clients: Startups and Large companies.

In this way, we got a clear idea of who exactly would need our services and, based on this, we could form our offer in as much detail as possible, based on the problems of our potential clients.

2. Choosing channels to engage with the target audience: We chose two channels, Clutch and GoodFirms. These are the two most effective channels that allowed us to interact with the audience directly. We also considered running ads on Google search, but after calculating all the costs and comparing them, we realized that we could lose more money on Google search without reaching the target audience.

3. Bid format and interaction with the target audience: We chose two formats to interact with our target audience; we made it to the list of 'Top Custom Software Development Companies for Fintech.' We also agreed to be featured in an article on this topic. The offer period was limited to three months. During this period, we received over 100 new leads, which were further qualified into future projects. I cannot disclose the exact number as it is corporate information.

Results: This personalized approach allowed us to save budget for promotion and attract new clients to the company, who received a quality service.

Segment Audience for Effective Reach

Audience segmentation is key to conducting solid and usable market research on advertising strategies. If you're lumping all potential customers or clients into one basket, you're unlikely to reach everyone effectively. We live in an increasingly polarized society where small differences can greatly influence how a viewer considers a marketing message. Shifting your approach ensures no one is missing out on the meaning behind your adverts.

So, instead of putting together a single target group, try starting with two or three separated by factors like gender, age, or education. This will help you tease out differentiated responses, allowing your marketing team to build multiple advertising strategies accordingly.