Marketing research has evolved a lot over the past couple of decades. Most great 21st-century businesses attribute a significant part of their success to extensive marketing campaigns that are in large part driven by marketing research. In most cases, however, these campaigns have been a trial and error process that costs businesses hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
While it is essential to divert a sizable portion of your company’s budget towards marketing, it is equally important to make sure this money is being spent effectively. Older marketing research mechanisms were more random and advice-based than any marketer would like them to be. But how exactly did these mechanisms function? Let's have a brief look.
Old World Marketing Research
Old world (early) marketing research mechanisms made use of primary market research. The said product/idea was tested among the general public in various ways to gather research data. This data was then condensed to form reports that acted as snapshots of the different stages of research and the results obtained from them. These reports were then studied by marketing professionals who used the results to obtain actionable insights. It was these insights that then shaped the brand’s marketing campaign for the season. While this may seem like a relatively straightforward chain of action, it had one too many flaws that caused many campaigns to fail. What exactly were these flaws? Let’s understand with the help of an example.
A well known beauty brand used an old-world marketing mechanism where research directly advises the marketing team. Multiple rounds of research were conducted to find out what beauty products (for example, foundation sets) do well with which demographic of women in the country. The research data was then crunched to produce fairly simple results: Women from the Hispanic community preferred the test shade A of foundation. In contrast, people from the African American and Caucasian communities preferred the shades B and C, respectively. Marketing campaigns were then advised to push these shades among consumers from said communities. This campaign is prone to fail leading to unsatisfactory sales for the following reasons:
When the research data is condensed, it generalizes an entire community of people. For example, everyone who identifies as Hispanic might not have the same skin tone and may prefer different shades of foundation. Women from the other communities might similarly all have diverse preferences that the research data doesn’t represent.
The mechanism doesn’t take the performance of the ads on different platforms into consideration. Old-world marketing is called a trial and error process because you only come to know of the audience’s reaction to a marketing campaign once it's launched. Contrary to what basic market research suggests, consumer habits are incredibly subjective and cannot be generalized over vast communities.
Flaws like these make old-world marketing unreliable for most brands. This trial and error process requires companies to run multiple research and marketing cycles to uncover the best marketing strategy. However, with new, experiment-based mechanisms, businesses can achieve the same results for a fraction of the cost.
New World Marketing Research
New world marketing mechanisms are driven by active research as opposed to older strategies. Here, the research is conducted on a sample population representative of the audience the ad is expected to find on internet sites like Facebook and Youtube. Specific insights from this research are then used to make accurate reports that rely on dynamic segmentation.
This is done with the help of creative experiments, which are test campaigns run on intelligent data collection and processing that can accurately mimic the audience response based on behavioral survey data. The results from these experiments are then used to craft the perfect campaign. Once the results are satisfactory, this campaign can then be released to the public, driving sales and audience engagement to all-time highs.
What helps here is having the Facebook audience (and an accurate digital representation of it) in the loop throughout the process. The campaign is constantly tested in complex conditions that are built to mimic real-world consumer responses. This helps produce nuanced marketing insights that tell you precisely what you need to do to make impactful ads.
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Convert Third-Party Audiences Into First-Party Insights
One of the critical features of new world digital marketing mechanisms and research is the first-party insights they generate. While old-world mechanisms rely on third-party data (and often, their interpretation), new world mechanisms allow businesses to hyper-target their research experiments to audiences that can later be activated upon with direct ad buys. This helps companies to gain trustworthy insights from reliable sources.
This first-party consumer data comes from the same digital channels and platforms that the ads are expected to run on. As a result, incentivizing people to leave a platform like Facebook to an owned and operated web property, allows you to collect first-party site data which is by far one of the most effective ways to gain actionable, privacy-compliant insights that your marketing team can use to build highly effective campaigns.
At Sweeplift, we use the power of statistical modeling and machine learning to help you achieve this. Our ingenious sweepstakes technology makes it possible for you to run creative experiments for a fraction of what they’d usually cost if they were to be ran on a platform like Facebook and measured with Brand Lift tests.
The outcome gives marketers the ability to better match their ad creative with audiences that would be most engaged.
How do we accomplish this? Through concise and accurate sample sets.
As few as 150 sweepstakes entries from an audience of your choice can generate significant insights with a SweepLift Study. You are then free to analyze the creative effectiveness of these ads among various demographics with respect to Likability and Retention.
Follow up studies can then be run with the necessary changes to produce better results. This cycle helps you streamline your campaign without having to pay for extensive trials that are doomed to fail.
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