It’s just a blog. It’s just a Facebook post. It’s just a link click. While most professionals understand digital marketing is necessary in this era, it can be difficult to truly show the impact it has on bringing in new business.
Digital marketing is shaping the future of all advertising efforts and can catapult your business ahead of the competition. However, it is not always as simple as spending money on Facebook or Google Ads to see a strong return on investment.
The best digital marketing strategies are built on data, customer feedback, and market research. Publishing content just to publish it will offer little to no return. Publishing content based on original research will allow your business to tap into a whole new audience of buyers.
Let’s take an in-depth look at the importance of digital marketing research and how it can be used to achieve the results you want.
The best digital marketing strategies are built on data, customer feedback, and market research. Learn how a simple survey can change the way you advertise for good.
Classify Ideal Customers into Segments
Digital marketing is a powerful tool that allows you to reach both a local and international audience. This is great because it means you’re not limited by demographics - but it can also be a significant problem. Advertising your brand to every individual online is a waste of time, money, and resources.
Instead, it’s essential to know the ins and outs of whom you are marketing to.
Through market research, you can identify your target audience, narrowing it down through a range of details, including demographic info, preferences, purchase history, expectations, wants, etc. Based on the information you collect, you can create highly targeted messages based on your audience’s wants and needs.
Market research can help identify the best way to reach and market to your target audience.
- What are the top sources of awareness for buyers?
- How likely are they to buy from your organization?
- Are they currently doing business with a competitor?
- What would it take to switch from a competitor to your business?
The answers to these key questions should then shape your marketing campaigns.
Segment your target market to create individualized campaigns
Going one step further, you should segment your audiences so that you can tailor specific messages to their preferences. With the help of an advertising and marketing research company, you will receive a report that breaks down the data by age group, gender, demographics, and more.
If young women are more likely to purchase a pair of shoes because they saw an ad on Facebook, then create a digital marketing campaign targeted to women on this platform.
If older men are more likely to purchase a pair of shoes based on what they find via a Google search, then create a separate digital marketing campaign with Google Ads targeted to this audience.
Another way to categorize buyers is by where they are in their purchasing journey.
For example, if you have a segment of your audience in the awareness stage, the types of blogs, social media posts, and emails they receive should be focused on revealing who you are, what you offer, and what makes you better than the competition.
On the other hand, a buyer in the consideration stage would benefit from content more focused on the benefits of your product or how to use it.
Now, your organization can easily identify different customer personas to help build a segmented digital marketing strategy.
Maximize Your Market Insight & Potential
Unlike traditional advertising, where you put up a billboard on the side of the road or film a commercial for TV, digital marketing platforms provide you with specific analytics to help guide your decision making.
Not only can you learn exactly how many eyeballs have viewed a particular piece of content and its effectiveness in driving leads, but you can also really dive into a wide range of data about how your digital marketing is performing.
The problem with high-level analytics such as impressions, link clicks, downloads, and followers is that it only gives you one side of the story.
This is even more prevalent if you are a digital marketing agency that creates different campaigns for a variety of clients.
If your digital marketing campaign delivered 100 link clicks, but 0 form fills, your client could care less about how many people clicked on the ad because it led to 0 conversions. As a digital marketer, you understand a link click is more than just a link click, but you are at the liberty of the basic stats given to you by the social platforms.
By adding an element of research to digital marketing campaigns you can test a variety of factors outside of the analytics provided by a social platform.
By conducting a pre and post-campaign evaluation survey, your team can test:
- How your digital marketing campaign grew brand awareness among a target market or community.
- How your digital marketing campaign improved brand perception.
- How your digital marketing campaign increased customer engagement.
Don’t you think this data shows more of the progress and positive impact of your digital efforts when sharing with your leadership team or clients?
Here are three ways market research can help sell advertising.
Pre-Campaign Testing
With the right market research, you can test marketing campaigns before launch. This will save you time and money while also ensuring that you’re using the best digital marketing content and campaigns possible for your brand.
It’s not just A/B testing, which tests content once it’s already in the market; it’s pre-market testing.
One way to do this is to see what your competitors are doing through a third-party lens. A market research company can conduct competitive research to help evaluate their standing in the industry, analyze their behavior and approach, and see what they’re doing right or wrong.
By identifying how your consumers respond to your competitors, you can take advantage of marketing gaps and mistakes to come up with a better and more cost-effective strategy.
When you see how your target audience will react to certain ads and which ads are more likely to convert before they go live, you can save yourself a lot of frustration before wasting advertising spend.
Final Thoughts
In the end, market research helps you take the guesswork out of what will and won’t work in digital. You’ll gain critical data and consumer feedback to support all brand messaging.
Quality market research is key to improving your digital marketing efforts. It helps you uncover vital data and insight that allows you to better engage with your audience. Contact our marketing and advertising research firm and we can help get you started.
Drive Research is an advertising and marketing research company located in New York. Our team has the knowledge and tools to deliver a 360-degree analytic review to set your digital marketing efforts up for success.
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