It’s no secret that advertising for businesses is critical. Especially when you consider that the retail industry in 2024 spent $88 billion on advertising. Advertising is not only critical for a brand, but it also helps develop an edge against competitors.
Market research can help make advertising more cost-efficient and perform exceptionally better. Essentially, it helps marketing and advertising teams work based on data instead of broad ideas or guesstimates.
If you would rather spend money with data you know is true versus just your best guess, which would you rather do?
We’ll walk through how market research can help with advertising, and how we would approach it (so you can do it too).
What Is Advertising Market Research?
Market research for advertising is all about getting to know your audience for the sake of advertising. All data is important, but specific touch points like pre-campaign, active-campaign, and post-campaign are useful to track specifically.
In our work, we’ve noticed better results tracking it this specific way so that each data point can be analyzed together or separately for even better performance tracking.
Collecting and analyzing data is important for all steps of the advertising process. That’s essentially what you’re doing when you perform market research for advertising. Collecting data at specific key points during a campaign, analyzing, and utilizing the data for better outcomes.
It’s important to know exactly what to collect, analyze, and how to use it - which is what we’ll cover in these next sections.
Pre-Launch Market Research
Market research during the pre-launch phase of an ad campaign will determine what works and what doesn’t, before it goes live. Doing this will save brands not only time, but a significant amount of money too.
Testing Creatives
It’s important to understand your target audience/market deeply enough to create creatives that elicit a response from them.
This is one of the most common and important parts that companies run surveys for. Understanding your audience should be the first step in your market research if possible. It will save a lot of testing budget if you can nail down your targets before starting.
The next step is setting your goals and objectives for creatives. You’ll most likely be testing creatives either as a campaign itself or against other creatives. So, you’ll want to lay out goals that are realistic to judge your creativity on.
Is the creative for:
- Brand awareness
- Offer validation
- Conversion point
These are just some common creative objectives but you’ll want to assign your specific one for your goals and company. That’s when you’ll get into the actual design and creation of the creatives.
Testing the Messaging
Messaging tells your story and defines your brand's voice. It’s another important aspect that comes from understanding your target audience.
Just like creative testing, you’ll want to know your goals and reasons for the messaging to have a successful outcome.
A market research project like focus groups can help gauge reactions to different messages. These are small, diverse consumer groups that are great for high-quality qualitative data. A lot of companies test their messaging on groups like these to get actionable insights for their advertising efforts.
Another great method for message testing is online surveys. They're cost-effective and can reach a broader audience. They answer questions like: Does the audience find the message clear? Is it relatable? Does it convey the intended emotion?
Similarly, you can test creatives just like you can test messaging, but we’ll show how you might track a campaign performance with market research.
Ad Campaign Performance Monitoring
Performance tracking in advertising means keeping an eye on how well your ads are doing. It’s important to have KPIs in mind before starting.
Some of the crucial ones are:
- Return on ad spend
- Conversions
- Impressions
- Cost Per Click
- Cost Per Acquisition
Not all of these might apply to your campaign, but these are examples of important performance metrics to look at:
In our experience, setting clear goals before the campaign starts is essential. It ensures you're collecting meaningful data that can guide decisions. You can also take data from a previous campaign or a finished one and use its insights when building out future campaigns.
Advertising Market Research Analysis & How It’s Beneficial
In our experience, the data analysis for an ad market research project is the most important part (besides knowing your target audience).
Data Analysis
This is the step where you uncover insights to guide your advertising course.
Typically in this step, this can come from any part of the advertising process, but you’ll want to look at what you’re testing for, find trends and patterns, look for anomalies, keep the data quality, and add what insights can be drawn from them.
An example might be certain messaging gives off a different feeling than intended.
One example could be that focus group data shows most participants were put off by the messaging tested. In this example’s case, it would be strongly advised to change it based on that data point. An insight like that would save an advertising campaign $10,000+.
Data Quality
The final point is data quality. This is critical, especially in the advertising space to be using quality data that can be trusted.
Since advertising dollars are on the line, it would be nice not to waste them right? So you wouldn’t want to trust below-average or even false data.
That’s why it’s critical to trust your market research partners or data! You don’t want to put your advertising dollars on the line if you aren’t 100% sure about the data.
Why Drive Research Is The Best For Your Advertising Market Research
At Drive Research, we’re an advertising market research company that has worked with hundreds of brands to help them maximize their advertising efforts and meet their business goals.
Our trusted third-party market research firm that believes in high-quality data, putting the clients first, and bringing our expertise to every project.
Not only are we an expert in the advertising industry for market research projects but we also act as your full-time consultants, start to finish project manager, and pre and post project support.
To learn more about our market research services, get in touch with us today.
Austin Parker
Austin has an extensive background in SEO as he's been blogging since 16 years old back when the internet was in its infancy. As fitting, he holds a Bachelor's degree in English with a concentration in creative writing.
Learn more about Austin, here.
