While focus groups often reinforce assumptions, rapid testing is able to illustrate whether any assumptions about a product, audience, and go-to-market strategy are accurate.
It’s time to face the facts: focus groups aren’t cutting it anymore. These relics date back to 1937 when Princeton University researchers investigated what sort of messaging sent over radio airwaves would drum up the most support for the World War II effort.
Focus groups might have been the most viable option at the time, but there’s no reason researchers should continue to spend $2.2 billion worldwide on the questionable insights offered by modern focus groups. Participants might provide a slew of opinions about a product, but that feedback doesn't predict whether people will actually buy it.
With so many companies mistakenly placing trust in focus groups, it’s no wonder Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen reports that 95% of the 30,000 new products created…
MTA and MMM are powerful when used separately, but when used together, they can be transformative for marketers
Modern customer journeys are long, with myriad touchpoints between initial awareness and the ultimate decision. One shopper might end up on your website by way of an organic search but won’t make a purchase until reading a recommendation on a social platform. Another might come to you via email, return after conducting a little research on a referral site, visit again following a click on a banner ad and then finally buy your product after reading a recommendation on that same social platform.
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Spreadsheets are an essential tool for marketing from advanced calculations for budget forecasts to reviewing marketing KPIs
Every marketer loves data! Whether they are numbers, feedback results or leads, this is what marketers dream about. They say knowledge is power, and that it is.
Importance of spreadsheets in marketing
Whether you’re preparing a report or trying to untangle raw data, working with spreadsheets can be rewarding to your job performance. Not only can it improve your efficiency, it could also speed up your projects. It also improves your insight into your business and the effectiveness of your campaigns.
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Spreadsheets are an essential…
Daunting, time-consuming and expensive. Or is it?
Doing any form of research doesn't always need to be so costly, here are five options to help you recruit participants for surveys.
I've also produced an article on how to get B2B survey responses, the focus of this post is helping you to find B2C participants for your research.
We all know that one of the hardest parts of doing any research is often something which is undervalued and that's finding respondents to take part. More importantly getting the right respondents for your research is even harder.
Research is essential to help get insight into a variety of business functions. and luckily the word of market research is maturing which means that there are loads of tools available that can help you. I've put together a list below of some of the most reliable places to find respondents for B2C research including surveys, focus groups, depth interviews…
The pain of finding B2B survey and user research respondents is real. Here are 6 solutions including free and paid services.
Finding relevant survey respondents for market research projects can be hard and the cost can be eye watering too, particularly if you're in a specialist B2B niche or you need senior respondents.
We all know that one of the hardest parts of doing any B2B research is often something which is undervalued- “getting respondents” and more importantly “getting the right respondents”. So you’re running a survey and it’s pretty niche, say you’re looking for B2B respondents purely for research rather than lead generation – where do you start? Where do you actually go for respondents? We’ve scoured the web and even given some of these a try, for our 6 ways to find B2B survey respondents.
Option 1: Google Consumer Surveys
It might be branded “consumer surveys” but they have lots of B2B publishers…
How to ensure you track performance against target
KPIs, we all have them, sometimes we set them for ourselves, often they are set for us! The question is, are the KPIs you are reviewing supporting your efforts into making the boat go faster? Are they translated from business goals or just a bunch of metrics someone thought they may as well stick on a weekly powerpoint dashboard because Google Analytics spits out a sexy graph?
This post explores how you can ensure you are using the KPIs that are helping you track performance in line with your business goals? KPIs give an integral pulse on the business that helps keep you be aware of what's really going on and they allow you to exert control to pull the right levers to keep on track according to what actually matters. For me, the key when setting KPIs for marketing and digital marketing is to start with the business goals.
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Why and how you should define goals vs objectives carefully?
I’ve found that goals and objectives are often defined and used differently within different companies or parts of a business and this can lead to problems when creating processes to track and improve marketing performance. This post gives a short summary of the difference between goals and objectives and why it matters!
Typically in businesses you see that objectives are specific, they cover the SMART or SMARTER criteria for objectives which make it possible to set specific targets for a time period and measure against these using sales or analytics systems. That’s the way it should be, I think, this is the de facto standard!
But in some businesses or some student case studies, “goals” are used to refer to specific objectives too. Perhaps it’s not helped that confusingly, in Google Analytics, goals are specific quantifiable metrics which are often used as…
Chart of the Day: Which objectives should be in your digital marketing plans?
"Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.”
So said, Kenichi Ohmae, who shared the Japanese approach to business planning with its idea of “long-term planning horizons”. It's useful to be clear on the difference between vision vs goals vs objectives vs KPIs as the measurement pyramid relating them shows.
With long-term digital marketing initiatives and transformation projects, the same is true, so it's essential that your digital marketing strategy features clear, SMART marketing objectives so that you have targets you can review performance against. Broader goals and vision can be useful too, to evangelize the benefits of digital marketing to the team.
A recent report from Adestra highlights the importance of choosing the right objectives to include within a digital marketing plan structure.
According to…
6 types of user experience and online audience surveying tools to help create a more customer-centred website and brand
Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics are used by nearly every company since they provide valuable quantitative data on site visitor behaviour. No surprise there.
But web analytics systems don't give direct qualitative feedback from site visitors and customers and the surprise to me, is that relatively few companies use these, although their popularity is increasing rapidly. They can be used to support UX improvement projects both on the live site and when getting structured feedback during website redesign.
We believe that qualitative website feedback tools are also essential to take the pulse of your website and improve your UX, but surprisingly they are less widely used despite paid services such as Opinion Labs being available for many years and some incredible free tools.
April 2018 update to tools
Thanks for your suggestions in previous…
Marketing can suffer from a lack of flow, especially when it's interruptive in nature, but the results are impressive when the two concepts come together
As a self-confessed app junkie who automates everything possible, it’s safe to say I’m a fan of things like web personalization and marketing automation. When lead scoring, triggered emails, personalized experiences, reusable nurtures, multiplatform integration, and analytics come together to form a holistic strategy, that brand of beautiful synergy gets me excited.
All this automation doesn’t come without a cost, however. Automated engagement strategies focus primarily on email, which has inherent flaws. Email can be a highly effective channel, but it's not without its shortcomings. Those who do agree to exchange their email address for something of value don’t always see, open, or click the content they receive.
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