05
Mar
Successful marketing relies on research; knowing your customers and your marketplace.
This is not rocket science, but so many businesses pour money into advertising channels that are completely fruitless.
They don’t do it on purpose, they do it because they make unfounded assumptions about their market.
Make conclusions not assumptions.
It’s so easy in business to draw unsubstantiated conclusions about what we do. Perhaps borne out of a desire to impress, to demonstrate we know our market, or maybe naivety. Whatever the reason you should always try to justify your claims. Make conclusions not assumptions.
Of course assumptions don’t cost money if you don’t act on them. But if you’re committing money to advertising through guesswork and intuition, at best you won’t be maximising your return and at worst you’ll be throwing money away.
You shouldn’t just be choosing what you ‘think’ will work.
There are lots of ways to spend money on advertising. Flyers, direct mail, pay-per-click advertising, radio, television, public transport, virals, banner ads, press, directory listings - you name it. You shouldn’t just be choosing what you ‘think’ will work.
You really need to spend some time working out who your customers are and what they tend to respond to. For this you will need some primary or secondary research. If you have the time and resources you can build your own primary research by simply talking to your customers, getting to know them and building a profile. The problem with this is time, and also the bias that may be created due to the personal nature of your relationships. Nevertheless it can help you quickly build a working profile for you customers to get you started.
Secondary research involves bringing data form outside your company and matching it with your own data. There are many market research organisations who provide this detailed data, such as Experian. You will find incredible detail in the data, breaking down demographics into ever more specified subsets. The great thing with such data is the potential to isolate information you never realised about your customers.
instantly see how this could dramatically effect where you place your ad money
The more you research the characteristics of your typical customer the more you will highlight gems of information such as - they listen to a huge amount of local radio, but don’t do much browsing of the web. Or they read a lot of national press but don’t watch much television. This is a very simplified example, but you can instantly see how this could dramatically effect where you place your ad money.
Over time, as you build and tweak your customer profile you will have a much sounder basis for deciding where to spend money. Whilst this process constitutes a simple, subset of what marketers use to do their job, it represents a very real tool that we can all apply in business.
Instead of thinking let’s a 10,000 direct mail drop or let’s spend £1000 per month on Pay-Per-Click, think about who is being targeted, get some research done and then make your decision. It could make a huge impact on the success of your campaigns.