Taking Market Insights Further with Mobile Market Research

Taking Market Insights Further with Mobile Market Research

Mobile market research has ushered in a new era of market research that connects businesses with their target market more efficiently. As such, businesses should take advantage of this novel form of research to fulfill all of their customer intelligence and market intelligence needs.

Global mobile ownership and use has been steadily growing and is now at an all-time high, as 5.27 billion people have a mobile device, which is equivalent to 67.03% of the world's population.

In America, smartphone usage is frequent and ongoing, as Americans check their phones 262 times a day, which totals to once every 5.5 minutes. Given the abundance of and reliance on mobile devices, it would be wasteful for market researchers not to conduct mobile-facilitated research.

This article covers mobile market research, its benefits, its makeup, how to conduct it and more.  

Understanding Mobile Market Research

Mobile technology has greatly evolved in the past ten years, so much so that businesses can go beyond communicating with and serving customers through their mobile phones. Mobile market research was born on this idea, accommodating the new era of high mobile traffic.

Mobile market research refers to the method of collecting data through the use of mobile devices, particularly smartphones, but can include tablets and other mobile tools. It extends mobile use and engagement to the sphere of research, as it requires engaging mobile users so that they take part in a market research study. 

All the data derived is used for market intelligence, as it is a means of research and is therefore conducted with objectives similar to those in traditional market research

Given that customers make transactions and engage with businesses on their mobile devices, mobile doesn't merely provide another avenue of commerce, but another means of customer intelligence.

This kind of intelligence is not limited to customer buying behavior, as businesses can use mobile devices alongside various market research techniques. As such, mobile market research is not a standalone affair; as it is often used with other forms of research, such as secondary research, along with primary research such as online surveys, focus groups and one-on-one interviews. 

The Importance of Mobile Market Research

Brands should recognize that they can now obtain insights in new ways, ones that were simply not available ten years ago, such as those that use the medium of mobile. 

Mobile market research is a  kind of intelligence that provides deeper, richer customer insights. As such, businesses must adapt or get left behind, casting aside a swath of customers who have flocked to the mobile medium. 

Given that mobile devices continue to power daily activities and open new possibilities for collecting market research data, mobile market research is becoming increasingly important. This kind of research can be used for extracting both qualitative and quantitative market research.

Aside from these areas of importance, mobile market research provides various other benefits for businesses. They include the following:

Mobile marketing research brings businesses closer to their customers than ever before. The kind of data it extracts augments the research experience with more extensive findings than other forms of qualitative research. 

It has the capability of connecting with a broader respondent base, including respondents that are difficult to reach. This eases the issue of finding the correct customer segments, be they demographics or psychographics, and allowing only the qualified ones to take part in the study. 

Mobile market research is also convenient for both the researcher side and that of the customers. That’s because with mobile, surveys can be answered from anywhere that has a Wifi connection. 

Additionally, given the sizing restrictions of a mobile device, mobile research tools must be optimized for mobile, or mobile-first. This approach keeps mobile surveys short and succinct, typical best practices for all surveys, as simplicity helps increase the survey completion rate.

Mobile research offers simplicity and ease of use, which pares away survey fatigue, a prevalent concern in the sphere of market research. There is little to no effort required of customers to take part in a mobile survey. 

The device is already in their hands and typically with just one tap, they can enter the survey. In this way, it is far more simple and engaging to participate in mobile market research than in traditional research, especially for those who are time-poor. 

This kind of research creates agile market research, as mobile surveys employ quick transmissions and can extract all the customer data, along with the preset quotas within days —sometimes hours— depending on the mobile research platform. Additionally, such a process allows businesses to iterate their marketing and market research campaigns, to truly execute an agile research strategy.

The Makeup of Mobile Market Research 

A successful qualitative mobile market research study depends on the quality of the research tools and the techniques for carrying out the study. Both of these aspects must be intuitive and mobile-friendly.

Another key aspect of mobile market research is the element of mobile ethnography. This refers to the qualitative research of a particular society as well as its customs of individual people and its cultural trends. Ethnography provides a full account of everyday life, behavior and practices of a specific group of people rather than statistical data (which mobile market research also involves). 

Ethnography traditionally involves conducting fieldwork so that the researcher can experience a culture firsthand as part of their studies for a certain period of time. This way, the researcher is able to garner critical information about a particular social group or community in regards to their culture and customs.

In market research, ethnography grants useful market insights, especially those that pertain to a business’s target market, allowing businesses to understand how customers use their products and services, along with those in their niche. 

Mobile market research offers a faster and more effective way to secure ethnographic data, which would otherwise take years to extract should it be conducted through traditional methods. Mobile ethnography offers several advantages, such as feedback in real-time, without the need for being in the same location as the customers under study. Researchers can thus get a glimpse of their global consumers without the need to travel. 

Mobile market research is highly reliant on specific tools to carry out the research, such as mobile surveys. These surveys should be easy to deploy across a wide span of mobile websites and apps. They should be designed in the mobile-first approach, so that they are easy to use for mobile users and do not appear as merely an afterthought of online surveys.

These surveys should allow for mobile monetization, which businesses can use as survey incentives. In-app incentives often apply to gaming, that is, as non-monetary incentives that reward respondents with points, game money, extra lives, etc. This kind of survey experience enhances the mobile experience for mobile users, as they get rewarded within their game of choice.

Another important part of the makeup of mobile market research is a mobile online survey platform that filters out and disqualifies respondents that provide low-quality data. This involves using machine-learning to disqualify respondents on a VPN or a bot, those who provide gibberish answers, those who fail tests showing they’re paying attention and other kinds of poor survey respondents. 

How to Conduct Mobile Market Research With Surveys

Market researchers seeking the mobile research approach should deploy online surveys, those that offer a mobile-first experience. 

Not all online survey platforms offer mobile surveys and within those that do, the mobile surveys aren’t designed through a mobile-first approach. As such, these surveys appear lacking or not as easy to use as their desktop counterparts. 

To conduct a mobile market research campaign, begin by narrowing down the high-level needs and themes of the research campaign. Decide on whether your business needs a longitudinal survey, which is a more ambitious project, or a short-term study. Decide on where your study is in the research process, which involves six main types of research.

Use an online survey platform that excels in mobile-first surveys. Your best bet is to opt for a platform that allows you to make your own survey in a few easy steps. This platform should do all the heavy lifting, so that all researchers have to contend with is setting up the screener and questionnaire. 

In such a platform, the surveys would be automatically deployed across a broad network of websites, mobile sites and mobile apps, especially highly-trafficked ones. This ensures that the surveys will reach a wide mobile audience. 

You should then customize the surveys to your liking, such as adding the A/B testing function if need be, or incorporating multiple audiences into one survey. 

Once you receive your mobile-facilitated data, you should analyze it through the online survey platform’s dashboard. You should also export the data as a spreadsheet or whichever file type is convenient for your team, should you prefer to view the data outside of the survey platform. 

Making Mobile Strides

Establishing mobile market research campaigns is more important than ever, given the globally widespread use of the mobile medium. This form of market research opens doors to a wide swath of domestic and international consumers brands would be remiss not to study.

The key is to use a strong online survey platform to create and deploy surveys, as well as analyze mobile surveys results. Such a platform should provide relentless quality, making it practical for researchers to set up a customized survey, choose the respondents of their survey, set quotas, get estimated survey completion times, deploy to a network of millions of mobile users, disqualify poor-quality responses and more.

Once a business operates a potent online survey platform, it is setting itself up for successful mobile market research campaigns, the kind that deliver speedy and relevant insights on consumers and the market in general. 


Reducing Customer Attrition With Survey Research

Reducing Customer Attrition With Survey Research

All businesses deal with some degree of customer attrition, even long-established ones that hold high consumer loyalty. This includes prominent brands like Apple, Nike and the Home Depot. 

Given that even these major brands contend with lost customers, startups and younger businesses ought to pay attention to their own customer attrition and work towards lowering at whenever possible. 

Attrition is a serious consequence for businesses, as American companies lose 23% to 30% of their customers each year from a lack of customer loyalty alone. 

50% of customers naturally churn every 5 years. While this statistic may not seem as severe as the prior, only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain to a business; the rest simply churn. This is a grave detriment to businesses, as it averts them from finding the root cause of their attrition.

This article examines customer attrition, its two main types, why customers churn, how to avoid it and how survey research helps reduce attrition.

Understanding Customer Attrition

Also called customer churn, customer turnover, customer cancellation and customer defection, this phenomenon deals with the loss of customers from a business, especially the kind in which customers never return to a business they had frequently or occasionally patronized. 

Businesses can acquaint themselves with their customer attrition, by calculating their customer churn rate, a financial metric that measures the percentage of customers churning within a certain time frame. 

Most customers do not remain active customers permanently; there are several reasons behind this. Some of these reasons are preventable, as they occur due to issues that a business itself causes, whether it is a poor product, experience or lagging behind competitors.

Other reasons for customer turnover spring purely from the customers, such as a life event that greatly reduces their purchasing power, such as the loss of employment, or a lack of interest in patronizing certain niches.  

As such, whether a customer makes a one-time purchase or is a loyal customer of many years, every customer will eventually cease their relationship with a business.

The Two Main Types of Customer Attrition

There are two main types of customer defection that businesses should consider to be able to distinguish among the kinds that occur to their customers. These two are known as active and passive attrition. 

Active Attrition 

This is typically associated with subscription-based business models, the kinds that are commonly used in the Internet, publishing and telecom industries. As such, it refers to customers who cancel their subscription to a phone line, magazine or newspaper. It also involves the cancellation of digital services, such as app, data, streaming and SaaS service.

Passive Attrition

On the other hand, there’s passive attrition, which simply occurs when a customer stops transacting with a business, even if it is to make one-off purchases. This kind of attrition is predominantly associated with physical retail stores, e-commerce websites, on-request service providers and others.

Typical Reasons Behind Customer Attrition

Customers can churn for whatever reason they like, especially one-time shoppers, who may not have paid attention to the brand or store they bought from when they made an emergency or rushed purchase. 

Then there are the more conscious and personal causes as to why customers end their business relationship. The following lists the typical reasons behind churning customers, including consciously and unconsciously-made decisions :

  1. Poor service
    1. This involves customer service and support, along business services on offer
  2. Lack of a personalized service and experience
    1. Marketing personalization is a must, as greeting signed-in customers by their names is insufficient. Personalization allows customers to feel as though they are not being marketed to.
  3. Cost / value breakdown
    1. Customers may find certain price points disagreeable and switch to competitors.
    2. Customers may not feel prices are commensurate with the value of company offerings.
  4. Lost customers (contact information outdated)
    1. Some customers change their contact information without updating it across company databases.  
  5. Competitor superiority
    1. Competitors can outshine a business when they offer innovation, better products and services, personalization, lower prices or a number of other offerings.
  6. No longer in the market (doesn’t need)
    1. Customers don’t require buying the same things regularly when the need for it  runs out. 
  7. Customers cannot reach goals
    1. This occurs with digital experiences, for example, a website with a poorly working search function or the products themselves,

Avoiding Customer Attrition

There are various strategies that businesses can use to ward off customer attrition, including mapping out plans via a strategic planning process

Firstly, businesses should hone in on their customer acquisition, making it more targeted so that new customers are better-suited for retention. One of the major mistakes businesses make in acquiring new customers is netting those who are not the best fit for the company.

Some efforts to gain new customers yield the wrong kinds, such as those with loss-leader offers or those from a particular channel. To avoid bringing in the wrong customers, businesses should hyper-target their customers via market segmentation and forming customer personas. At times, it is going to be reasonable to spend more to target customers who will bring a long business relationship, including those with a higher customer lifetime value (CLV).

Next, businesses ought to improve their business offerings, whether it is a product, several products, a service or an experience. All of these tie into a business’s performance and factor into customer retention and loyalty. Brands must improve their customer loyalty, as it is the primary driver of retention — the polar opposite of customer attrition. 

In order to improve in all of these areas, businesses need to assess their current products, services and experiences. They should consider the following: does their business hit or miss the mark when it comes to their products and services? Does their business provide useful and positive customer experiences? After considering these questions and others, they should work towards innovation and improvement, which they can later promote. 

Brands must augment their marketing strategy, making their marketing efforts more personalized and up-to-date. If not, their competitors surely will. Many businesses already use a next generation approach to appeal to their target market. For example, Glasses USA offers a virtual try-on of their products and Patagonia takes part in sustainability and green marketing, a tactic that resonates with its customers. 

Finally, businesses can cut the effect of customer attrition by predicting it. They can achieve this by implementing predictive behavior modeling, a practice that helps companies predict the future behavior of their customers. This allows marketers to improve on the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. 

How to Reduce Customer Attrition with Survey Research

Survey research goes a long way towards reducing customer attrition. This is because in order to avoid churn, businesses must satisfy and delight their customers. In order to do this, they must know their customers’ needs, desires, aversions, opinions, sentiments and more.

The more intimately a business is acquainted with its target market, the better it can cater to it. After all, how can a business, or anyone, know how to serve and market to customers without knowing their preferences, sensitivities and wants

Survey research uncloaks the unknown when it comes to customers, as surveys allow market researchers to study virtually any topic concerning their business and customers. In this way, innovating new product features, and marketing certain messages will no longer be a mystery for brands. 

When it comes to customer attrition specifically, brands can set up their surveys to study what drives customers away, along with what they look for in a variety of matters. For example, businesses can study customer aversions by surveying them on specific product features, prices, sales, cultural trends and current events.

As for the latter, brands can observe which marketing ads, images, offers and promotions customers crave the most through surveys. Businesses can set up scaled questions and matrix questions so that customers can rate their necessities and desired items. With this information in tow, businesses can make informed and data-backed decisions, the kind that have a far greater impact on reducing customer attrition.

Retaining Customers for the Long Term 

Given the oftentimes staggering customer attrition rates, businesses should work towards strategies to reduce their own customer churn. While there are many tactics that businesses can employ to cut their customer turnover, using an online survey platform is the most proactive way to do so.

By studying all the wants, needs, opinions and aversions of their customers, businesses can avoid ensuing marketing faux pas, product blunders and other snafus that drive their customers away. The key is to use the proper online survey platform.

A strong online survey platform provides artificial intelligence and machine learning that disqualifies questionable users (such as VPNs, respondents that don’t pay attention) offers a wide range of filtering data options, engages users in their natural digital environments via random device engagement (RDE) sampling and much more. 

A business that uses an online survey platform with these capabilities and more is well-equipped to stave off customer attrition and retain more customers.


Using Market Research with Emotional Marketing to Resonate with Customers 

Using Market Research with Emotional Marketing to Resonate with Customers 

Emotional marketing is a useful tactic to employ for a number of reasons. No matter how rational a consumer may be, emotions always have sway, as people are emotional beings that base many of their decisions on how they feel at a particular time.

Emotional marketing connects audiences with brands in a personal and human way and has the power to associate brands, their products and campaigns with distinct feelings. 

As new media channels, devices, and platforms emerge, they provide additional avenues for brands to partake in emotional marketing, which is proven to be effective for various purposes. Firstly, 70% of emotionally engaged consumers spend up to two times or more on brands, as opposed to the less than half (49%) of consumers with low emotional engagement.

Additionally, marketing messaging that is purely emotional performs twice as well as rational content (31% vs. 16%). It is evident that this kind of marketing engages customers and produces key results. 

This article explains emotional marketing, its importance, how market research works alongside it and how to use surveys when building an emotionally bent campaign. 

Understanding Emotional Marketing 

Emotional marketing refers to marketing messages and campaigns that primarily use emotion to make a business’s target market aware of the business and influence the target market to buy, remember and share the business and its offerings. 

This kind of marketing tactic is typically used to evoke a single emotion that elicits a response, particularly one that prompts decision-making, to help businesses achieve their desired result from their customers. It can also use multiple emotions, especially if brands are working on a set of marketing messages and advertisements.

Emotional marketing addresses the audience’s feelings, values and pain points so that brands can better connect with their target market and even form customer loyalty

This is because brand loyalty springs from behavioral, rational and emotional loyalty; emotional marketing works by tapping into the latter. Emotional loyalty entails customers who are emotionally engaged, feel delighted by a brand, would recommend the brand and even advocate for it. 

As such, emotionally engaged consumers hold a great deal of value for businesses, as they are inclined to not simply buy more, as aforementioned in the intro, but to help brands keep their customers, therefore increasing their customer retention rate

The Importance of Emotional Marketing 

Emotional marketing carries significant weight, as emotions play a major role in decision-making, given that 95% of cognition resides in the emotional side of the brain. 

82% of customers with high emotional engagement always buy from the brand they are loyal to during their purchasing decisions. As such, it is no wonder that consumers who are emotionally engaged spend twice more on brands (see statistic in the intro).  

At times, the emotional response to an ad or marketing message influences consumers to buy more so than the content of the ad itself.

When businesses use emotional marketing strategies correctly, they differentiate themselves from other brands. It is generally key to stand out from the crowd, but more so when marketing to an audience, as people are inundated with thousands of marketing messages every day. 

Brands should thus consider the following: out of the thousands of ads consumers are flooded with daily — whether on billboards, emails, websites, social media, etc. — how many of these messages actually resonate with them? 

Given that most of the advertisements and other marketing messages that consumers see on a daily basis will not live to be more than an afterthought, brands should seek to stand out as much as possible in their marketing efforts

Emotional marketing allows brands to achieve this goal, as messages that trigger emotions are not disposed to be ignored nor easily forgotten. Rather, they stir consumers into action and can resonate with them for years to come, depending on the degree of emotion they set off.

Aside from triggering emotions that incite action and deliver unforgettable memories, emotional marketing also allows brands to engage in storytelling, thereby forging connections with their target market. However, to have the correct impact on an audience, brands will need to assure that their campaign is honest and authentic. 

Additionally, when businesses relay their identity and vision properly, it makes emotional marketing simple, as the emotional tone of an advertisement will make more sense.  

Finally, aside from connecting consumers with a brand, resonating with them and inciting them to buy more from a particular brand, emotional marketing helps create customer advocacy. In this form of heightened customer loyalty, customers advocate on behalf of a brand for free, such as on social media, in forums, review sites or by giving word-of-mouth recommendations. Brands must first establish such a connection and state of loyalty and emotional marketing helps them achieve this. 

The 5 Key Emotional Hooks To Use in Emotional Marketing 

Marketers and market researchers can implement different emotions in their marketing campaigns. 

The strongest human emotions have the best chance of success, especially when it comes to resonating with consumers. This is important because, although consumers may not buy something immediately that they discovered from an emotionally charged message, the message will still last within their minds.

This kind of remembrance is powerful, as it can enable the marketing message to live on in the consumers’ minds, eventually making them purchase, or at the very least, engage with a company. 

The following explains the five emotions to use in this kind of marketing and when to use them:

  1. Happiness
    1. Everyone desires happiness and you can tap into this emotion by showing how your brand produces happiness.
    2. This does not have to be directly from an offering, but rather a story including your product or service.
  2. Anger
    1. Inciting anger lets customers realize that something must be done or changed to resolve an issue and achieve justice. 
    2. For example, ads that address stereotypes, painting the narrative of a brand fighting those stereotypes whether directly or indirectly.
  3. Fear
    1. Evoke fear when it aligns with your target audience’s existing beliefs about fear with a product/service you sell. For example, marketers can use the fear of danger in their ads to promote car insurance, as accidents can occur to anyone.
    2. Use fear in the form of FOMO (the fear of missing out) to highlight limited-time offers, which will urge customers to buy within a certain period of time.
  4. Greed 
    1. The emotion of greed comes into play, as customers want to feel that they get more for their buck. 
    2. Marketers can design campaigns centered on major savings to elicit this emotion. They can also employ BOGO deals. 
  5. Belonging
    1. This feeling is part of the mechanism used to avoid feeling alone. Strong bonds and intimacy are a part of human nature and signifies being part of a group. Brands can incorporate belongingness by forming communities (online or offline) for loyal customers to share common interests and passions. 
    2. This also plays a role in brand equity, as it allows brands to be seen as more than simply their products.

Using Market Research Alongside Emotional Marketing

Market research can and should be used alongside emotional marketing. Market research provides a strong method to support all emotional marketing campaigns. This is because it is not enough to build an emotional marketing campaign, or any marketing campaign, off of intuition alone.

Brands will need to know what kind of imagery and messaging that their target market will be receptive to and what kind to do without. After all, it is in the best interest of all businesses to avoid offending and disturbing their target market. Upsetting consumers in such a way can cause customer attrition, which can become permanent. 

Rather than using emotional marketing messages that miss the mark, or even go as far as to offend, brands should conduct market research, allowing them to understand their customers and avoid marketing pitfalls. There are two ways to go about this: secondary and primary research.

Secondary market research involves gathering and studying information that has already been researched and made available. While this is a critical early research step, the information from this research is not always relevant to a business. 

Primary market research, the kind that researchers must conduct themselves, is far more relevant and granular to a business. This is because, in this kind of research, the market researchers and their businesses form all of the inquiries specific to their study.

The most apt means of conducting primary market research is through online surveys. These tools grant researchers full control of their study, facilitating who is qualified to participate, the questionnaire, the visualizations of the results and much more, depending on the online survey platform. 

How to Create a Survey for Emotional Marketing Campaigns

There are numerous ways to prepare and test an emotionally-driven marketing campaign. This includes gauging customers’ emotions towards a brand in general, if brands wish to see the emotions that their companies inspire. As such, surveys can test all emotional ties between customers and businesses, not merely campaigns centered on evoking an emotional response. 

The following provides questions to use with different emotional marketing campaigns, along with questions for measuring all emotional affiliations, regardless of campaign type. 

  1. Question: Considering your overall customer experience with [brand, product, service, experience], which of the following emotions do you feel when thinking about [brand, product, service, experience]? 
    1. Campaign/Purpose: Finding all the emotions that customers associate with a brand or its specific offering
    2. Question Type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection
    3. Answer examples: happy, satisfied, appreciated, angry, disappointed, relieved, disappointed, stressed, worried, anxious, confused, frustrated, relieved, confident
  2. Question: How does the following advertisement make you feel? 
    1. Campaign/Purpose: Emotional marketing of future (or running) ads
    2. Question Type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection
    3. Answer examples: happy, angry, scared, in want of the [product, service, experience], like I belong
  3. Question: I have feelings for [Brand/Product] X that I do not have for any other [Brand/Product].
    1. Campaign/Purpose: General emotional comparison with a competitor
    2. Question Type: Yes or no and open-ended 
    3. Answer examples: Yes, no, other [explain]
  4. Question: What does this issue make you feel? 
    1. Campaign/Purpose: Emotional marketing based on a topical or continuing issue
    2. Question Type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection, open-ended 
    3. Answer examples: It’s disturbing, it’s unfortunate but expected, it needs to change now, I have no feelings towards it, it confused me, I’m not sure what needs to be done about it, Other (open-ended)
  5. Questions: Which ad/message do you feel the strongest for? Which ad/message makes you the most [happy, sad, disturbed, satisfied, etc?]? 
    1. Campaign/Purpose: Emotional comparison with a competitor based on a specific marketing material
    2. Question Type: Multiple-choice
    3. Answer examples: Ad 1, Ad 2, Ad 3, etc.

Resonating with Customers

Emotional marketing has the power to make marketing messages stay with their intended audience long after they’ve seen them. They spur their viewers into action, or at the very least, charge them with feelings stronger than non-emotionally-bent marketing messages. 

This kind of marketing also forms emotional bonds with its target market, a critical component of building brand equity and customer loyalty. However, these kinds of messages must be executed properly in order to not offend, bore or have no emotional effect on their intended targets.

To build a strong emotional marketing campaign, businesses must observe their target market by way of market research, using both secondary and primary market research. An online survey platform is the most effective tool for conducting primary research and can make a lot of headway in emotional marketing campaigns — if brands use the correct online survey platform. 

A strong online survey platform allows you to make your own survey in three easy steps, provides artificial intelligence and machine learning to stave off low-quality data, allows a wide range of filtering data options, engages users in their natural digital environments via random device engagement (RDE) sampling and much more. 

When market researchers choose a platform that offers all of these capabilities, they are setting up their business for success with emotional marketing campaigns and all other kinds.


Using Surveys to Uphold Cultural Marketing and Appeal to Customers

Using Surveys to Uphold Cultural Marketing and Appeal to Customers

In an increasingly diverse digital and physical landscape, cultural marketing is more important than ever. Diversity in the United States is growing, correlating with the public’s views on the need for diversity in marketing. 

61% of Americans find diversity in advertising important, and 38% of consumers are more likely to trust brands that display diversity in their ads. Evidently, brands must carry out cultural marketing to satisfy a diverse target market. 

To do so, brands should implement a data-driven strategy so that they are properly marketing to and serving consumers from a wide spectrum of cultures, ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses.

This article sheds light on cultural marketing, its importance, the consequences of neglecting it and how surveys help brands understand diverse audiences and execute cultural marketing campaigns. 

Understanding Cultural Marketing

Also called multicultural or cross-cultural marketing, cultural marketing refers to the marketing practice in which a message, product or service is promoted to a particular group of potential customers who belong to a certain culture, demographic or socioeconomic group. 

The campaigns making up this practice are meant to build consumer relationships with existing and potential customers. In cultural marketing, businesses leverage various aspects of an ethnic group’s culture, such as its language, tradition, holidays, religion and other cultural matters. 

Cultural marketing is also a kind of inclusive marketing, in that it is meant to represent all people, rather than merely those who make up the majority of the population. It is used for both advertising and marketing to people in different cultures as well as appealing to their specific interests and catering to their specific needs

The ultimate goal is to relate and connect with diverse consumers so that they eventually convert or remain loyal to the brand; the latter involves customers who have made at least one purchase. After all, retention is critical for business and cultural marketing can help increase a business’s customer retention rate

This is because all customers want to feel represented and included. Given that retention involves building solid relationships with customers and making them feel included and appreciated, cultural marketing can make strides on increasing the customer retention rate. 

The Importance of Cultural Marketing 

Multicultural marketing is critical in the face of a diversifying nation and an overall diverse digital environment. However, there are many other factors that make up the importance of cultural marketing. 

Brands ought to take them all into consideration, as some of these reasons will also guide them on forming a cultural marketing strategy.

First off, this kind of marketing opens new doors for businesses to engage with consumers who are outside the “majority audience.” By targeting specific target market segments based on their ethnic and socio-cultural facets, businesses can build a deeper emotional connection with consumers. In turn, this increases the chance of a conversion.

This kind of connection also builds customer loyalty, thus playing a role in retaining customers. Retaining customers paves the way for customer advocacy, in which customers act as brand ambassadors, recommending a business to their family, friends and peers. 

Thus, establishing an emotional connection by way of engaging customers is important, as 80% of emotionally engaged customers will promote brands they are loyal to compared to 50% of those who are less engaged.

Moreover, a consumer’s ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic background influences how they behave, from how they consume content, to their customer buying behavior. Marketers should therefore consider their target market’s various traditions, languages, customs, beliefs, and other experiences when developing and delivering marketing campaigns.

Multicultural marketing brings these influences into focus and allows businesses to strategize accordingly, which in turn allows brands to improve their communications with the diverse groups making up their target market.

Additionally, cultural marketing deals heavily with adoption, as there are constant shifts in the  U.S. cultural landscape and abroad.  The onus to adapt to these changes is on businesses.

Finally, there are certain cultural aspects that may be appropriate in some cultures, but not in others. Businesses must assure that they don’t appear culturally ignorant or indifferent to these cultural differences and sensitivities. For example, what’s acceptable to wear in the United States may not be in the Middle East.

What Happens When Brands Neglect Cultural Marketing

To piggyback off of the previous section, brands that neglect understanding cultural differences will poorly execute cultural marketing, if they attempt any culturing marketing endeavors at all. 

Brands that don’t implement cultural marketing in their strategy will have several reputational consequences, along with other business risks. Firstly they are going to appear dated and irrelevant, allowing competitors to outshine them in this regard, as competitors will make themselves appear to be more inclusive, culturally aware and up-to-date. 

Next, it is going to result in at least one marketing faux pas, such as when imagery or concepts in ads are insensitive to certain cultures, or when certain phrases get lost in translation. Either way, a lack of cultural awareness will eventually make its way into a marketing campaign, poorly reflecting on a company. 

This, in turn, will make a business appear to be rude, insensitive or willfully ignorant about a particular demographic, nation or socioeconomic group. It is similar to that of a business simply being out of tune with its target market, therefore sending them irrelevant, poorly targeted, clueless or unwanted messages. 

All of these consequences carry dangerous risks, such as landing into a PR crisis, deterring existing customers from making further transactions,  turning away current customers for good, declining sales and at worst, shutting down due to lack of business. 

Thus, businesses should attempt to understand cultural differences among their target market segments and practice cultural marketing to properly appeal to a wide range of customers. This will show consumers that a business cares about them, their unique cultural needs and sensitivities, and is soliciting their attention in an inclusive manner. 

How to Engage in Cultural Marketing

There are several major undertakings in cultural marketing. First off, a business must become versed in several cultural matters, as they relate to their diverse customer segments. This involves conducting secondary market research to understand dominant cultural trends and matters.

It also involves studying and listening to their target market, in order to address and cater to their unique needs. This involves conducting primary market research, as self-conducted research allows brands to examine things particular to their business and customers, allowing them to inquire into specific cultures. 

The following lists how to engage in cultural marketing:

  1. Understand cultural norms to avoid missteps.
    1. Some nations and their cultures are more conservative
  2. Observe the six dimensions of culture. These provide the key features of a culture, or the mental programming instilled within countries and peoples. Understanding each culture and country’s stance in each will allow you to market to it appropriately. 
    1. Power Distance
    2. Individualism
    3. Indulgence
    4. Masculinity
    5. Uncertainty avoidance
    6. Long-term orientation
  3. Demonstrate relevance in your messaging with marketing personalization
    1. This also involves staying atop the latest concerns and trends. For example, not all ethnicities are concerned with the same issues, as aren’t all socioeconomic groups.
  4. Leverage customer data to anticipate needs and avoid making mistakes due to cultural differences.
    1. This includes conducting market research, both primary and secondary, along with using other customer data tools, such as analytics. 
  5. Surprise and delight customers, while taking cultural norms, practices and taboos in mind.
    1. All customer segments will appreciate surprises that benefit them, such as a sale or promotion, especially if it is tied to their culture.  
    2. Make sure to not offend your target cultural segments. 

How to Use Surveys to Execute Cultural Marketing

Surveys are the most apt tools to use to properly execute cultural marketing campaigns. This is because they can be used in virtually all of the above practices for executing cultural marketing campaigns. 

Businesses can use surveys to identify and categorize their target market into granular segments and personas, allowing businesses to learn about various demographic, psychographic and class-based groups. As such, surveys provide brands with insight into major cultural aspects, such as the six dimensions of culture and marketing personalization.

They are the most potent tool for gathering customer intelligence and data, as businesses can gain insights into any topic of their choice and deploy it to a mass network of digital users (depending on the online survey platform).

Surveys allow brands to stay abreast with the latest cultural happenings, shifts and trends, so long as they are deployed regularly. They are especially useful for cultural marketing, since brands can screen their respondents prior to moving them to the questionnaire to ensure that their respondents belong to the brand’s cultural background of study.  

In this way, surveys help businesses stay organized, ironing out any organizational or categorical kinks from the process, as there are many diverse groups that businesses ought to study in order to take part in cultural marketing. 

After segmenting customers and data, businesses can use the data they extracted from surveys to guide all of their cultural marketing efforts. This is because surveys are essentially a vessel that connects businesses with their customers, revealing all kinds of customer opinions and needs to businesses, so that they can become culturally aware and avoid poorly executed marketing campaigns.

Remaining Culturally Relevant

The importance of culture in terms of marketing is major. The world market is made up of many smaller markets.  As such, the entire world economy is composed of smaller, distinct economies with their own cultures and languages. 

In order to tap into these economies, brands must be attuned to their unique culture. Surveys are an excellent option to use to gain insight into different cultures, cultural needs and differences, allowing brands to avoid making mistakes in their cultural marketing.

To execute a successful survey study, businesses ought to invest in a strong online survey platform, the kind that makes it easy and practical to screen respondents on a granular level, set up a questionnaire, deploy it to the masses and filter data in the post-survey results. 

Additionally, a useful online survey platform offers artificial intelligence to perform quality checks that remove poor quality data from making its way into the results of the survey. When a business invests in such a survey platform, it is on the right track to study different cultures and demographics and successfully execute cultural marketing


Consumer Engagement: How to Make an Audience out of the Multilingual Generation Z

Consumer Engagement: How to Make an Audience out of the Multilingual Generation Z

Gen Z should be part of your consumer research for consumer engagement. No one should ever underestimate a Gen Z’s voice and financial power despite their age.

The best and most accurate moniker that post-millennials ever received is that they’re widely recognized as the next consumer powerhouse, the ideal target for consumer engagement. With a projected $33 trillion income by 2030, Gen Zers are poised to become the second wealthiest generation in US history a few years from now (next to Millennials). Not to mention that just last year, Fast Company forecasted them to account for 40% of all consumers worldwide. 

As the Z generation is considered to be “on the cusp of adulthood”, members of this age group go around with a lengthy list of nicknames, which can be good or bad, depending on who calls them that way. 

Sometimes, they’re praised as being “entrepreneurial” as most of them are business-minded and would typically avoid working from 9-5 in the corporate world. On the other hand, media and market research companies have labeled Gen Zers as “screen addicts”, considering a recent finding that they check their phones more than 100 times a day on average. But you should never underestimate and should always understand the consumer value of Gen Z.

Consumer Engagement For Different Demographics

Born after 1996, most Gen Zers are not yet old enough to vote (the oldest is only 23 this year)  but they’re on track to being the most well-educated generation yet. Before we get into the reasons why, let’s take a brief tour first of this generation’s older siblings, parents, and grannies.

First off are “Baby Boomers” who were born between 1946 and 1964. They're currently between 57-75 years old (Gen Z’s grandparents) and are the biggest consumers of traditional media like television, radio, magazines, and newspapers—thus their alternate name “silent generation”. 

Despite being traditionalists, 90% of boomers own a Facebook account. Boomers are also the most comfortable with using cash as payment for everyday consumption out of all the other age groups.

Then we have the Gen Xers or the “MTV generation.” They grew up spending most of their time in front of the television and also spent roughly 7 hours a week on Facebook, making them a great mix of both traditional and digital savvy. Compared to boomers, Gen Xers would typically do more research when purchasing goods online but still prefer to do transactions in person as this is how they demonstrate loyalty to their well-loved brands. They’re Gen Z’s parents.

Coming next are the viral and always on the go “millennials” or Gen Y. This generation is actually divided into two groups, namely Y.1 (25-29 years old) and Y.2 (29-39) but one common thing about them is their penchant for on-demand services such as Netflix and Spotify. Millennials are known for their penchant for spending, even in a crisis, such as shown in an article about millennial savings and spending during the pandemic.

Because millennials own multiple social media accounts, they’re extremely comfortable using mobile devices but 32% still use a computer for purchases. Compared to Gen Xers, they have less brand loyalty as millennials are typically impatient and particular when it comes to pointing out poor company service. This is a handy-dandy guide for how Americans spend by generation.

Who Are The Gen Z And In What Way Are They Diverse?

Gen Z is the newest generation, born between 1997 and 2012. This age group is different from previous generations in some important ways, but similar in many ways to the Millennials especially when it comes to their social and political views. 

Members of the Gen Z (or simply Gen Zers or post-millennials) are racially and ethnically diverse, making this age group highly multilingual. In the United States, for example, post-Millenials think that the country’s growing racial and ethnic diversity is a good thing which gives them a tendency to be less racist. 

According to statistics, almost half of Gen Zers in the United States are either European, Middle Eastern, or North African Americans while 14% are black, 6% are Asian, and 5% are mixed.

Consumer Engagement For Engaging Your Gen Z Digital Consumers

Gen Zers, more than any other younger age groups, are known to be digital natives, meaning they have little or no memory of the world as it existed before technology exploded. 

While boomers and their parents (Gen X) would most likely opt to update themselves with the daily news by reading the broadsheet, their descendants (the post-millennials) would just simply open Twitter and do some scrolling to get the same. 

This is what makes this generation extra unique–Gen Zers think that they have the power to do almost anything just as long as their mobile phones are wrapped around their hands. No wonder why they’re also sometimes referred to as the “i-Generation”.

The i-Generation is also quite versatile in the sense that they know exactly how to use every single social media platform available in the market. Their approach to posting on these sites is multifaceted as they use different platforms for different activities. 

On Facebook, they follow trending stories; on Instagram, they share how fun their life is; on Twitter, they write their thoughts like an online diary; on Youtube, they compare specs by watching product reviews; and on Tiktok, they challenge themselves by recreating what is currently viral.

The Financially-Conscious Generation

Because the average i-Generation fella received their first mobile phone at age 10, many of them grew up playing with their parents' mobile phones or tablets. When not communicating, they’re either playing mobile games or buying stuff online. Life for them is generally comfortable since their Gen X parents have worked hard for their stability. In return, Gen Zers tend to avoid debts since that’s what they’re told. Debit cards top their priority list, followed by mobile banking. Unlike millennials, very few Gen Zers own a credit card.

What’s even more interesting is that the offspring of the MTV generation love learning about personal finance. Most members of the i-Generation have a strong appetite for financial education and are opening savings accounts at younger ages than prior generations.

And because the parents of post-Millennials are more well educated than the parents of millennials (Gen X), Gen Zers are more likely to put up their own startup business in the future instead of working as full-time employees. 

What Makes The Z Generation Multilingual?

We discussed in the first few parts of this article how culturally-diverse Gen Zers are. If you’re wondering which between them and the millennials win this category, then they're definitely the former as post-millenials are either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. They’re multilingual, and many learned English as an additional language to their mother tongue.

When dealing with people whether professionally or just to casually hang out, most members of the i-Generation would prefer face-to-face communication. Sure they will post and tweet, but they want to get involved and eventually make a difference. Compared to older generations, a Gen Z’s sense of purpose is unmatched. They won’t do something if it’s against their will.

This makes them accessible personally and virtually. Since Gen Zers are an outgoing and approachable bunch both in the real world and in social media, it’s time for marketers to learn how to reach them.

How You Can Use Consumer Engagement For Your Multilingual Gen Z Consumers

As mentioned a while ago, the multilingual Generation Z is the future consumer powerhouse that’s why now is the perfect time to begin thinking about how to best engage them using a global marketing strategy that appeals to this rather tricky age group. 

Having a global marketing strategy that reaches out to new and international audiences is a must especially if it’s intended for a specific demographic (like Gen Z) but as a business, you also need to think about ways on how you can engage consumers regardless of their generation or age group so it would be best to think about the boomers, Xers, and millennials as well when coming up with an effective consumer engagement global marketing strategy.

Businesses that are targeting to turn them into loyal customers should provide Gen Zers with engaging and immediately beneficial experiences. When making text posts on Facebook for example, make them concise and short because most teenagers nowadays have the attention span of a gnat and they’re easily distracted. 

While a millennial or Gen Xer might stop for a moment to read a longer post, Gen Zers want to get straight to the point so that they can proceed to the next one. Despite these, they relatively have faster processing speed than millennials—so you should also consider this somehow. 

Brands that don’t adapt to the way Gen Z consumes messages might end up losing them as paying customers.

To properly engage Gen Z consumers, one should take into primary consideration their so-called inclusive-first mindset. Although most of the guidelines we have on inclusive communication are geared towards being sensitive to socio-economic issues, we rarely talk about inclusivity in terms of the language itself. 

Projecting an inclusive model of communication by accounting for the languages spoken in your targeted audiences’ regions can help you get better reception from Gen Zers. 

In this case, collaborating with a company experienced in providing translation services for different age groups and can navigate through complex language barriers, yes even generational barriers, can help you capture this elusive and values-driven demographic. 

By translating your content, you can develop a more inclusive approach to engage not only your Gen Z consumers but also their friends and families, which can develop into a ripple effect further fortifying your brand and public image. 

But age group is just one of the many demographic options that a brand should consider when studying the right approach on consumer engagement strategies. There are a few more indicators to consider to get the best results such as gender, location, device being used, occupation, and of course, language spoken since the age group in talks is a highly multilingual one. 

Engaging The Alpha Consumers

If you think that Gen Z is the youngest generation out there, then think again!

Since we’ve already covered the W, X, Y, and Z generations, it’s now time to come back to A! Introducing—the Alpha generation!

They were born in 2012 and will continue at least through 2025 (four years from now), which makes them the “pandemic babies”. This is yet another interesting age group to cover as they’re the kind of digital natives that will expect fully integrated and personalized, consumer experiences. For them, tangible cash was never a thing. Their idea of money is a number on a screen that they can spend through apps and other forms of e-commerce. 

We’d love to tell you more about Gen A but that’s already for another comprehensive article. But if you’re really keen to explore the potential of the Alphas for your business, then you might wanna try doing surveys among mobile users. There’s a new, fast, and amazing way to get the information that you need by just simply creating polls. It works well for Gen Zs so it should work for Alphas too!

The Wrap Up

So are generations the best way to categorize consumer behavior? Not entirely, but it also doesn't hurt to understand these age groups since marketing tools and audience segmentations generally include age as a factor, among many others.

The truth is, everyone grows up, and sometimes, older generations tend to behave more like younger generations. If you want your business to reach the Alphas, you need to start going out often in order to meet and get to know all age groups. Otherwise, surveying millions in just one click for your brand visibility can be of big help. Whatever you choose, the result will likely be favorable just as long as you know where to start and you know who to seek.


Fostering Inclusive Marketing with Surveys

Fostering Inclusive Marketing with Surveys

Inclusive marketing is a critical aspect in marketing, allowing brands to effectively connect and serve diverse communities. Given that a target market is made up of diverse demographics (and psychographics), it is a must for companies to make everyone feel included and valued. 

Inclusive marketing works towards achieving this end, along with cutting out cultural biases and stereotypes, so that all groups of people feel seen, heard, and valued by brands. 

Creating content, other marketing messaging and campaigns that reflect the diverse communities that companies cater to is a requisite, as 61% of Americans consider diversity in marketing important.

In addition, 38% of customers are more likely to trust businesses that show diversity in their marketing. As such, there is clear evidence that inclusive marketing is appreciated and impactful for companies. 

This article delves into inclusive marketing, its importance, current state, and how surveys foster inclusive marketing. 

Understanding Inclusive Marketing

Inclusive marketing refers to the messaging, imagery, processes, and technologies that consider and accommodate all groups of people, allowing them all to fully engage with businesses, in turn. This includes enabling marginalized and underrepresented groups to fully experience and connect with brands.

These marketing campaigns embrace diversity by including people from various backgrounds and the experiences they relate to. In doing so, this involves creating campaigns that break down barriers along with stereotypes

For marketing to be fully inclusive, it must consider all facets and layers of its target market’s identity. These include ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, culture, language, religion/spirituality, size, physical/mental ability, and socioeconomic status.

It should also account for the fact that one person may be a part of many identities and dimensions. Additionally, brands should acknowledge that nuances are inherent in all of their customer personas, including their personality and preferences.

Aside from marketing campaigns, inclusivity reckons forming all of a brand’s products, services, and experiences in ways that can resonate with a diverse swath of people and make them feel included.

The Importance of Inclusive Marketing

Inclusive marketing is ever-important in an increasingly diverse country and a globalized world. As such, businesses must tailor their marketing and business offerings at large to a wide pool of target market members. 

Brands must adhere to inclusive marketing practices, even in niche companies that have very specific target market segments. Doing so will ensure that all of their customers feel recognized and appreciated.

Another critical aspect of inclusive marketing is representation. Marketers must remember that as customers and as people, everyone wants to be represented. When people are not represented in any marketing messages or imagery, they understandably feel left out, as outliers and outsiders looking in, not encouraged to participate with others. In turn, they are being made to feel as the “other.” 

Brands should avoid this at all costs. It is difficult enough to entice customers to buy from them; when a brand doesn’t forge inclusive marketing, it adds another layer of difficulty for the business to appeal to its customers. It also makes a business appear negatively in comparison to its more inclusive competitors. 

It is not enough to declare acceptance of diversity and inclusivity. Businesses must practice what they preach by enacting inclusive marketing into all of their campaigns. 

Inclusive marketing is also important, in that it opens the door to visibly encourage equality in a particular niche or industry. It makes strides towards backing equality, as brands can feature people in non-traditional roles in their marketing deliverables. For example, women in a male-dominated field or hobby. 

In this regard, businesses can no longer be passive; they must actively show that they are inclusive to all identities and support participation from all, whether they are a B2B SaaS business or a sports equipment company.

When brands participate in inclusive practices, they satisfy consumer demands and create a vast amount of opportunities with all of their potential customers. Consequently, this will play a major role in building consumer loyalty.

Inclusive Marketing Versus Diversity and Inclusion

While both of these concepts are important for businesses and show appreciation and respect to a diverse group of people, they are not the same. Therefore, they should not be conflated or used interchangeably. 

The basis of these two concepts is fairly similar: that of fostering inclusivity among all. However, they refer to different areas of practice and have different end goals

Diversity and inclusion is a concept that typically refers to developing an inclusive culture within a workspace, whereas inclusive marketing involves stamping out exclusion via marketing efforts

Diversity and inclusion is predicated on a workplace with a diverse personnel, one in which everyone feels equally involved and supported in all areas of the workplace. 

Inclusive marketing, on the other hand, denotes marketing campaigns that take up diversity by including people from various backgrounds and displaying stories that are relatable to unique audiences

Inclusive marketing efforts should make an effort to break stereotypes and biases, in addition to embracing and reflecting a diverse target audience. This involves becoming better acquainted with different cultures and experiences. 

As such, diversity and inclusion practices have the end goal of diversifying a particular operation or institution, while inclusive marketing is inclined at providing representation and appreciation of a diverse marketplace. 

Both of these concepts are crucial to a business — but serve different areas. D&L is an HR matter, while inclusive marketing concerns marketing departments, along with advertising, PR, and creative departments, depending on the organizational structure of a business.

How Surveys Create Inclusive Marketing

There are many best practices for inclusive marketing. These practices make up the overall marketing process, embedding into the preliminary stages of a campaign up until the review of a campaign’s performance.

For example, businesses should use inclusive language and avoid resorting to stereotypical assertions or messaging. But more importantly, businesses should address the unique needs, perspectives, and issues across demographics, including people with disabilities and from different lifestyles. 

This is where survey research takes center stage. Surveys provide an invaluable method for deploying targeted questionnaires to a wide swath of audiences, extracting customer data in the process. This data represents a diverse range of consumers, allowing brands to tap into the minds of a diverse set of consumers. 

As such, surveys solve the major issue of adequately marketing and serving diverse audiences, given that businesses must understand their customers to satisfy them, and diverse audiences have unique needs and interests.

Surveys provide brands with an easy method of reaching their target market and understanding all of its concerns, requirements, desires, aversions, opinions, and more. Surveys are essentially instruments of data for decision-making, which is much-needed across all industries. 

Customer data carries massive value, as it drives a variety of business strategies and decisions. Without it, a business would be far less attuned to its customers and not be fully aware of how to serve them, including what to avoid.

Moreover, surveys are the most adept solution for inclusive marketing, as market researchers can set granular conditions in the screening section, dictating precisely who can take the survey. 

Researchers can include a wide variety of demographics and psychographics to take the survey, depending on the data filtering capabilities of the survey platform they use.  In this way, they will get easy, automated access to the group of respondents that they are seeking to study to then market to and serve. 

Surveys allow market researchers to assess the results of each demographic group via post-results filtering in their survey. Thus, they can easily reap and review the data on a diverse set of customers with surveys. 

Forging Inclusivity Across Campaigns

Inclusive marketing is no longer a nice-to-have option; it is the future of marketing. More and more brands are incorporating inclusivity into their marketing to avoid seeming non-inclusive, outdated and disrespectful.

Conducting market research is an apt way to become more accustomed with a diverse target market and its closely situated markets. Surveys provide the most potent way of extracting timely customer data, but the success of surveys is largely dependent on their online survey platform.  

A strong online survey platform makes it easy and practical to set up screeners, target respondents at granular levels, deploy the surveys to a vast network of high-trafficked websites and apps, offer various post-survey visualizations, and much more.

Therefore, businesses and market researchers should choose their online survey platform wisely; a valuable one will make it easy to foster inclusive marketing, cater to customers and so much more.


How to Execute an Efficient Agile Research Strategy with 4 Steps

How to Execute an Efficient Agile Research Strategy with 4 Steps

Executing an agile research strategy goes far beyond working quickly. Rather, it involves agile software development methods, along with following several best practices. Coupling these key aspects allows businesses to become well-suited to performing agile research.

Becoming a truly agile organization has a powerful impact across departments, even affecting business expenditures. In fact, a Harvard study found that by the end of the agile transition, CEOs spend four times the amount of time on research strategy, at 10% - 40%.

93% of businesses that had fully adopted an agile research strategy before the COVID-19 pandemic outperformed businesses that hadn’t. Clearly, using an agile research strategy is a key component of business operations and success.

This article explains the meaning behind the agile research strategy, its importance, benefits, how to execute it efficiently with four steps, and how surveys are the best bet for software development methods.

Understanding Agile Research Strategy

Agile research strategy is a four-step strategy that falls under agile market research, an approach characterized by accelerating market research operations and processes to ensure timely and efficient results

There are several best practices that make up this strategy. Since it falls under agile market research, these strategies also involve using agile software and development methods that are iterative in nature

The iterative approach involves taking small steps towards an end goal, where each step informs the next and involves iterating tests, as opposed to the waterfall approach, which involves completing a project in one go. 

The agile research strategy builds off of this iterative approach and can be used in the strategic planning process. In order to truly be agile, this strategy requires coupling on-demand technology with a four-step iterative process.

The Importance of the Agile Research Strategy

Having an agile research strategy is important on many fronts. First and foremost, it is one of the major aspects that uphold agile market research, working in tandem with the agile technology that helps bring any research campaign to completion.

Secondly, this kind of strategy allows researchers and their business at large, to work much faster and become more productive. This is because the agile method relies heavily on using AI and automation market research platforms, the kinds that remove manual, repetitive work from the research process.

It’s also because the strategy involves a great deal of planning, testing, and understanding customers and other research subjects down to a T, as the following section explains. 

This strategy allows businesses to perfect a variety of business campaigns, and to do so in an informed and data-backed manner. The agile research strategy works to improve everything from branding and brand visibility to concept testing and customer development

Essentially, this strategy underpins and strengthens all the processes that are involved in various business campaigns — marketing or otherwise. It helps researchers and other team members better work together, as it typically involves collaborations across departments to reach alignment across goals.

In this way, it brings the democratization of data into play, meaning that all team members can work with data, even those who are non-technical. This is because each step in the strategy is methodical and one designed to help teams conduct and use market research better.

4 Tips on Best Practices for Agile Research Strategy

Brands can execute an informed agile research strategy by adhering to four stages, or steps. This section examines each of these four stages individually, what to do in each, and how these steps ensure quality results. 

Foundational Learning

The first stage in the four-step strategy, foundational learning is used for building a strong foundation for the rest of the process. Brands build the foundation via compiling the needs of their target market. This includes their demographics, psychographics, desires, and needs.

Businesses must study their customers directly to obtain this data. They can do so by conducting a focus group, survey panel, or consumer survey. Brands must use the proper market research software or technology to be agile, as these methods can be increasingly time-consuming and difficult to perform in traditional ways.

However a business chooses to construct market research, it should ask questions that allow it to engage in foundational learning. As such, they should tap into areas such as demographics, brand awareness, customer behavior, preferences, and much more. 

Businesses can get access to these insights with both qualitative and quantitative market research but must rely on an agile market research platform to deliver these insights.

Innovation Pipeline

The innovation pipeline stage deals with business strategy. This stage should apply the information that businesses garnered from the foundational learning step and apply it across various market research and marketing campaigns

For example, businesses can use the data they reaped from the first step and use it to build customer personas, tweak their marketing messages, tailor products and innovate on product features, along with broadly connecting with their target market by addressing their needs or speaking with them via representatives.  

To do so, brands should identify all kinds of customer behaviors to understand category opportunities and their consumers’ unmet needs. They should continue studying their customers' unique needs at a more granular level, such as with follow-up studies. 

Product testing is another crucial element in this stage, as it is still early in the process and the most important iterations occur from survey responses on product ideas and sentiment. Doing so allows businesses to go to market with more confidence that their products meet their consumer needs. 

Brands should also validate iterations against competitors’ products, as it will give them a competitive advantage. 

When a business reaches parity or superiority in its benchmarks, and consumers detect it, the business will be in a sweet spot and can proceed to develop its campaigns.

Campaign Development

This stage involves developing marketing campaigns supported by strategic research in order to form brand equity, foster awareness, and drive demand. It shows that a good product is not enough to succeed. 

Much like creating innovative products, businesses should rely on market research in this step, incorporating things like user panels, foundational learning, iterative tactics, alongside qualitative and quantitative research.  

After businesses create campaign ideas based on their target market comprehension, they can test new ads with their consumers. The feedback from this activity is used to iterate and conduct tests. This allows businesses to fine-tune their campaigns and their corresponding messaging, and branding. By iterating and testing, brands can understand the effectiveness of their copy, imagery, and more.

Businesses should continue this work until their benchmarks are outperformed and campaigns are ready to go to market.

Shopper/ Tracking Support

While campaign development is a crucial step in the agile research strategy, it is not the final one. This is because markets and consumers are constantly evolving; businesses ought to remain agile and attentive to sustain a competitive advantage

As such, there is work to be done after products are tested, iterated, and launched along with their marketing campaigns. 

In this final stage, brands should evaluate their shopper and customer support experience. This involves studying the in-store experience, customer interactions with personnel, including those that offer support, along with studying retail assets. 

This step is partially used to make forecasts on current markets to ensure effective future campaigns. Although it is impossible to precisely predict markets, businesses can still make accurate predictions by following this four-step strategy. But they must carry out these stages using the correct market research software, the kind that provides agile data. 

How Surveys Complement Agile Research Strategy

Given that the majority of agile research strategy involves iteration and testing, surveys — particularly online surveys — are crucial and trustworthy tools to use. They enable brands to extract virtually any kind of customer opinion, sentiment, or need.

This is because surveys allow brands to ask any question and deploy the questionnaire to their target audience. Businesses can use surveys for any campaign, from branding and general marketing to product strategy, and customer experience evaluation. Some online survey platforms even allow market researchers to A/B test concepts concurrently with their surveys. 

As such, researchers can iterate concepts with surveys on hand. If customers respond negatively or less enthusiastically than expected to on a concept, a business can test another one by simply deploying another survey. 

Surveys can also be used to better understand the overall shopping experience, as described in the final step, as brands can deploy surveys that address their own CX.  All in all, surveys can be applied to a variety of campaigns, including pre and post-campaign market research, allowing brands to establish an efficient agile research strategy.

Making Headway in Agile Research

Agile market research is no longer a buzzword, despite the fact that not everyone shares the same definition of it and applies it to slightly different areas of research, along with different objectives.

To reiterate, agile market research is the application of agile software methods (think iterative activities with market research practices, such as the agile research strategy. This strategy dictates how to test, iterate, and launch products, concepts, and campaigns more efficiently and quickly via a customer-centric approach.

In order to facilitate a strong agile research strategy, brands must use an agile market research platform. An online survey platform is brands’ and market researchers’ best bet, as it allows for customer targeting, survey creation, deployment, and post-results data filtering.

A strong online survey platform should obtain high-quality data, which can be executed with the RDE (random device engagement) sampling method. This method engages customers in their natural digital environments in a completely randomized way

Such a platform must also rely on artificial intelligence to perform quality checks that ensure that brands extract only the highest quality of customer data. These checks should disqualify VPN users, gibberish answers, incomplete surveys, and other sources of poor data from appearing in the final survey results.

When a business uses such an online survey platform, it can seamlessly perform an agile research strategy.


How to Uncover and Minimize Business Risks with Surveys

How to Uncover and Minimize Business Risks with Surveys

Businesses must work towards uncovering and preventing business risks, as running a business is often a risky operation — especially for fledgling companies. For a fourth of new businesses, failure is imminent, as 20% of businesses fail within the first year.

The leading worldwide business risk is business interruption at 41%, which includes supply chain disruption. The next most common risks for businesses are pandemic outbreaks – 40%, 

Cyber incidents – 40% and market developments – 19%.

While it is impossible to be immune to all business risks, a well-prepared business can lessen and even avoid risks in some cases, with the use of data-driven decision making. They can also do this by honing in on their business strategy.   

This article explores business risks and how surveys can be used to discover and minimize them early on. 

Understanding Business Risks

Business risks refer to any threat a company may experience in its ability to achieve its financial goals. A risk can also mean that a business’s plans may not turn out as they were originally planned or that they do not meet their targets, objectives, or KPIs.

A risk can also include the chance of exposure to any factors that lower a business’s profit and chances of success. These factors can vary, ranging from internal business risk factors, such as technological, human, physical, structural, political, mismanagement, etc.

There are various risks that cannot be blamed on a business itself, which include external factors, such as increased prices of raw materials, a new pool of competitors, and government regulations. 

Virtually anything that threatens a company from achieving its financial goals can be considered a business risk. As such, businesses need to be aware of all their possible risks, how to counteract them, and mainly, how to prevent them from causing any impact. 

There are also external risk factors that a business can rein in or reduce, such as those present in target market demands, customer behavior, and tastes. To do so, businesses must take part in a strategic planning process and create business safety nets. 

The Main Types of Business Risks

While there are various kinds of business risks, businesses can better identify them and remember them by understanding their broader categories. The two main types of business risks are internal and external. In this binary, each category has the power to affect the other. 

The following lists the main types of risks businesses can experience, along with their various major subcategories

Internal Business Risks

Internal risks occur from within a company and can result in various setbacks every now and then. These risks can be predicted reliably, as they emerge from a business itself. Businesses have a good chance of reducing these kinds of risks. 

Here are several major internal risks that a business can face:

  1. Human risks: 
    1. Union strikes
    2. Employee performance, including idle workers
    3. Ineffective management and/ or leadership
    4. Poor relationships with external producers or suppliers
    5. Clients and customers who fail to pay on time
  2. Physical risks:
    1. Loss of or damage of company assets 
    2. Loss or damage of office equipment and buildings
    3. In-office physical risks such as issues (even minor) in building/ wall structure
    4. Crimes such as theft and vandalism
  3. Technological risks:
    1. Product and service changes in the manufacturing, delivery, or distribution 
    2. Outdated operating systems that decrease production or cause disruptions in supplies or inventory. 
    3. A lack of IT staff investing that supports company systems
    4. Server and software issues leading to equipment downtime 
    5. Production deficits 

External Business Risks

These risks often include economic events outside of the business’s structure. External factors can be unexpected and take a turn for the worse, as they involve virtually any undesirable outside force or phenomenon. It can be more difficult to reduce these risks given that they cannot be forecasted effectively. 

Identifying Business Risks

Risks are identified in a number of ways. Strategies to identify these risks rely on comprehensively analyzing a company's specific business activities. Most organizations face preventable, strategic, and external threats that can be managed through acceptance, transfer, reduction, or elimination.

The following are several major external risks that a business can face:

  1. Natural risks:
    1. Natural disasters that affect business operations such as remaining open. 
    2. Damages to office buildings and merchandise 
    3. Being forced to shut down temporarily or reduce hours of operation
  2. Political and legislative risks:
    1. Changes in the political, environmental, or governmental policy 
    2. Changes in import and export laws, taxes, tariffs 
    3. Legal risks
    4. Regulations that may seem unwarranted or affect a business negatively
    5. Compliance policies such as data protection and payment processing
  3. Economic risks:
    1. Changes in market conditions
    2. Economic downturns such as recessions
    3. Increased levels of unemployment
    4. Entry of new competitors
    5. Revenue loss
    6. Changes to customer buying behavior
  4. Security and fraud risks
    1. Hacking opportunities across channels 
    2. Data breaches
    3. Payment fraud
  5. Reputation risks
    1. Dissatisfied customers
    2. Product failures or dissatisfaction with products 
    3. Lawsuits
    4. Negative press  
    5. Damage to brand equity

How Surveys Uncover and Reduce Business Risks

There are many ways to identify the two major risks within an organization. Given the varying nature of business risks, businesses must implement several strategies to uncover and reduce them, if not completely eradicate them.

These methods include conducting secondary market research to identify industry-specific risks, analyzing customer complaints via a VoC (voice of the customer program), conducting internal and external research, analyzing any suspected risk sources and other means.

Fortunately, surveys provide a direct approach to tackling many of these ways to uncover and reduce risks. This is because surveys can be used to study virtually any topic or concern of interest. 

Surveys complement secondary market research, as they provide business-specific information, granting market researchers the opportunity to ask their own questions and to use a precise survey sample based on the required target population.

Surveys allow researchers to gain firsthand insight into their customers. They can dig further into customer complaints, by assessing the number of people within a target market that share the same concerns and may have the same complaints. In this way, they provide qualitative market research in addition to quantitative market research.

While there are many unforeseen changes that can occur, businesses can make them more predictable and therefore, manageable by conducting surveys. This is because businesses can use these tools to gain insight into various markets, including global ones via global market research

They can assess whether external factors have any bearing on their customers and how to best respond to them. In this way, businesses can both uncover and minimize their risks with surveys. As such, surveys can also be used to compare a business with its competitors, helping to assure that the business doesn't fall behind and risk losing market share.

Implementing surveys is also valuable for branding, as they can be used for brand tracking, helping businesses keep track of their reputation, and warding off reputational risks. 

In this way, market researchers can set up such survey campaigns to gain access into the public opinions of their business. They can research how their current branding, advertising, and PR campaigns are faring with their target market. They can also do this with A/B testing.

All in all, although business risks vary in nature and impact on a business, surveys help counter the risks by identifying them and preparing researchers to mitigate them

Preventing all Undesirable Business Happenings

Businesses must equip themselves with all the necessary tools and strategies to help them identify and reduce business risks. As such, there is no single solution to these risks. 

However, surveys provide an excellent source of customer and even competitor information that can inform businesses on their risk factors and overall environment. In order to reap the most benefits out of surveys and effectively reduce risks, businesses must choose the proper online survey platform. Such a platform should make it easy to create and deploy surveys and have the capability to distribute surveys to a massive network while ensuring they are answered by the targeted population.

In addition, a strong survey platform should extract quality data, which is made possible through the RDE (random device engagement) sampling method, which engages respondents in their natural digital habitats in a completely randomized way. It should also rely on artificial intelligence to perform quality checks that ensure the highest quality of customer data.

When a company uses an online survey platform of this caliber, it is setting itself up for success and mitigating its risks.  


Diving into the Concept Testing Survey for Marketing and Product Development

Diving into the Concept Testing Survey for Marketing and Product Development

Using a concept testing survey to inform marketing and product development is like giving your target audience a seat at the table. 

Concept testing refers to the market research practice you should perform early in the marketing and product development process. It helps you find out how your products will resonate with your customers. 

While traditional market research requires respondents to choose from pre-existing criteria, concept testing requires them to provide unique feedback. 

With a concept testing survey, your business can assure that it is putting out products that your customers will be fond of. Use this article as a guide to get started.

Defining a Concept Test Survey

A concept test is a research method wherein your business accrues customer feedback about a new product before it launches. 

A concept test survey, as its name implies, is a survey that utilizes a concept test.

Surveys are tools with questionnaires designed to elicit unique responses from your target audience in reference to your business’s new product or product feature idea.

Concept surveys differ from other surveys, in that they help your business to evaluate concepts before they go to market to understand how your customers will react. The concepts include anything that can be tested for marketing purposes, such as an advertisement, a slogan, imagery, emails, a particular service, and more. 

Surveys act as a safety net for new products, helping your company predict whether they will succeed or fail. 

Why Your Business Needs a Concept Testing Survey 

A concept testing survey is important, as it provides insight into how products will be received. With proper concept testing, your business can avoid investing in concepts that won’t succeed (saving you a lot of money). On the flip side, you can increase investment in concepts where testing predicts success. 

Basically, a good concept testing survey system can help your business save money and resources, while earning money at the same time.

Concept Testing Survey Methods

The first step to a successful concept test is choosing the right method. Here are the most common methods: 

  1. Single Concept Evaluation (Monadic testing) – a full evaluation is given on one concept. Participants are made aware of features and prompted to discuss whether they approve or disapprove as their survey response.
  2. Multiple Concept Evaluation (Sequential Monadic) – full evaluations are completed for multiple concepts.
  3. Concept Selection (Comparative) – Respondents choose their most preferred concept.
  4. Concept Selection and Evaluation (Comparative Monadic) – Respondents choose their most preferred concept and provide a full evaluation of that concept.

Each product testing method has its advantages and setbacks. As a business, you should choose the one that best fits your specific needs, based on the concepts you want to test and the results you seek.

You should use survey software to ask questions about your products. Survey software is also helpful in pushing your surveys to your target audience.

The survey questions should include the following:

  • What do you like most about this product?
  • What do you like least about this product? 
  • How likely is it that you’d buy this product?

You can use more specific questions, just make sure they are relevant to your products for the most useful feedback. 

Concept Testing Survey Use Cases

Concept testing can be used at almost every stage of the marketing and product development process. Here are some common use cases:

Logo Testing

A concept testing survey is an asset when conducting branding market research. For example, logo testing is a great way to see how your customers will perceive your business’s new logo. 

You can use concept testing surveys to identify what your logo communicates to customers. Ultimately, logo testing is the best way to discover the logo that best embodies your brand.

Website Design 

Concept testing surveys also come in handy when you redesign a site or launch a new one. Through concept testing, your brand can see how its design concepts will be perceived by a selection of people who will one day interact with your website. This gives you an inside look at how the sample of your target population thinks, guiding their design decisions for the best possible outcome.

Ads, Landing Pages, and Conversions

Split-testing is a popular way to test headers, images, and other website content to see which resonates most with an audience. Also called A/B testing, split testing is a random experiment where two versions of a piece of content are shown to your target audience. Whether customers see version A or version B occurs completely at random.

Through analytics, this method helps you identify which ad, landing page, or other pieces of content is most compelling for their audience. You can see which customers convert. 

Concept testing takes this method to the next level by allowing your business to hear from your audience directly. As such, you won’t simply obtain numbers, as concept testing gives you qualitative feedback about the “why” behind the numbers. 

Beyond just validating the numbers, this inside look into the minds of your audience could lead businesses in new directions and even spark new ideas. 

Pricing and Upgrades

Concept testing is also a great way to project how upgrading products and services or altering your pricing system will be perceived. The best way to do this is by using migration path tests to gauge your customers’ initial thoughts and see what features and benefits they crave. Migration path tests compare migrated data with original data. Your business can create upgrade tests to predict how the new product will affect your sales.

Name Testing

Deciding on a name can be rather difficult when forming a new company or creating a new product. The impact a name has on overall success can be paralyzing, especially since it’s usually composed of only a few words. 

Those few words have to convey what your business offers, its benefits, and how your brand should make customers feel to your audience. 

By using concept testing surveys, your business will be able to test potential names and request evaluations on what your customers believe the names convey. This feedback will guide you on the correct track to choosing the perfect name for your business.

Price Testing 

Have you ever considered how your customers feel about the value of your products? You can use concept testing to find out whether or not your customers are satisfied. You can also use price testing when you alter the prices of your products. This is an effective way to find out how your customers will receive any new redesigns or product innovations. 

Package Testing 

Packaging matters more than many a business may think. Do you know what your customers think about your current packaging? Using a concept testing survey for package testing is a strong method to discover if your customers are impressed or irritated by your business’s packaging. 

Messaging

When your business is unsure about how its target audience will perceive your messaging, you can apply a concept testing survey to learn more. This shows them if your messaging resonates with your audience. As such, you can gather how it communicates the value of what you offer. You can use the insights from concept testing to create a style guide that informs future messaging. 

Product and Concept Development

This might be the most obvious use case of them all. A concept testing survey is an essential part of transferring products and concepts from ideas to reality. Concept testing can reveal missing product features as well as features that offer no benefit and can be removed entirely. Your business can discover what its customers think about your new product’s quality and usability. Overall, product concept and usability tests are the ultimate way to make sure every product your business releases is up to par. 

Step Up Your Product Development with Concept Testing Surveys

All businesses should use a concept testing survey at virtually any level of the marketing and product development process. Listening to direct customer feedback gives you an edge over your competition by equipping your business with key information about the specific wants, needs, aversions, and sentiments of your target audience.

Frequently asked questions

What is a concept testing survey?

A concept testing survey is a survey that uses a concept test. The survey asks questions that trigger unique responses from your target audience in response to a new product or concept. Concept testing surveys are unique surveys because they help businesses predict customer reactions before products are released.

Why should market researchers use a concept testing survey?

Market researchers and business owners should use a concept testing survey, as it informs product marketing decisions by predicting which concepts and products will succeed (and which will fail). It’s a way to ensure you’re putting out products your customers will love.

How do you to use split-testing in a concept testing survey?

Split-testing is a common method of testing headers, images and other website content to see what version customers respond to best. It helps brands optimize their website content so that it resonates with their audience. Concept testing surveys that use split testing give similar feedback, but they let you hear from your audience directly.

What are migration path tests used for in concept testing surveys?

Migration path tests compare migrated data with original data to gauge customers’ initial thoughts and to find out what features and benefits they’d like to see. They are useful in concept testing surveys meant to project how pricing changes and product upgrades will be received.

How do you use split-testing in a concept testing survey?

Split-testing is a common method of testing headers, images and other website content to see what version customers respond to best. It helps brands optimize their website content so that it resonates with their audience. Concept testing surveys that use split testing give similar feedback, but they let you hear from your audience directly.


How Relentless Quality in Market Research Perfects the Strategic Planning Process

How Relentless Quality in Market Research Perfects the Strategic Planning Process

Surviving in business depends on a well-established strategic planning process — and not just for new businesses. This ensures that a business establishes its priorities and correctly focuses its efforts and resources in order to obtain them.

Despite the importance of this process, up to 67% of strategic planning fails.

You can build an effective strategic planning process with market research, but you’ll need to use the proper market research tool.

That’s because in the demanding world of business today, market research tools must provide relentless quality in order to sustain a strategic plan.

This article explains the strategic planning process and how a market research platform that provides relentless quality can support this effort.

Understanding the Strategic Planning Process

This process involves all the activities that your business performs as part of strategic planning, the organizational management activity used to identify priorities, set goals, map out a direction, produce strategies, allocate resources, and make decisions to accomplish the goals. 

This process plans the fundamental course that your business should take, along with its actions, while layings out what your business seeks to do, who it will serve, and why it will do so. It is built with a focus on the long-term.

In the strategic planning process, your business must cover as many bases surrounding itself as possible, including where it currently stands, where it is going, where it seeks to go, and what it’s striving to achieve. Additionally, the strategic plan must include all the actions required to accomplish its goals based on this evaluation.

The strategic planning process also includes measuring the effect of its activities and whether your business has achieved the kind of results it sought., It is therefore an exhaustive process that involves strategy, exchanging ideas, testing and implementation.

Essentially, the strategic planning process centers on a catalog of steps that managers must follow to form and implement a strategy within a company. This process aligns the entire company around its main goals and how to execute them. As such, it is also meant to create transparency, so that no employees are left wondering about the objectives of a company and how to incorporate them into their daily work. 

The Importance of a Well-Executed Strategic Planning Process

It is critical to establish a solid strategic planning process for a number of reasons. Without clearly established goals and plans, your business would be navigating in the completely uncharted and unaided territory

As for the process itself, your business must understand the steps it will need to take to tackle its goals, especially since many of them are mid-to-long-term goals. The following lists the various benefits of a well-executed strategic planning process:

  1. It sets a clear set of goals and an honest assessment of an organization’s strengths and weaknesses.
  2. It reveals what is most important, relevant, and actionable in business, removing the guesswork.
  3. It offers plans on how to achieve its goals, with different ideas that businesses can smartly put to the test. 
  4. It helps companies understand how they can improve their performance
  5. It shows businesses where their biggest challenges lie, whether it is in your business itself or external factors (laws, changing trends, customer behaviors, etc).
  6. It prevents businesses from performing tasks that will yield little to no growth or benefits.
  7. It enables businesses to respond to a change or an issue with preparation, lowering stress and the difficulty of handling the unknown.
  8. It fosters and upgrades the technical abilities of your workforce or product.
  9. It aligns employees and shareholders with business objectives and visions.
  10. It determines KPIs so that businesses can track progress based on data

When to Use the Strategic Planning Process

Strategic planning is an ongoing activity, therefore its process should not be applied just once. Although mainly used by new companies and startups, strategic planning should be involved at various stages, especially those that are bent on making change. 

As for scheduling the process, this will vary based on the needs and experiences of your business and its external settings, such as its niche, target market, or competitors. 

The strategic planning process should be regularly carried out in a business that operates in a frequently changing industry, such as the SaaS industry, for example. In this case, this kind of process should take place 1-2 times a year.

If your business has existed for a long time and is in a slow-moving market, it can carry out a lesser frequency of one strategic planning process a year. This should involve updating in which only certain parts of the process.

Aside from new businesses, all businesses should perform strategic planning when taking on any new venture, whether it is an acquisition, a new department, product, or branding change.

Businesses that are in an unstable or semi-stable marketplace should conduct the strategic planning process at least once a year in preparation for the coming fiscal year. By doing so, they can identify the organizational goals to accomplish in the coming fiscal year, along with finding the resources to obtain the goals. 

In this way, this process is a must for budget planning. However, businesses will not need to complete every step of the process each year, as the full strategic planning process should be conducted at least once every three years. As mentioned previously, it should be conducted every year when businesses or their external environments undergo a massive change. 

Although longtime businesses in stable marketplaces don’t need to conduct this process yearly, they must review it once a year to determine any new action items and to determine whether anything should be removed.

How Market Research Supports the Strategic Planning Process

Market research is invaluable to the strategic planning process, as it provides a stable foundation for virtually every step of the process. 

This form of research provides insights on your business’s target market and industry at large, the kind of crucial data that supports a vast array of decision-making. 

That is because creating objectives and planning activities around them based on intuition is dangerous and costly. Unfortunately, many businesses do not pay enough attention to their market research data, or any sort of data, as over half of the data businesses obtain goes unused.

This is a major misstep as market research offers relevant information on the heart of your business: its consumer base. A strong market research tool can help your business reap the most updated data on its target market, along with specific market segments

In this way, using a primary source of research is superior to conducting secondary research alone, as secondary research may not be fully updated, relevant to your business’s specific needs, or involve using questions that a particular business needs to address.

Market research provides the key insights that a strategic planning process needs, as it sets concrete objectives and lays out concrete processes, all of which require time and resources. By gathering and analyzing market research, your business can gain a competitive advantage, one that yields 10 percent in sales growth and higher margins.

A market research survey in particular is a potent way of extracting the kinds of insights that set a strategic planning process in motion. Surveys are versatile and can take various forms, from customer satisfaction surveys like the NPS to employee feedback surveys, to B2B surveys, and many more.

They are devised to help your business understand a number of issues, such as product satisfaction, product needs, opinions, aversions, user experience, and much more. You can create them with any sort of questions, depending on the market research platform they use. 

In order to create a strong strategic planning process, businesses should turn to a market research tool that offers relentless quality. 

How a Platform Offering Relentless Quality Perfects the Strategic Planning Process

Obtaining a market research platform that is built on relentless quality is difficult to come by. While this may be a tall order, given that there are so many tools marketed in this way(but not verbatim), only a few deliver on this promise.

The Pollfish market research tool, on the other hand, delivers relentless quality, the kind designed to provide a 360-degree assessment of all the factors involved in a strategic planning process. 

Whether your business needs to determine its specific market segments through market segmentation or weed out survey fraud and faulty responses with artificial intelligence, Pollfish offers both and much more

It also uses a viable sampling method to gain timely responses in a randomized way to limit survey bias. This method is known as random device engagement (RDE) and it is extremely effective at gaining responses from a target market the natural way, by deploying surveys across a vast network of digital properties that users visit voluntarily, meaning that they are not forced to take a survey or are pre-recruited. 

It helps your business gain intelligence at virtually every aspect of the business relating to its customers and employees, which helps hammer out reasonable objectives and a market research budget for a strategic planning process. 

Additionally, businesses can use the Pollfish platform for the following aspects of their strategic planning process:

  1. Finding funding priorities
  2. Gauging customer-service satisfaction
  3. Discovering new customer needs that can help set off new product launches
  4. Identifying the backbone of strategic goals
  5. Discovering whether a business needs to change its branding direction

The Pollfish platform allows businesses to gain access to all of these factors and more in a friction-free way, as the platform is user-friendly; there are only three main steps to make your own survey.

The platform uses quality checks to remove any below-par data, such as repetitive answers (flatlining), gibberish answers, VPN use, and more. It does so through a machine learning system that cancels out the need for manual quality checks.

It also offers 24-hour support from a dedicated team of market researcher experts. As such it is possible to perfect a strategic planning process, as long as it is done with the proper market research tool. Because the Pollfish online survey platform offers proven relentless quality, your business should look no further and use Pollfish for all their strategic planning needs.