feature article

What Do You Think?
By Kelly Amenson, Project Manager

With the beginning of a new year, many organizations may be looking into kicking off a marketing campaign in the near future. This can be a fun and exciting time, but can also bring anxiety to those involved in the budgeting process.

If done correctly, your campaign can be a huge success. If you haven’t taken the time to do your research, it can be a flop. To make sure yours isn’t the latter, take the time to determine if research is necessary, as well as what kind and how much.

Research is the foundation of all sound strategic marketing decisions. It eliminates guess work by helping marketers sketch the broad strokes of a strategic idea and then fill in some of the nitty gritty details as well.

As you probably know, there are two main types of research: Quantitative and qualitative. Qualitative research involves gathering in-depth information. It can involve one-on-one or one-on-two interviews, or focus groups.

Interviews can take a lot of time but are especially useful if you want to get the opinions of those who fit your ideal target audience. That narrows down your audience so that you can spend the time with those individuals.

Focus groups allow for a little more room to include additional people in the discussion. A typical focus group includes about 10 participants and a moderator. Participants often feed off of one another once the conversation gets going and you will often see different points of views come together.

Qualitative research is especially valuable in building messaging strategies and guiding creative decisions. You’ll often hear a customer utter some brilliant little nugget that a copywriter will craft into a catchy headline or jingle.

If what you’re searching for is in-depth and well-balanced information, qualitative research may be the way to go. However, if you’re looking for quick information on the opinions of many people, quantitative research may be your best option.

Quantitative research, as you might assume, is all about counting. Counting responses to survey questions, foot traffic through a store, expert rankings and any number of other things.

Surveys done by phone, online, mail, or on-site are examples of quantitative research. Many organizations will use quantitative research to determine the public’s perception of them. In order to ensure a better response rate, an incentive is often offered. Since quantitative research typically includes 100 or more people, it is too expensive to offer everyone an incentive. A better idea is to hold a random drawing from the people who responded.

After the research is done and tallied, quantitative researchers use sophisticated statistics like margin of error and confidence level to determine how accurately their research projects to the population as a whole.

Trilix Marketing Group has used research in many campaign launches and has seen tremendous success. It gives you a direction to start from and many great ideas are developed from research. Taking the time to do research for your campaign will cost you up front, but may end up saving you more in the long run.

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