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Marketing Articles: Market Research

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Potential Customers Are Telling You How to Market to Them!by Arnie Kuenn
The key to achieving high rankings in search and creating buzz in social media is solid content. Fortunately, the Web provides free marketing data that can help you create relevant subject matter and learn about your customers. more
The Market Research Survey Is Dead; Long Live the Market Research Surveyby Lev Mazin
Market research surveys, though expensive and out of reach for many, have been around for ages. But there is now a revolution brewing in MR that makes it something even the smaller players can fully participate in. more
Six Ways Organic Search Can Make You Smarter About Your Businessby Jim Yu
In an Internet business environment that expects immediate results, online marketers have overlooked the power of SEO, or organic search, as a top revenue-generating channel. It can also teach you how to run your business in a smarter way. more
Why Customer Satisfaction Doesn't Mean Customer Retention—and What You Can Do About Itby Sean Geehan
Most organizations try to predict retention rates based on customer-satisfaction scores. The reality is that in B2B, user satisfaction does not equal customer retention. Remember, most customers who leave a company leave satisfied. Here's why... and what you can do about it. more
Four Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting a Businessby Stephen Johnson
Many people are bullish about growth prospects now that the Great Financial Crisis seems largely behind us. But a lack of planning and preparedness will sink many of ambitions to start a business. These four questions can help structure your thinking before you make some important decisions. more
Questionnaire Auditing: The Quality-Control Step You Cannot Afford to Skipby Carey V. Azzara
The value of strong questionnaire design is all too often not fully appreciated in the market research community. But the fact is, you can never fully recover from a poorly written and designed questionnaire--no matter how great you are at data analysis, manipulation, interpretation, and presentation. more
Top 10 Ways to Make Twitter Your Brand's Best Friendby Ryan Holmes
There's more to Twitter than amassing followers and broadcasting your latest news. Properly engaging in the right discussions can earn customer goodwill and brand awareness. The real-time conversations that fill the Twitterverse offer an abundance of market insight. more
Fatal Mistakes in Questionnaire Design: Leading and Misleading Questionsby Carey V. Azzara
Leading and misleading questions always yield questionable data, based on which you are highly likely to report findings that can misguide stakeholders. Moreover, decisions they make based on such data could cause an organization's failure rather than lead to its success. Here's how to diagnose and repair those faulty questions. more
How to Identify and Avoid This Survey-Questionnaire Design Problem: Mixed-Mode Scalesby Carey V. Azzara
Data from mixed-mode questions are hard, if not impossible, to interpret accurately. But such flawed survey questions abound, perhaps because at first blush they seem entirely workable. Here's why they're not--and how to avoid them in your survey instruments. more
How to Demonstrate and Deliver Lead-Nurturing ROIby Jim Lenskold
Lead nurturing has high potential value when your acquisition programs have generated responses from interested prospects, but those prospects are not yet ready to buy. The 2010 Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study found that six in 10 lead generation marketers (58%) agree that nurturing stalled leads is under-funded relative to ... more
Two Survey Questionnaire Flaws to Avoid: Scary Matrix Questions and Unbalanced Scalesby Carey V. Azzara
Poorly designed questions and scaling problems can derail your research efforts faster than you can say "the cat in the hat"! To help you avoid a few of the more common and onerous problems, this article explores two separate but related questionnaire-design issues: matrix questions and unbalanced scales. more
Why You're Always Wrong and Your Customers Are Always Rightby Allen Weiss
If you're like most people, you live in a world where blame often happens in a systematic and predictable way. People simply have a tendency to believe the fault lies with someone else--and that someone else can be you. Of course, the process can work in the opposite direction, too... ... more
Your Launch Strategy and Beyond—at Cyberspeedby Barbara Bix, Olga Taylor
When used systematically, market research is an ongoing two-way communication between your business and its target audience. Treated as such, market research becomes a constant source of information about opportunities for improvement and innovation. And via the Web, you now have a direct round-the-clock link to every potential customer. more
Effective Customer Listening Requires More Than Keywordsby Alex Lustberg
Is it your job to listen to and analyze social-media messages and direct customer feedback about your product, brand, or service? Effective listening and insights analysis allow you to track not just the volume but also the meaning of online conversations across a complex web of consumer-interaction channels. more
Case Study: In a SaaS World, Customer Feedback Drives Competitive Advantageby Barbara Bix
At Kadient--a company that now delivers interactive Sales Playbooks--customer satisfaction is more important than ever. As the company began development of a SaaS product for a new market, here's how the management team readied a formal process for gathering customer feedback. more
Shopper Marketing—So What's Keeping You?by Alison Chaltas
In today's consumer-goods industry, manufacturers and retailers alike are recognizing the value of developing an integrated understanding of the consumer and the shopper. Combining the voice of the shopper into brand and category plans is rapidly becoming a cost of entry for successful trading relationships. more
Tap the Power of Customer Feedbackby Carolyn Hall
In 2010, there is no excuse for keeping your marketing insight languishing in a silo, away from your core business processes. Thanks to today's Web-based technologies, you have an unprecedented number of opportunities to generate real business value from such insight. more
Branding in the Age of Social: Gaining Insight Through Research by Eric Norman
Do you have a clear picture of your organization's strengths and weaknesses, and of the opportunities and threats in the marketplace? Is your position vis-à-vis your competitors clear and compelling? Does anyone else in this vast universe know or care? What brand signals echo back from the noise in the ... more
The Secret to Success in a Down Economy: Market Intelligenceby Barbara Bix
Especially in a down economy, it's important to understand where the opportunities are--and how to capitalize on them. Luckily, today's companies have many avenues for gathering such information. more
Plan B: Seven Back-to-Basics Questions to Ask About Your Buyers to Drive Growthby Kevin Clancy, Peter Krieg
Plan A, which calls for pouring dollars into advertising, rarely increases profitability. Sometimes it doesn't even boost sales, and it certainly doesn't guarantee improvements in marketing effectiveness or ROI. Enter Plan B: taking a closer look at the basic marketing strategy fundamentals that drive tactical decisions. more
Defining Market Opportunity—You Be the Judgeby Kevin Horne
At its core, market opportunity is your sizing forecast for a specific product or service, now and over the next several years. At a minimum, you should know that information in terms of sales dollars. A solid understanding of opportunity will guide you to the best markets and warn you ... more
Planning an Online B2B Communityby Nancy Strauss
B2B communities are often aimed at highly specialized populations and may even be closed to outsiders. However, a growing number of enterprises regard their B2B communities as a secret weapon that gives them a powerful competitive advantage. more
What Every CMO Should Know About Musicby Ruth Simmons
Sir John Hegarty, the man behind the Levi's jeans and Lynx deodorant ads, once claimed, "Music is 50% of an ad's success." Yet even today very few metrics are regularly applied within the planning and creative processes to measure the value of music and sound to a brand's marketing. more
The State of Social Media Marketing, by the Numbers: A Sneak Peekby Tim McAtee
Before writing The State of Social Media Marketing--an in-depth, thorough study of social media use among marketers--we looked around at the existing research to see what other organizations were asking in their surveys. Much of it seemed interesting, but lacking in nuance. Here are a few rich examples of the ... more
Neuromarketing Is the Future, But...by Samuel D. Bradley, PhD
Increasingly, marketers are turning toward brain-imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in the quest for the Holy Grail "buy button." We call it neuromarketing. The brain, however, is reluctant to reveal its code. more