When you are conducting tracking studies as part of your business marketing research, it is important in this digital age to stay focused on the role of data. Digital marketing allows brands to grow at exponential rates, if they use the right strategy. But how do you discern what the right initiatives are for your business? And how do you tracking studies for marketing research ensure a consistent level of brand awareness and customer satisfaction as your business keeps growing?
The secret, quite simply, is in the numbers.
The data collected by digital marketing efforts can be your biggest asset. Whether you are thinking about product development or brainstorming new customer initiatives, let your marketing data be your guide. It gives you the tools you need to think about improving brand awareness, ensuring customer satisfaction, and understand consumer sentiment as a whole. Here is what you need to know about tracking studies for marketing:
Start with a benchmark
Benchmarking is absolutely vital when it comes to tracking data. If you don’t know where you are, how can you know when you’ve improved? So the first step is to go through your marketing initiatives and understand what the baseline is that you are operating from. Your goals and key performance indicators stem from here, so it is important to be realistic and thoughtful in how you decide to go forward.
Think about what it is you want to improve first. Is it brand awareness? Or is it improving customer satisfaction and retention? Are you launching a new marketing campaign? Maybe a mixture of these? Some questions to consider include:
- When it comes to brand awareness, where you at now? What do you want to see in 6 months, 1 year, or even 2-3 years down the line?
- What is the current rate of customer satisfaction? What are their top 3 concerns and top 3 points of satisfaction?
- In past marketing campaigns, what channels have done the best and the worst? What kind up of uplift would you like to see? Do you want more followers on certain platforms or more engagement such as likes and comments? What is the current status quo on your social media platforms?
Develop a strategy
Using the answers to these questions, start to build a map of what the current situation is across your different platforms and what you are using to capture this data. Based on these different elements, what metrics have you identified as the most important? Use these as the foundation for your data strategy. Identify key objectives you want to accomplish and try to delve into specificities. For example, it could be:
- Increase followers on X platform before launching a new product
- Improve customer satisfaction by communicating about changes related to the top 3 customer concerns that you have identified
- Improve clickthrough and conversion rates on marketing campaigns by Y%
Segment progress
Once you have objectives in place, it is time to think about timelines. This allows you to segment progress and track it more effectively to understand your data on a macro and micro level. Having a blanket timeline (i.e., “we want to improve everything now!”) is tempting, but will not help you measure success.
Instead, think about timelines in your business. Having KPI measurements in place for three months, six months, and a year, for example, can help you understand whether your measures are successful. Measuring in intervals will also give you leeway to tweak and improve strategy as you go along, rather than pushing out data tracking and measuring overall success.
Ultimately, keeping track of your data is a central part of digital marketing today and can help you leverage your existing campaigns to ensure you are getting the maximum return. If you have doubts about how you capture this kind of information, or how to use it effectively to create killer marketing strategies, contact New Perspectives today to learn more. Our experience in market research and consumer insights enables us to help you create and implement a strong data strategy that drives success for your brand.
