Developing Marketing Objectives and Digital Research
A) Developing Marketing Objective
One of the most important factors to consider when developing your digital marketing plan is your objectives. The SMART model is a well-known standard for putting down efficient objectives that would satisfy business and marketing stakeholders. The following characteristics should be present in your objectives when they are defined. SMART stands for
1) Specific
2) Measurable
3) Achievable
4) Relevant
5) Time-bound
1) Specific Objective
Having a particular goal implies having a well-defined and clear goal that states precisely what you want to achieve. The goal should be self-evident, and anyone who reads it, even if they are not in the marketing department, should understand what it is attempting to do.
Here are some tips to make your objectives specific:
• Think simple, sensible, and significant.
Consider the following questions while creating your goals:
• What am I hoping to accomplish?
• Why is it important?
• Who is involved?
• Where is it?
• What resources or constraints are involved?
Make a summary of your aim and modify it to be as explicit and clear as possible. The aim should explain an activity that includes the client. Having a singular goal is sometimes clearer and more feasible than having too many, which dilutes your effect and concentration.
2) Measurable Objective
After you have determined the goal’s objective, the next step is to make it measurable. This implies you must set an attainable target that can be tracked statistically, such as increasing website visitors by 10% by June..
You may confirm this component of your goal by asking the following questions:
• What are the company’s current key performance indicators (KPIs)?
• What digital data can you use? This comprises, among other things, traffic, cost per click (CPC), lead generation, and social media monitoring.
• What is the present situation, and what changes do you anticipate?
• How much money?
• How many?
• How will you know when the target has been met?
At the end of the campaign, you should be able to clearly measure your impact and transform the numbers into a business goal.
3) Achievable objective
Now you need to think about the execution of this objective. Is it achievable? Is it too ambitious? Do you have the resources necessary to achieve this goal? It’s the reality check. Crafting an achievable objective means that it is reachable within the currently available skills, budget, and time, and it takes into account the potential constraints or limits that exist.
Consider the following considerations when determining the reach of your
objective:
• How are you going to attain this objective?
• Is the aim achievable in light of other restrictions, such as financial limits?
• What is your existing budget allocation for this?
• How many hours per week can the team devote to this project? Who will be the point of contact for the purpose of accomplishing the objective?
• What factors might jeopardize the team’s ability to accomplish its objectives?
4) Relevant Objective
At this point, you should consider if this goal is important in the grand scheme of things. Remembering what we discussed at the start of this section, the marketing objectives should complement the business objectives perfectly. Even though you began by researching the business objective in order to build the marketing objective, after the marketing objective has been developed, take a step back and ensure that it is still relevant. Several things to consider when comparing your aim to the organization’s general objectives and business priorities include the following :
• Does this seem to be worthwhile?
• Is this the right moment?
• Is this consistent with our other activities or requirements?
• Is this the correct team? Are you the best person to do this task?
• Is it relevant in today’s socio-economic environment?
5) Time-Bound Objective
Finally, your goal must be time-bound in order to limit the amount of time spent on it and to fit the company timetable in terms of aim, product development, and other significant time-bound events. An objective must be completed within a specific time range. This aids in maintaining attention and meeting deadlines and goals. Answering the following questions may assist you in selecting a time-bound objective:
• When?
• What can I do today?
• What can I do in six weeks?
• What can I do in six months’ period?
• Based on your study, what is the optimal timeline for achieving this goal?
Choosing the amount of time you believe it will take to attain your objective can help you choose how active you should be with your marketing efforts.
B) Digital Research
Audience Research
The main research that all marketers use before even thinking about the campaign is audience research. Audience research is designed to establish the size, composition, and characteristics of a group of individuals who are, or could be, potential customers. It’s important to note that this research is about the people and individuals who make up your target audience.
1) Goal
All audience research aims to find consumer insights that can help you deliver on your campaign or business objectives. Because a digital marketing strategy aims to influence the buyer’s journey, marketers need to connect with the audience by knowing what they think, how they behave, and how they live their lives. You should know your audience as well as you know your best friend!
2) Benefits
One of the key benefits of conducting audience research is identifying obstacles. For example, are other brands trying to communicate with your audience but not experiencing much success? Why? By being aware of such obstacles, you can then develop appropriate, personalized content that is more relevant to your audience. Moreover, you want to find ways to stay ahead of your customers and discover solutions that anticipate future needs they may have. Audience research allows you to understand your customers and ultimately makes you more effective in delivering your digital marketing strategy by catering to their needs. To focus efforts, it is common practice to create a buyer persona. This is a description of your ideal customer in terms of motivations, demographics, and channels used to access the internet. Buyer personas help digital marketers choose the channels and messaging that will resonate with their ideal customer and efficiently deliver on objectives.
3) Data Types
Before we examine the various tools available to us, let’s look at the data you’ll want to gather when conducting audience research.
We have three types of data:
• Demographic
• Psychographics
• Behavioral
You want to have a good understanding of the three of these because each of them will give you different insights into your audience.
A) Demographic
Demographics are the hard facts about your audience. Some examples of facts would be:
• Are they male or female?
• What is their age?
• What is their occupation?
• Are they married?
• Where do they reside?
• Will they attend college?
This information is about their social aspect and relative place within their society. It’s not very personal, but it helps you peel back the first layer of understanding your audience; it gives you an initial glance at their make-up. The socio-economic data in demographics include: gender, age, income level, occupation, marital status, location, number of children, education, religion, family size, ethnicity, nationality, social class, industry, number of computers, and generation.
B) Psychographics
Psychographics are much more detailed and complex. They can uncover anything that your audience might be interested in: their beliefs, life goals, or opinions. It’s about gaining a deep understanding of your audience’s aspirations so that, when you talk to them, you are speaking a language that resonates with what they really want. Psychographics can include: activities, interests, opinions, attitudes, values, lifestyle, and loyalty. It’s about their lifestyle, their personality. For instance, maybe you want to reach someone that’s 21 years old and works as an accountant, but also loves basketball. As there can be many different people types in your audience, you need to conduct demographic and psychographic research so that you really know who they are and avoid making any assumptions. This will help you navigate away from potential pitfalls or running campaigns that target the wrong audience.
C) Behavioral Data
This is about how people use your product, or even how they navigate on your website, and how they use the different media that you want to use as your marketing channels. What do they do on Facebook? How long do they stay? Why do they click? Where do they click? All of this is very important because it will allow you to transform the journey of your audience on your website and social media and know exactly where you need to target your effort. This data can tell you a lot about your customer. For example, when are they on your website? What time are they on Facebook? Maybe it’s in the morning, maybe it’s at night, and you don’t want to miss those opportunities to engage with your customer. By observing what people do and how they behave online, using your product or using your competition’s products, you can understand the limitations of the user experience and perception to improve your message and overcome obstacles.
Behavioral data may comprise the following:
• Online behaviors such as social media use
• Website visits
• Product and content consumption
• Where they click
• The typical customer route on your site
So audience research is really about giving you all the context and information you need. It is central to any digital marketing strategy because if you don’t have this data, how do you know where and how you are going to communicate?
TOOLS FOR AUDIENCE LISTENING
What is the audience listening?
By definition, audience listening is the act of monitoring what people are saying about your brand, your goods, and rivals on digital media platforms. This information may assist you in developing a plan that can impress customers based on what you’ve “heard” from them.
Platforms for audience research
The primary sorts of platforms that marketers will utilize to perform audience research in the digital world are:
• Social media
• Marketing research firms
• Survey providers
• Behaviour analytics platforms.
By using these tools, marketers may narrow their emphasis on the sort of content and message that they need to generate to engage their target audience. You must determine which media outlets are the most effective for reaching out to your target, raising awareness, and comprehending the words and pictures that will pique their interest. All of these platforms provide direct customer insights through tweets, comments, and interactions, as well as third-party data analysis.
1) Social media
You may evaluate existing data about your community of followers, as well as their likes and friends, by using your social media analytics and platforms. Begin by forming an image of your present consumers. Additionally, you may do social media research to ascertain the audiences who follow rivals and have a better understanding of their profile. This is true for all social media networks with robust analytics capabilities, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Social media platforms compile information or insights gleaned through social media data analysis. These are advantageous for eliminating manual labour by simply accessing gathered and evaluated data. Hootsuite, HubSpot, Social Intel, Nuvi, and Affinio are all examples of social intelligence platforms. The majority of them are premium services that provide additional data display and analysis capabilities. They do, however, allow you to collect data from many social media networks in one location and to monitor discussions.
2) Marketing Research
Marketers may benefit from secondary research conducted by third-party research firms like as Claritas’ PRIZM, eMarketer, Euromonitor, Nielsen, and Spark. These may be provided as free reports or may need a commercial membership to the research platform that provides the data. Additionally, you may hire market research tailored to your firm, but keep in mind that this can be time consuming and costly.
Typically, marketers will leverage digital insights as a low-cost method of obtaining high-quality data. Bear in mind that, as a public and shared resource, data is unlikely to provide novel insights or conclusions. A rival who has access to the same data as you may have already chosen the path you are contemplating. The more precise the study, the better, since this will enable you to communicate effectively with your audience. Bear this in mind while using secondary data, since a mixture is always preferable.
3) Surveys
Assume you wish to gather specialized data about your product or a certain trend. Conducting primary audience research among your present audience using online survey platforms is a cost-effective and easy method of conducting primary audience research.
Primary data may be obtained using platforms such as SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Zoomerang, or AYTM surveys. They have the potential to be very effective if they are well-designed and ask the proper questions.
4) Analytics of human behavior
Behavioral analytics is concerned with delivering insight into your audience’s and consumers’ behavior. Behavioral analytics is utilized in a variety of circumstances to find chances for optimization that will result in the achievement of certain business objectives. Because you can see what consumers are searching for on Google Search Data, you may get valuable information into their behavior. You may then monitor their activity on your website after their search and click on your link. This allows you to see the whole trip and have a better understanding of what piqued their attention. Additionally, you may use heatmaps to determine where your website’s traffic and clicks are focused. This entails employing color-coding tools to see the activities that users do on the website, such as where they move their mouse and where they click. Understanding how users engage with your website is critical for digital marketers.
Cultural Research
Cultural analysis is aimed with the features of a concept, namely culture, which is always being rewritten as a result of ongoing social transformation.
Cultural Research Tools
Marketers in the internet age have access to a plethora of tools for doing cultural research. These technologies are similarly valuable for traditional audience research, but they facilitate the targeting of distinct cultures. The following are some of the most often used instruments for cultural research:
1) Discussions on social media
Keywords, Facebook groups, Twitter communities, hashtags, and influencers all provide valuable insight into how a particular community communicates and interacts, as well as their level of engagement with your business or product.
2) Research Firms
Research Firms doing audience research will conduct their own studies on certain cultural groups and make them accessible to marketers. This may be accomplished via organizations such as eMarketer, Nielsen, and others, but also through specialist firms that will develop dedicated reports and case studies regarding what worked and what didn’t work for brands when working on cross-cultural campaigns. Scholarly research is also a valuable source of knowledge, since it is often more in-depth and specifically focused at certain subcultures.
3) Specialized Platforms
Another technique for doing cultural research using digital media is to track the customer journey via content. By locating and visiting specialized websites, influencers’ accounts, dedicated apps, blogs, and forums, you may get knowledge about all of the previously listed topics and determine the cultural group’s most essential values. This effect may be amplified by consuming other types of media, such as television series or films that connect with the viewer.
Competitive Research
Competitive research has a number of advantages. Competitive research reveals how the competition markets, what their message and positioning are, how well they are accepted, which segment of the market they are targeting, and the level of success they are getting online. When doing competitive research, there are three key insights to look for.
1) Strategy
Understanding your competitors’ media and content strategies may assist decrease friction and avoid overlapping throughout the competitive research process.
2) Market segmentation
Analyzing your competitor’s target audiences in further detail might give insight into your own target audience and how it should vary depending on how your solution addresses their issue. Additionally, based on the resemblance of your target audience, it may assist you in comprehending the difficulty.
3) Message
Understanding the competition’s message enables you to set yourself apart. Brands with similar themes get less credit and exposure, creating uncertainty in the eyes of customers. Your brand need a point of difference that will set it apart at every step of the buyer’s journey. Ideally, your message should be stronger and more resonant with the audience than the competitor’s, allowing it to stand out more than the competition.
Competitive research platforms
With the advent of digital media, businesses are sharing more information with their customers than ever before and are compelled to be more transparent as a result of public pressure. This implies that more information about rivals is now available and readily accessible in one location: the Internet!
Social media platforms
Similar to audience research, social media is a never-ending source of insights, discussions, hashtags, mentions, reviews, and comments. By centralizing your research with specialized monitoring tools, you can keep an eye on what your audience says about your competitors (whether favorable or bad), where they please their consumers, and where they fall short on quality. Additionally, you can observe how customers perceive your company in comparison to others, such as how much more traffic their brand creates in terms of community density. Twitter, Feedly, and Brandwatch are all platforms that may assist you with this, since they are all meant to monitor discussions.
Assets of competitors
As straightforward as it sounds, visiting your competition’s website, downloading their white papers or quarterly reports, listening to their webcasts or podcasts, and participating in their online events is an excellent way to gain a better understanding of their business, their positioning, and their message delivery. By putting yourself in the shoes of the customer, you may have a better understanding of the buyer’s journey and how your competitor converts their audience at each step. For instance, you may learn about their core emphasis and how they portray themselves as market experts via their blog. Additionally, you may analyze the traffic on your competitors’ assets using services such as Alexa to determine where their traffic originates and consequently adjust your media plan.
Search
Search provides a wealth of information on how users discover products and what they are searching for. By studying search results, you can determine the nature of the customer issue and how it is resolved. You may use search engines such as SEMrush or SpyFu to determine your competitors’ keyword rankings. Are they ranking for keywords that you do not use? How are they ranked? What is the benefit of these targeted keywords? Additionally, you may use Google Alerts to monitor fresh material created by your competitors.
Analyses of content
Apart from social media monitoring, you may utilize technologies to keep an eye on other types of material distributed by your competitors. This may aid in your comprehension of their media strategy. You may subscribe to their newsletter using Owletter, or use Kompyte to keep track of changes to their website. Numerous tools are available to help you monitor changes, traffic, bounce rate, click rate, and reviews. This may be used to assist you have a better understanding of your own position and where you need to go, but it can also be used to establish objectives if you are a market challenger.
INDUSTRY TREND ANALYSIS
Industry trend research is keeping an eye on developments and improvements within and around an industry sector in order to remain one step ahead of the competition. Industry trend research helps a business to design a competitive strategy that effectively protects against or affects competitive forces in its favor. Understanding the origins of competitive forces is critical for establishing a competitive strategy. Porter’s Five Forces is an example of a technique for performing industry trend research, which we shall discuss in the next slide.
Porter’s competitive forces
Customers, suppliers, substitutes, potential newcomers, and competitors all play a critical role in analyzing market developments and competitiveness, according to Porter’s Five Forces.
Porter’s Five Forces
Sector rivalry (level of competition among existing firms): Intense competition reduces profit potential for businesses operating in the same industry.
Threat of replacements (products or services): The presence of alternative items restricts your capacity to increase prices.
Purchasers’ bargaining power: Strong buyers have a substantial influence on pricing.
Supplier bargaining power: Strong suppliers might demand premium pricing, so reducing your profit.
Entry barriers (danger of new rivals): These function as a disincentive to new competitors.
The advantages of performing trend research in your sector
The purpose of industry trend research is to comprehend the movement of these forces, to anticipate their direction, and eventually to forecast it in order to develop a plan that will increase the company’s market position.
1) Adapting to the communication style and medium of the audience
This is very advantageous for businesses since it results in behavioral changes across several sectors of the industry. It may notify a business that customers are no longer responding to tweets but are instead interacting with videos, that they are abandoning one platform in favor of another, or that they are exploring alternative methods to solve a similar issue, for example.
2) Recognize market potential
This data on customer and competitor behavior aids in optimizing performance depending on the audience’s communication style and medium, as well as finding market possibilities associated with new consumer requirements or values. They may assist you in developing future marketing plans via predictive research of market trends.
3) Plan your next marketing campaign
By anticipating consumer wants, you may improve customer loyalty by giving a solution to a future problem they may encounter. A business must adapt to the market’s current trends while also seeking for new trends that may provide an opportunity. If a business does not adapt to changing trends, it risks losing its audience and becoming obsolete.
Instruments for tracking industry trends
Numerous technologies are available for tracking industry trends. Here are a few examples.
1) Monitoring of social media
By analyzing the volume of social media discourse, you may uncover patterns and insights about where customers are searching and what they want next. Tools such as TweetDeck, Google Trends, and Twitter trending topics may assist you in identifying internet trends and determining what is currently popular. This is a trustworthy source for real-time trend information. However, this is a reactive technique, since you may discover a trend only after it has already gained widespread attention.
2) Market analysis reports
The majority of industrial trend research is undertaken by research organizations equipped to survey, interview, and analyze trend data before producing actionable findings. Euromonitor, eMarketer, Qualtrics, Nielsen, Crimson Hexagon, and PwC are just a few internet firms that regularly give free industry information. These organizations benefit from the availability and quality of data, since they are often larger in size and statistically more precise. Requesting studies from research organizations tailored to your business might help you identify more particular trends that connect more directly with your target audience. It may, however, be costly and time-consuming.
3) Analytical search
Keywords are excellent indications of trend direction. Similar to the stock market, you may track rising keywords and wager on their progress and the information they might bring. Google Ads and Google Trends are the primary tools for keyword analysis, although additional resources include the Amazon Keyword Trends tool and Wordtracker.
4) Scholarly research
Individuals who observe the market and consider its possible development are excellent sources for trend forecasting. Scholars examine particular behaviors using factual facts, theory, and experimentation, and then create insights into the probable future of a sector. As a result, academics and scholars are excellent sources of predictive analysis and may give valuable insight into creating a digital marketing strategy. You may access research from institutions such as MIT, Harvard, and Oxford and scholar databases such as Google Scholar and Base.