MARKETING LIKE A SPY AGENT

How to Research For A Successful Marketing Campaign

Did you know that when Dove launched its new #SpeakBeautiful campaign it used social media market research to guide its strategy? As part of The Dove Global Beauty and Confidence Report, Dove analyzed over 5 million social media mentions on Twitter. They found that approximately 80% of female users had experienced negative body-shaming comments. What they used this information for is to create the most effective online marketing campaigns of the 21st century!

Wondering how they did it?

They approached market research like an anthropologist and aced their marketing campaign!

I know...sounds strange. But, you know how a spy always has some nerdy professor helping them with their mission in movies? Well...that’s the kind of anthropologist we’re talking about!

Anthropologists study culture and society. They uncover the meaning behind our thinking, rituals, attitudes. They are able to do this because of the special research methods they use. And isn’t this precisely what marketers and copywriters should do?

“Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.” - David Ogilvy

Below are the research steps that will allow your marketing campaign to become the next success story.

What’s Your Secret Mission?

Dove was so successful because they knew exactly whom they wanted to “spy” on. What exactly do you want to know about your audience? Let that question guide you when collecting social media data. Setting your research question and goals should be your priority.

Let’s say you published an e-book that sells well but you want to know more about your market. If you know more about your customers, you can leverage social media to sell more of your other products. In this case, you would like to know more about your target market. Your research question can be: Who buys my e-book and why do they find it useful?

When you know what your question is - you can pick the right tool and platform for data collection as well.

Who Holds The Clue You Need?

Now you are clear on what you want to know. You also have a concrete idea of the audience you want to understand better.

Moving forward with our earlier example of trying to understand your e-book customers - perhaps the best way to collect data would be collecting customer reviews and conducting direct interviews. This way you will gain a deeper understanding of their thinking and motivations.

But before you move to that - you can gather basic demographic data (gender, age, income, family…) about your audience. This will allow you to also build a precise avatar of your ideal follower and client. Using tools such as Quantcast.com or Google Ad Planner allows you to find out who follows any websites of your choosing. This is where the spy work happens!

How To Gather Key Intelligence

Being clear on your questions and who hast the answers is crucial.

When you have that set up - decide how you can go about collecting the information you need. Here are the three most popular “spy” methods to collect data on social media:

Content analysis - likes/comments/shares. Identifying the content and products that your audience prefers is the key! Looking at the engagement levels for different content will allow you to figure out what you do well.

Social listening. Gather feedback from your customers or monitor opinions about your brand or competitors. You can do this by going over reviews or following discussions on facebook and other social media.

Polls/questions/interviews/calls to action. Ask questions directly in social media feeds, or encourage users to share feedback with a sweet call to action.

Whatever method you choose, make sure to “clean your data.” Go through all the information and make sure that it’s relevant to you and your business. For example, if your brand name is a commonly used word - you might have caught information that is not relevant to you at all.

Imagine how much of that information would Target gather if they searched social media platforms by their name as a keyword? Their name is both the brand name and a commonly used noun and verb.

Now, Can You Connect The Dots?

Now that you collected information from consumer conversations about your product, you can identify main ideas, feelings, or anything you find interesting that relates to your main research question.

As you move on, you will cluster these basic initial ideas and feelings into larger topics they relate to. For example - “happy with the product” becomes a theme under which you include all ideas, feelings, sentiments, related to this topic.

Then you can categorize these topics into larger themes. In this case, your two topics such as “happy with the product” and “will recommend to a friend” become a larger theme of “returning customers who act as brand ambassadors.”

As you continue to develop the information you receive, you may be able to establish a connection between some of the data. Maybe you discover that people are unhappy about one part of your offer which inspires you to introduce a new product.

"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." - Bill Gates

What To Do With What You Know?

The social media data is so much more powerful than you can imagine - only if you use it well. Peter Drucker said: "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product or service sells itself."

Understanding consumer behavior allows you to stay resilient and be more flexible to changes as you can understand and predict them better!

In order to do this well - you must develop a deep understanding of your audience. Use this understanding to create high converting marketing campaign. If you conduct your market research well, social media data will offer you so much material that your copy will write itself.

If you want to learn more about how to hire a trained copywriter who can help you understand your audience and create a success story marketing campaign, contact us today.

Summary

Doing your research well is the first and most important step to a high converting marketing campaign. Social media platforms are full of valuable information. If you use social media research methods to build your marketing campaign, yours could be the next big marketing success story.