Market Research Guide for Advertising

Market Research Guide for Advertising

Although a major subsector of marketing, advertising is often treated as a secondary task, one with a scarce backup of data to deliver outstanding ad campaign results. To add insult to injury, a sweeping 76% of marketers in 2020 did not rely on behavioral data for ad targeting.

This is dismal news, given the fact that despite being barraged with 1,700 ads per month, users only view half of them. It occurs in the face of a costly worldwide ad expenditure, which is forecasted to reach $375 billion by 2021.

Market research is therefore undoubtedly necessary. A wide-spanning umbrella term, it refers to collecting and analyzing data about your target market and your competitors, along with the traits, trends and changes in the overall market you serve.

Consequently, it is evident that advertising requires its own market research. This guide will teach you how to carry out market research for advertising.

Advertising Market Research at a Glance

Advertising market research is a form of research concentrated on advertising campaigns. As such, its ultimate aim is to identify the most effective ads within a company’s target market.

The process of market research for advertising includes pre-campaign efforts as well as post-campaign scrutiny. This includes setting up advertising campaigns, narrowing in on your target market, deducing which ads are best and measuring the success of your ad campaigns.

You’ll find that market research plays a critical role in each stage of this advertising development process. Let’s get a more thorough rundown to learn how to set up an effective advertising campaign through market research tailored specifically towards it.

Pre-Campaign Market Research: Setting Up Your Ad Campaign

We caution you to never jump headfirst into an advertising campaign. Before running a campaign, you must set it up through planning. Pre-campaign efforts include three stages, all of which are fueled by market research.

Here are the first three stages:

Stage 1: Acquire a deep understanding of your target market.

You cannot lay the groundwork for an ad campaign before you understand who your target market is, along with the different segments it encompasses. By understanding these groups, you’ll be able to create general ads that target the entirety of your target audience, along with ads tailored more towards the different segments within your target market. Here is what you will need to nail down both of these groups:

  1. Set up a survey that covers a wide net of demographics. Ask questions to gauge which demographics show the most interest in your brand.

  2. Determine which demographics show the most favorability towards your brand, offering or messaging. This is your target market.

  3. Arrange psychographic surveys across the demographics most conducive to buying from you. This will give you direct insight into the psyche into specific demographics, revealing the different segments within your target market.

Stage 2: Set Up Micro and Macro Advertising Campaign Objectives

Now that you’ve nailed down your target market and have zeroed in on the different segments within it, you can begin planning your advertising campaign. Each campaign, sub-campaign and ad itself will require an objective.

Otherwise, you won’t know how to measure the performance and success of each component of your campaign(s). Here are the objectives to focus on and how to do so:

  1. Pin down the purpose of a new campaign. Or do so with a number of campaigns. Typically, an advertising campaign seeks to:

    1. to inform your target market about a new offering.

    2. to persuade consumers to convert (either by buying, subscribing, signing up for the new or existing offering).

    3. to remind your target market where and how to access the offering.

  2. Find the proper media channels to deliver your advertisements. Think about the purpose of your campaign; can a particular channel deliver it best, or perhaps, can it do so partially?

  3. Collect secondary research on your target market. This will help you discover which advertising channels work well across general target markets.

  4. Collect primary research by creating surveys that unveil the messaging preferences of each segment of your target market.

  5. Narrow down the advertising channels for your campaign. These include:

    1. Display ads (landing pages, pop-ups, banners)

    2. Social media ads

    3. PLA ads (via Google Adwords or Criteo)

    4. Native Ads

    5. PPC

Stage 3: Set Up a Budget for Your Advertising Campaign

The shortest stage within the advertising research and development process — although not trivial in the slightest — setting up a budget is necessary before you do any conceptualizing.

Market Research During the Campaign

Following the first three pre-campaign, pre-planning stages, we move along to the campaign itself. Now that you’ve done the market research on your target audience, set campaign and sub-campaign objectives and set a budget, you can start conceptualizing the operation itself.

Here is how to proceed:

Stage 4: Create the Central Messaging Behind Your Campaign

  1. Decide on a concept; it can be a theme or a central narrative to all your ads.

  2. Make sure your idea is precisely targeted to your target market, along with the segments of your target market.

  3. Next, create the ads themselves. An ad should possess the following qualities:

    1. Relevance to the target audience

    2. Value in purchasing and using

    3. Uniqueness to set yourself apart from competitors

    4. Credibility — your customers should believe your ad, don’t make it seem too good to be true.

  4. Get into the nitty grid of your sub-campaigns and ads themselves

    1. Decide which channels you chose previously work best for which ad type

    2. Decide what to incorporate into each medium (ex: do you need a video in each medium or only copy, etc.)

    3. Based on the surveys you’ve run, decide which ads to expose to particular segments of your target market. You can add more surveys for research purposes.

    4. Set a frequency, ie, how many times your audience will receive your ads

  5. Launch your advertising campaign

Post-Campaign Efforts

Market research doesn’t end after you launch your advertising campaign. Its performance gives you another great opportunity to study your target market, along with your ensuing marketing efforts.

It will also inform your new campaigns and new ads as part of your current, ongoing one. This brings us to the final stage.

Stage 5: Keep Track of Your Advertising Performance

Tracking the effectiveness of an advertising campaign will differ based on the KPIs you set. These will depend largely on the medium you use to distribute your ads.

  1. Attribute several KPIs to monitor during your campaign. Here are some to consider:

    1. Conversions

    2. Return on Ad Spent (ROAS)

    3. Cost Per 1,000 Impressions

    4. Impressions

    5. Cost per click (CPC)

    6. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

    7. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

  2. Observe these KPIs daily on a web analytics platform like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. Or, set up your campaign and track it on a specialized platform like Adroll.

  3. Create surveys that target the same segments from your campaign. These can help you see how your customer base reacts to them.

    1. Test them on images (preferences on 1 over the other).

    2. Ask them questions to expand and refine the current campaign.

    3. Come up with questions for new campaign ideation.

Closing off on Market Research for Ads

After Stage 5, you should have established a familiarity with your target market and your industry — at least to some extent. With all this data in tow, you can go about new ad campaigns armed with this new customer knowledge. More importantly, the market research you’ve picked up during this process will help inform all of your marketing efforts.

After all, the purpose of this research is to equip your brand with a deep understanding of your customers to make smarter business decisions. After gathering enough market research, you may try going bold in your next advertising venture.

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by Pollfish Marketing Team

Americans Divided Over a Coronavirus Vaccine: Over 50% of Survey Respondents Say Employees Shouldn’t Get Vaccinated

Americans Divided Over a Coronavirus Vaccine: Over 50% of Survey Respondents Say Employees Shouldn’t Get Vaccinated

Developments on a vaccine for the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) have been in the works worldwide, even before the current pandemic had first hit China this January. In the US, vaccine testing has been making the rounds for months, as a fourth large-scale vaccine trial has recently entered phase 3.

With all the developments surrounding a Covid-19 vaccine, Americans have been on the edge about its implications. These include its legality, efficacy and effect on many aspects of daily life. Consequently, we at Pollfish conducted a survey on the coronavirus vaccine in an effort to unearth how Americans truly feel about it, chiefly in regards to its probable mandate by the US government.

As such, the survey delves into the various issues the vaccine can present, and our findings represent the thoughts of Americans of various age groups, education levels, employment types and other demographic categories. You can access the full survey here. Let’s dive in.

Scarce Confidence in a Vaccine to Soon be FDA-Approved

First things first. We wanted to discover if Americans believed a Covid-19 vaccine would soon come to fruition — legally and with FDA approval.

23.82% of respondents were unconfident that an FDA-approved vaccine would arrive in the coming months, which span the remainder of 2020.

With almost a quarter of Americans skeptical of a coronavirus vaccine to be approved in the first place, it is objective to conclude that Americans believe that the current pandemic state will carry on in some part for the rest of the year. This means lockdowns, partial lockdowns and oscillation of new cases.

This statistic also points to a lack of confidence in a new vaccine. This is rather unsurprising, given that past vaccines for the coronavirus have failed phase 3.

Over 50% of Respondents say that employers should not require their employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19.

Specifically, 50.05% of our respondents were against an employee mandate to get inoculated with the vaccine. This amount represents the largest percentage out of all the other questions, meaning this notion has the greatest support. The slightly past half agreement on the issue (which is considerate) comes into opposition with another study run by Glassdoor.

The Glassdoor study found that almost 75% of remote workers want to return to their office or physical place of work. It is not surprising that the majority of respondents sought to end homebound work, as the pandemic has caused what is known as stir-craziness in the US.

However, this sentiment clearly has not changed the rather negative attitude towards mandatory vaccines. It largely points to the fact that employees don’t want to feel as though they're under the heel of their employers, at least not to the extent of their medical involvements.

Despite the unwillingness to get vaccinated under an employer mandate, roughly half of the responders were in favor of one. For instance, the 7.01% that responded with “other” elaborated that it all depends on a number of factors, such as the nature and field of work, whether the employees have underlying issues and other considerations. These respondents, along with the 42.94% that agreed with the employer-required vaccine, show that a large chunk of the population still supports employee vaccination, even if it comes with a mandate.

Almost a quarter of respondents feel extremely uncomfortable about getting a government-mandated vaccination

Following the uneasiness of an employer-mandated vaccination, a hefty 24.92% of respondents reported feeling extremely uncomfortable with a government-mandated vaccine. This kind of attitude is much in line with the growing mistrust of vaccines in the US. This particular statistic shows that having the government decree the vaccination of its citizens only exacerbates this mistrust.

Alternatively, when you consider all the answers on the comfortable side against all of those on the uncomfortable side, a different narrative arises. That is because the sum of all the comfortable answers is 46.43%, while all the uncomfortable answers add up to 45.64%. This elucidates that although the respondents are largely divided on this issue, roughly more than half still feel some relative ease towards getting a vaccine demanded by the government.

Can the Coronavirus Vaccine Fix the US Economy?

There are two ways we approached this topic. First, we asked respondents whether a Covid-19 vaccine would empower them to make more purchases. A significant 36.6% of responders said a vaccine won’t change their purchasing habits. However, retailers can rejoice in that 16.2% answered with “absolutely,” signaling a promising bump to the economy.

 

Next, we asked responders a more encompassing question about the economy — whether a coronavirus vaccine will repair it. The responses to this prompt were much more positive, with almost 22% reporting “moderately likely” and almost 18% answering with “extremely likely.” The sum of all the likely votes is at a whopping 59.5%, whereas those of all the unlikely votes is 22.5%.

Clearly, Americans are hopeful in the state of the economy when a successful vaccine comes along. Some have even openly expressed that they will buy more because of it. These are the markers of the more positive associations of a coronavirus vaccine.

Life Won’t Go Back to Normality… at Least Not Fully

The final question we posed to our respondents was one of a general outlook of the future, that is, if life will resume its normality after a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available. Over a quarter (25.5%) of responders believe that while life will begin returning to a kind of “normal”, certain things have been changed forever.

There is some truth to this already in existence. Working from home has been the dominant work model for non-essential workers, especially those of the white-collar kind. Given its pervasiveness for some six months, several large companies have already aired their plans to allow employees to work from home even after the pandemic ends, i.e. permanently. For example, these include brands such as Facebook, Twitter, Shopify and Slack.

Additionally, e-commerce has consistently been on the rise. Because of Covid-19, the shift towards e-commerce has been accelerated by 5 years. That is going to take time to undo, if it will be undone at all, with many consumers spending a great deal of time online. What is certain, is that the world has abruptly changed and will continue to in many respects, even as life “returns to normal.” Brands and researchers alike should thus stay in the know of how their target market is thinking. Carrying out surveys will help you do just that.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

The Most Insightful Market Research Questions You Can Ask

The Most Insightful Market Research Questions You Can Ask

With great customer expectations in today’s ever-growing digital world, market research has become exceedingly important. It should be at the forefront of every business’s strategy. Even if you feel as though you’ve nailed your target market down to a tee, there will always remain work to be done on the market research front.

That’s because market trends sway, as do the opinions and desires of your customer base. That means when you least expect it, even your most loyal customers will turn to your competitors, sometimes for good. But you can still stay in the know about what your customers want and think by running a sturdy market research plan.

As part of any solid market research endeavor, you’ll need an apt set of questions to help answer the most pressing needs and opinions of your customers. You’ll also need sets of questions that pertain to your needs as well; this is especially crucial to understanding your customers’ minds about your product or service.

Let’s explore four sets of insightful market research questions.

Questions Based on Pain Points

These questions are thematically based on the difficulties customers may have undergone, are currently experiencing, or may run into in the future. In regards to the latter, these types of questions are great in that they are wired to prevent the pain points from occurring in the first place.

Here are some examples of market research questions on customer experience (CX) and customer journey points of friction.

  1. What is the most difficult aspect of [action related to your product]?

    a. For example, if you supply sneakers, the action can be a certain physical activity people perform in sneakers. If you sell software, it can be in regards to an issue your software helps address.

  2. What bothers you the most about [product, service, or aspect related to either of the two]?

  3. What issues do you typically run into on our website?

  4. How can we better support your needs when shopping for…?

  5. What frustrates you the most about [product, service, or action related to either one]?

Questions Based on Goals

Goals-based questions help answer what your customers want, in that they inquire specifically about what it is customers are looking for and what they hope to gain from a product or service. These questions do not necessarily have to zero in a particular product/service — although some of them should. Rather, they can focus on improving specific tasks/actions related to your field. This will not only help you understand how your customers feel about your market but will allow you to innovate more and faster.

Here you’ll find some examples of market research questions on customer goals.

  1. What do you look for in a [product, service, or action related to the particular market]?

  2. What do you think [product, service, action related to either one] can do to improve its usefulness?

  3. What can [product, service, action related to either one] do to help improve your overall user experience?

  4. What aspects would you like to see in new [products or services]?

  5. What do you hope to gain when taking on [problem or goal within a market]?

Questions Based on Pricing

Pricing has always been (and will remain to be) a major part of the buying equation. Even customers in the luxury sector care about prices to some extent. No one wants to be ripped off; even businesses aim to save money. For example, in 2020, 69% of companies are expected to decrease ad spending.

Thus, it is ideal to have reasonably priced goods or services. But you won’t know what is considered a reasonable price until you conduct a questionnaire on your target market. Referring to general internet research alone will not suffice for this.

Here are a few examples of market research questions to ask about pricing.

  1. What is a reasonable price range for [product or service]?

  2. Are there any conditions in which you’d be willing to buy [product or service] at a higher range?

  3. What do you think is the ideal price for [product or service]?

  4. How would you rate the prices within [industry, niche, or specific market]?

    a. These can be answered within a gradient of too high/too low answers

  5. Is [price point] too high, low, or a fair ask for [product, service, or completion of an action]?

Questions Based On Psychographic Traits

Psychographic questions help reveal the psychological characteristics within your target market, or your entire pool of respondents. This type of approach to market research questions involves the feelings, interests, and attitudes your customer base holds.

It allows brands to understand their customers at a more intimate level, specifically, their views on any topic. You can tailor these to focus on your product/service or the desired act of making purchases.

Here are a few examples of questions based on psychographic traits.

  1. Which of the following is most important to you?

  2. How do you like to spend your free time?

  3. If you had more time, which of the following would you do?

  4. If you had more time, what would you spend more money on?

  5. How do you favor making purchases?

  6. What interests you?

  7. What draws you to one brand over another in the [niche, industry, space, etc.]?

A Reminder on Market Research Questions

All four of the question types covered in this article are critical to tap into the brains of your current and potential customers. What’s more empowering about these kinds of questions is that they can help you expand your target market and appeal to a much wider audience. They can inform both your marketing strategies, your content, and the innovation of your product/service itself.

But you must remember, these in-depth questions do NOT cover demographics. Instead, these questions are for those who already passed the screening question portion of the survey.

Screening questions, which determine the eligibility of a respondent to partake in a survey, answer demographic questions about the responders. While they are incredibly necessary to understand who your respondents are, they do not necessarily allow you to conclude your customers’ behaviors, needs, and attitudes (although a few of them might).

A strong survey should combine both sets of questions for a comprehensive market research assemblage.

If you’re looking for more great resources on using surveys to meet your business and marketing goals, check out the Pollfish Resource Center, or reach out to our 24/7 customer experience team for guidance and support.

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by Pollfish Marketing Team