How Social Media gives important for Brand Marketing

Social media plays an important role in how consumers discover, research, and share information about brands and products. In fact 60% of consumers researching products through multiple online sources learned about a specific brand or retailer through social networking sites. Active social media users are more likely to read product reviews online, and 3 out of 5 create their own reviews of products and services. Women are more likely than men to tell others about products that they like (81% of females vs. 72% of males). Overall consumer-generated reviews and product ratings are the most preferred sources of product information among social media users.

Data mining: the marketing research of the future

Shawn Hessinger shares results of a recent study by Cambiar Partners, a market research consulting firm, which suggests data mining will rule market research in the future, and Web-based data companies like Google and Facebook could be the top marketing research firms.

For the study, Cambiar asked 274 corporate researchers and research senior executives to project out to 2020 about the changes they see coming for the field of marketing research. It compiled results in its Future of Research Report, released late last year.

Hessinger shares the most significant findings, including:

•           Three out of four researchers believe “mining of existing knowledge” will be the main kind of market research conducted in the future as opposed to new research projects. A majority also believe “emotion measurement” will be significant, though exactly what form this measurement might take remains vague. “The jury is still out” on whether techniques like neuroscience and biometrics are viable options, Cambiar noted in the report.

•           One quarter of corporate researchers surveyed think the leading research company of 2020 doesn’t exist today, and another one-fifth expect that leading company to be either Google or Facebook. In a world in which “mining of existing knowledge” becomes the main kind of market research, it makes sense that a search tool or social platform already managing almost limitless data would lead the pack.

The findings may suggest a major role for text analytics and sentiment analysis in the future of marketing research. Market researchers would use text analytics to identify brand mentions in social media and other customer-generated data, and sentiment analysis to measure the general attitude toward those brands.

For more details, see the full blog post on allanalytics.com. For more on harnessing data for marketing effectiveness, check out this white paper.

What do you think? Will collecting and mining existing customer data take the place of new market research projects? Leave your comments below.

Monitor on-line conversations

We live in the era of big data. Those companies have a competitive advantage that collect the most data about their prospects and customers and transform it into useful information. Predicting what a customer wants to buy and when he is willing to purchase is in the crystal ball in which every company wants to look in. This knowledge enables them to address their customers with relevant offers specifically tailored at their needs. Therefore the aim of a company in our days should be to possess as many personal and behavioral data of their customers as possible.

But how do you get to know your customers? Market research and customer satisfaction analyses are established ways that are applied by most companies. A large amount of interactional data and social insights about customers and customer behavior are generated by transactions, e.g. in web statistics or customer communications., Message boards, blogs Also geo-based data are important sources of information that are used for analytics. Tracking those data and using the retrieved knowledge can create further business opportunities.

Nonetheless, it is not enough to only invest in business analytics. What a company needs is an overall data strategy across departments to generate the necessary customer insights. This data strategy is closely linked to a customer-centric strategy: If customer experience stands in the center of a company’s business activities, the only logical consequence is to know as much as possible about each single customer. Since with whom do you have the best relationships? Right: the persons you know best.

To enable a successful implementation, however, it is necessary to break through the current silo-structure in a company (marketing, sales, service, …). There has to be an organization-wide approach instead of a department (silo) approach. This means not only to integrate touch points across channels but to ensure that all business activities are truly customer-centric and data-driven. Every department has to have one integrated aim: retrieve as many data as possible and communicate these insights into the company. 

Without the support of integrated business processes and IT systems it is impossible to pursue a company-wide data strategy. But it is also essential to change into a data-driven culture. Only if every employee in a company has incorporated the necessary mindset and works in an environment that emphasizes quality data generation, the transformation can be successful.

When your company is now starting the journey to become a data-driven organization, some simple guidelines can support you:

• Deliver value to customers to make them voluntarily provide data
• Engage your customers in a personal way to encourage involvement
• Support multichannel customer interactions
• Analyze online conversations about your products and services
• Track customer behavior (online and offline)