2016 Tech That Will Make You A Market Research Blade Runner

In a fast-moving online culture, it seems like we’re always catching up to the next tech advance…or at least waiting eagerly for the next smartphone upgrade. In reality, though, technological innovations are a logical and natural continuum—sometimes long in the making and slow in the perfecting.

This progress could be the case for market research in 2016. Several technologies might finally bear fruit, though, instead of remaining as forbidden fruit no one can touch.

The issue is whether researchers notice instead of lingering in the already-halcyon days of phone polls and paper surveys.

Nobody knows that answer except 2017. In the meantime, here are some of the technologies that could potentially influence market researchers in 2016.

Eye-tracking technology: It’s doubtful this will make you a Blade Runner running around with the Voight-Kampff test, gleefully exposing Replicants trying to migrate to Earth. Yet this technology will get you much closer to deciphering participants’ intimate motivations in qualitative projects.

Eye-tracking technology is not only becoming accurate but also cost-effective, not something only the Tyrell Corporation can afford. As we reported:

The idea of eye-tracking technology on smartphone screens and other mobile technology was once deemed too pricey. This is no longer the case, with companies already offering eye-tracking technology for home devices at under $100. Samsung, as an example in the marketplace, has incorporated eye-tracking technology for a variety of its mobile products.

Automation: The word “automation” probably unnerves many researchers. It does evoke a notion of losing control, and that traditionally translates into wayward data. Yet companies with automating capabilities in their survey software—such as our sister company QuestionPro—can assist gaining insightful snapshots of consumers, as well as quick and often real-time feedback from respondents.

By no means does automation replace a robust research project or nurtured sample. Nevertheless, automation is beneficial for companies seeking “to find efficiencies similar to those enjoyed by media planners and campaign analysts.”

Quick, economical and easy when you need it…

Mobile: At qSample, it seems we’ve been beating this dead horse all 2015. It’s just too important of a stallion to ignore. Some have predicted online surveys completed from mobile devices to approach 50% in 2016.

Don’t get left behind like the career of Nicholas Cage after he did Left Behind.

Big Data: Sorry, but nothing to here see here, kids. Wait until 2017. Please let me repeat the quote from our executive that exemplifies what Big Data truly is:

It’s like teen sex. Everyone talks about it, everyone wants to do it, everyone thinks they know it, but no one is doing it.

If that’s not enough, here is telling research from Adobe explaining that “companies that embrace creative marketing are 3.5 times more likely to see their annual sales revenue grow by 10 percent or more compared with companies that exclusively rely on big data.”

Stay human, my friend.

Social Media Research: Social Media has been around almost as long as Big Data, but at least the former may potentially be harnessed in 2016 by market research. Sure, the age of organic social media is gone; yet that just means that companies like Facebook can corral their demographics in far more tidy ways. It’s a matter of market research listening better and leveraging automation in the right way for real-time data mining (and again, not replacing traditional research projects but complementing them).

As Fernando Anzures, Liquid Thinking Group CEO, recently said:

From Fan Pages to Brand Communities, it’s time for brands to go further and use social influence to create real conversations between brands and ambassadors. Co-creation at the center of social interaction. Social Media at the center of market research. Moving from ethnography to netnography, every aspect of a brand will be observed and determined by monitoring human behavior on social media.

Honorable mentions: Virtual Reality, wearables, and the Internet of Things. These three technologies will likely boom in the next year and beyond—or at the very least blossom—and already they have become vehicles for a sensible amount of market research.

In the meantime, don’t pass up the mentioned technologies in 2016. If not, even the Tyrell Corporation will not be able to save your data slipping away like a Replicant after a badly-conducted Voight-Kampff test.

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How Do People Use Twitter? [Infographic]

With over 270 million active global users, Twitter is a great platform for businesses to communicate with their current audience, gain new prospects, and drive traffic to their websites.

But just because lots of people are on Twitter doesn't mean they all use it the same way. For marketers looking to drive traffic, subscribers, leads, and customers to their websites, knowing more about who uses the platform and how they use it is essential.

To help you get a quick overview of who is on Twitter and how they tend to act, we put together the infographic below. If you want a deeper dive into Twitter best practices, sign up for our #TweetSmarter webinar on June 24th at 1 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m. PDT.

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How To Do Social Media Market Research

In the early days of digital marketing, brands and businesses could get away with a lot of shady tactics: overwhelming email spam, sketchy banners and over-the-top, aggressive marketing messages. Flash forward to today, consumers are wiser and they have an arsenal of anti-spam and ad blocker tools that promote consumer empowerment and help them keep the BS nonsense to a minimum.

For businesses, this shift in web consumerism means that your customers' behavior has changed and so have their expectations from you. At the same time, over the last 10 years or so, the web has seen a surge in both the number and popularity of social media sites. Putting two and two together, by now we all know how valuable, or even essential, social media can be, bringing businesses the opportunity to grow lasting relationships with their customer base. It's a great place for people to communicate and interact online.

So everyone knows that social media is an important tool in business but gazing across the overcrowded spaces of social media, as a business owner or marketer, how do you know where on earth their target market is? After all, the number of people using, for example, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr is so colossal that to take into account the typical demographic of these social networking services is practically meaningless. Sure it helps to know that Pinterest is skewed towards women and Tumblr towards youth and that there are more women on Facebook than men while the reverse is true for Twitter but most of the platforms are so huge in terms of the number of users that you can find representatives of your target audience on any of them.

Therefore the key to a social presence with a far-reaching impact for your business is social media market research to carefully look for your audience rather than broadcasting your messages aimlessly and to whoever is willing to listen. After all, the greatest value of social media marketing is your ability to foster and engage with a community of other people and there are so many tools to help you do that.

Social Media Marketing Driven By Research

Here is the deal: Consumers today have a wealth of resources available literally at their fingertips including customer reviews, blog posts and competitor websites among other things. So when Dell's executive director of global marketing, Rishi Dave, says today's consumers are almost through their buying journeys by the time they reach out to your sales reps, he is onto something. So you might as well fully support this shift in consumer behavior instead of fighting it. By making your content available precisely when your prospects have questions, you can answer the 3 important questions that today's consumers ask:

1. What's in it for me?

2. How will I benefit from using your product?

3. Will your product give me the most bangs for my bucks?

But for that to happen, businesses need to create and distribute the right information tailoring what they create to the specific needs of their audience. Otherwise, because consumers are constantly bombarded with aggressive marketing messages and hard sell tactics, they've become natural skeptics and they'll filter you right out if your content does not appeal to their rational or emotional brains. Ideally you want to target both mindsets by focusing on, ultimately what people care about most, personal gain with a clear and compelling benefit.

The Value Of Personalization

So far we've established that the days of broad-casted marketing messages are gone. If you want to foster engagement as a brand and build a reputation around familiarity, trust and like-ability, you need to be able to reach your target audience. To do this, you need to:

1. Create Buyer Personas

In contrast to typical market research that focuses on traditional marketing demographics, creating buyer personas means taking your buyers one segment at a time and answering questions about them. As you build the profile of your target audience, you find out about their motivations. Subsequently, when you craft your marketing messages, you can talk to these people directly and appeal to them using all the right triggers. This will help you humanize your content marketing and copywriting.

2. Know What Their Problem Is

If you want to create and publish marketing messages that resonate with your audience, you need to focus on establishing a crystal-clear empathy with them. One of the best ways to do this in social media is monitoring discussions and distilling meaningful bits from the massive flow of information that takes place on the social networks. It's also a vital first step to improve any return on your investment.

3. Target Some Influencers

By definition, influencers are people that hold other people's attention in some way. In social media, if you want to extend the reach of your content and increase the impact of your business, these people have the power to influence the decisions of your number one target audience. If you identify the influencers in your industry, you can start building important relationships with them and earn their trust so that, in time, they positively influence your target market and tilt the scales in your favor.

Perhaps one of the biggest marketing mistakes that businesses make is trying to appeal to everyone. In truth, no matter what you sell or how big or, conversely, small your business is, defining a target audience is a business best practice.

Recommended Tools You Can Use To Identify Who And Where Your Target Audience Is

In this era of social media, having a social media marketing strategy goes beyond having a Facebook page or Twitter feed. The approach to correctly executed social media marketing is as follows:

1. You need to identify the social networks where your target audience is active.

2. You need to craft your marketing messages so they resonate with your target audience.

3. You need to create a steady stream of buyers to complement your website's conversion process.

And measurement is key to the process. If you don't measure what you do, there is no proof that it worked. Social media analysis and market research has 3 general components to it.

1. Measurement

Encompassing things like analysis of account growth and competitive progress, measurement is important to collect quantitative social media data. Combined, metrics like growth in followers and likes, reach and CTR can give you a pretty good idea of how well your audience is responding to your content so you can do more of what they like and less of what is not resonating with them. Recommended tools for measurement include:

- Crowdbooster

Get the help you need to measure and optimize your social media marketing.

- Social Crawlytics

The tool you need to identify influencers and your competitors' most shared content.

- Moz Analytics

Research tools you can use to find out the best ways to engage your audience.

2. Listening And Insights

Part of the beauty of social media is unprecedented access to conversations. Therefore, when it comes to social media market research to optimize your marketing efforts and ultimately improve your ROI, listening tools can go a long way in informing you of important customer pain points, lucrative competitive opportunities and other useful insights. Recommended tools for listening include:

- Topsy

Search and analyze the web for the latest topics related to your industry and for mentions of your brand, products and/or competitors.

- Social Studio by Salesforce

Build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media and analyzing conversations from across the globe.

- Mondovo

An all-in-one platform to research, track and manage your Facebook and Twitter marketing activities including competitive analysis.

3. Monitoring And Response

And finally, on a more tactical front, marketers need to monitor all of the above social conversations in order to derive actionable takeaways. Monitoring and response tools are also often effective for use as a primary content distribution platform. Recommended tools for social media monitoring include:

- Meshfire

A social media management platform powered by artificial intelligence.

- HootSuite

A one-stop shop to manage social networks and give you an in-depth view of how well your social media efforts are paying off.

- Sprout Social

Find opportunities to engage and analyze all your social efforts to create exceptional experiences for your audience across the different social networks.

Of course some of the above tools can serve more than one need.

- Google Analytics

A great tool for capturing the value of social media and measuring the social media and business metrics you care about.

Social Reports within Google Analytics can help you with, predominantly, 3 things:

1. Identifying the quantitative and qualitative value of traffic coming from the different social channels.

2. Understanding social activities taking place both on and off your website.

3. Inform data-driven decisions to increase the return on your investment.

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