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Statistics in retail marketing show that while advertising spending in North America is increasing — with digital advertising driving much of that trend — the growth in ad spend from year to year is slowing. Why? Because marketing budgets are being squeezed.
At the same time, rising ad spend means more competition for eyeballs. So, marketing teams are under pressure to wring more value out of their ad campaigns while making them more effective. Conducting thorough advertising research is crucial to achieving both goals.
Effective advertising research is crucial for companies to compete effectively in today’s dynamic marketplace. New consumer trends constantly emerge, and customer tastes and behaviors frequently ebb and flow.
While it’s true that advertising research can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, you can expedite and streamline the advertising research process with the right technology. As we explain later in this post, conducting effective advertising and marketing research at scale is well within the grasp of any business today, provided it has the right artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solutions in place.
But first, let’s get a handle on what advertising research is and how it works. We’ll also look at key steps to take to ensure your efforts deliver the results you seek.
Advertising research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information related to advertising and marketing strategies. The primary goal of advertising research is to provide insights that can help businesses make informed decisions about their ad campaigns, understand consumer behavior, and optimize the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
However, they can be complementary. Market research blends insights into consumer behavior, market dynamics, and economic trends using relevant data gathered from various sources (e.g., customer surveys, industry reports, customer reviews, social media listening tools) to provide a reliable method for companies to prove a concept for or improve a product or service.
When used together, advertising and market research can deliver the accurate information needed to make the most of paid advertising campaigns and achieve worthwhile results from marketing efforts. Later in this post, we’ll explain when you may want to bring market research into the mix.
You may come across the term “advertising effectiveness research,” which is a type of advertising research. It is used to analyze the efficacy of ads and ad campaigns with target audiences and is typically conducted and measured before, during, and after a campaign is launched.
Advertising research, meanwhile, is a broader field that encompasses all activities related to advertising planning and execution.
The simplest approach to conducting market research is also usually the most expensive: outsourcing the process to an advertising research firm. The advantages of engaging an outside specialist are independence and objectivity, access to more resources, and unbiased results.
Businesses with limited advertising and marketing research budgets typically conduct research using in-house resources.
There are two main forms of advertising research: pre-testing and post-testing research.
Now, with all that background on advertising research fresh in your mind, let’s look at the seven steps you can take to conduct effective advertising research.
Your research won’t be effective if you don’t know the target market. So, you’ll want to clearly identify your target audience and ideal customers from the outset.
Support your advertising research efforts by building detailed buyer personas, including demographics, interests, behaviors, pain points, and preferences. This will help you tailor your research approach so you can gather relevant insights.
Here is where market research comes into play! Bringing market research insights into your advertising research efforts can help you better understand the broader industry landscape, including your customers and competitors.
Primary market research is formally collected from sources such as surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups, but it can also be gathered economically from sources such as phone conversations.
Secondary market research can be obtained from various third parties, such as market research firms and government departments.
Conversation intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to record, sort, and analyze phone calls at scale, can also provide a rich vein of market research data and insight to enhance advertising research.
In addition to primary and secondary market research, other common types of market research include:
Once you’ve decided on the methods of research you want to use for advertising and marketing research, it’s time to start collecting data.
To obtain meaningful and accurate results, it’s important to scale the research so that it is representative of your target audience. Generally, the larger the sample size, the more accurately the results will match the target market. If the sample size is too small, there is a greater likelihood of aberrations and outliers skewing the research.
You can collect data in the following ways:
You can use structured tools to gather quantitative data from a relatively large sample of respondents. But take care when you develop surveys and questionnaires. Research shows that wording, question order, and even the form of a question (whether it is open-ended or closed-ended) can have an impact on the results.
Focus groups are facilitated discussions designed to provide in-depth qualitative insights directly to researchers. They typically consist of six to 12 participants who are representative of a target audience and willing to share their views. Participants sometimes receive an incentive, such as a gift or meal voucher, to participate.
Interviews are typically one-on-one or small-group interactions for gathering detailed insights directly from participants. Like focus group participants, interviewees for advertising research projects are selected to be representative of a broader target audience.
Competitor analysis, as its name suggests, provides data on your competitors and their marketing and advertising strategies. It can also provide insights into your own business’s strengths and weaknesses. This data is often helpful in assessing how to differentiate your brand and offerings in the marketplace.
A recent Invoca survey, which included respondents across several industries, indicated that a fifth of consumers now prefer to interact with chatbots. That means the vast majority (80%) still want to talk to a human. It also means businesses have a wealth of valuable data locked in phone calls that can help to inform their advertising research (and market research, too).
Conversation intelligence uses AI to monitor, record, and analyze data in phone conversations at scale, unlocking key insights that marketers can use to improve advertising effectiveness.
Collected data becomes valuable intelligence only once it is analyzed. Using statistical tools, qualitative analysis techniques, and data visualization programs, marketers can dig deeper into and interpret their data. The patterns, trends, correlations, and insights they can glean can help inform advertising strategy.
Specialized software that organizes data at scale can make it easier to detect patterns and report on them. Examples of data visualization software programs include Microsoft Excel, Dundas BI, Tableau, Google Charts, Infogram, and Datawrapper.
Qualitative data analysis interprets non-numerical data like text, images, and videos to identify patterns and themes. And quantitative data analysis uses statistical analysis of numerical data to uncover relationships and trends.
There is a wide array of statistical tools that can help advertising and marketing researchers derive meaningful insights from numerical data and assess the significance of their findings. For example, there are over 137,000 Python libraries available today that can use machine learning and data visualization to conduct statistical tests, look for correlations and regressions in data, and other quantitative analyses.
Once you’ve analyzed your data, it’s time to use the insights to refine your advertising strategy. For instance, perhaps the data shows that YouTube ads deliver more conversions through the sales funnel than other ad channels. You’ll want to adjust your paid ad strategy to overweight YouTube.
The data insights you glean from effective market research can also help you tailor ad messaging and visual resources.
Most advertising strategists advise that you begin advertising campaigns small and scale up as results are delivered. Testing elements of an ad or campaign can help you prove that your advertising research has paid off before you start investing significant ad dollars.
Here’s a quick look at four main tests you can use:
A/B testing (also known as split testing) compares two versions of an ad, webpage, or email, to the same audience to determine which version delivers better click-through rates, conversions, or engagement.
Color and visual testing experiments with different color schemes, images, graphics, and overall design aesthetics within an ad to determine how these elements influence user attention, perception, and engagement.
The testing of device-specific features involves optimizing content to enhance the user experience and user engagement on various devices. With mobile device software being updated and new models introduced regularly, you want to ensure your ads are optimized for mobile and work, especially if they have touch or rich content features, like video.
Retargeting and remarketing are key components of any digital ad campaign. It’s easier to sell to someone who already knows your brand than someone who needs to be introduced to it.
Retargeting display ads to users who previously interacted with your brand can lead to higher conversions. You can test different retargeting strategies to determine which approaches lead to higher conversions among these users.
Here’s yet another area where conversation intelligence can assist with your advertising research. Invoca captures and analyzes zero-party data at scale, allowing you to pinpoint intent in phone conversations. You can then retarget callers with ads for the specific products they mentioned during a call, so your advertising is aligned to their specific interests. What’s more, you can save and redeploy valuable ad budget by suppressing ad targeting to leads that phone calls show already converted.
Always monitor and measure the performance of your advertising campaigns. Initiate tracking systems to deliver the following key performance indicators (KPIs):
This metric measures the number of customers who click through to your website or app following their exposure to a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign. Tracking this metric helps you assess if your ad is driving users to act. (Campaign Monitor suggests a good CTR is between 2% and 5%.)
The conversion rate is a critical KPI supporting marketing attribution. It measures the number of visitors to a website who are either converted into leads or customers during a campaign.
Engagement metrics include social media likes, shares, comments, and retweets. These metrics can also measure the time a user spends on a webpage and bounce rates. (A website visitor “bounces” if they land on your webpage and click away without checking out at least one other page.)
ROI expresses net profit and total cost of ad campaigns as a percentage ratio approximating profitability. The higher your ROI, the higher the effectiveness of your campaign. That makes it perhaps the most important KPI to track, as it helps you understand the financial impact of your advertising investments.
Invoca for marketing, is a tool that can help you modernize and elevate your approach to advertising research. Invoca’s AI-driven conversation intelligence solution unlocks zero-party data from phone conversations at scale and analyzes that data in real time, enabling marketing teams to maximize paid media optimization. This allows you to target your audience more effectively and serve them ads that align with their interests and behaviors.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you conduct better advertising research? Check out these resources:
