I have seen this hundreds of times.
Tech marketers rushing to get their marketing programs out the door, developing programs because they need to present them to a board or senior management meeting. All focused on the creative, execution or tactical elements of a marketing program, perhaps, with a touch of strategy. Listen up tech marketers, unless you understand your tech buying customers, you risk painful marketing missteps. Slow down and do it right.
Because we know that effective marketing depends on a thorough understanding of your tech buying customers, regular research should be a core component of marketing strategy development.
In many organizations, research can be a very scary word drumming up thoughts of large budgets, elongated time lines and a contradiction to the “gut feel”. Of course, it’s possible to do way too much research. That’s when you wind up with the paralysis by analysis situation. But, many companies suffer from too little research and too much gut feel. That’s when some very bad decisions get made.
The good news is that high quality research that would have been affordable only for multimillion dollar enterprises just five or 10 years ago is accessible today.
Although it is possible to spend vast amounts of money on research conducted by high profile research organizations, it is much easier than you might think to conduct valuable research on your own. Many tech marketers in both large and small organization can use these research gathering tactics to base a new effort on or just tap into the customer base and double check your thinking. There are numerous online tools to create and deploy research studies.
Basics For Gathering Quick Customer Research
- Inexpensive e-mail- Most research has moved away from snail mail or even faxed questionnaires. Each of these alternatives was relatively time-consuming; a mailed out study could easily take four to six weeks before results could be compiled. You can have great results in just a few days.
- If you need to make a decision in a hurry and are worried that research will take much too long, not to worry. Within a week or less you can create a questionnaire, deploy the survey, and analyze the results.
- Early online research tools were very difficult to use. You now have several inexpensive and easy to use online tools with surprisingly rich functionality. You can now do a filter or a cross tab in a few seconds that would have been agonizing five to 10 years ago.
- It may help if you or someone in your organization has research training. However, online tools such as Zoomerang, Constant Contact or Survey Monkey make it easy to devise a reliable questionnaire. In addition, they provide tutorials which teach research best practices.
- Even if your universe of potential customers is huge–say several million–you do not need a huge sample of respondents. Three to four hundred respondents will provide reliable and projectable data. This is why Nielsen can project television viewership for such a small sample.
- You probably have a sizable database of e-mail names that can be used for your research studies. Even if you don’t, companies like Zoomerang will give you access to a huge databases with highly detailed demographic data. Moreover, Zoomerang will actually guarantee the number of responses that you want.
Is the time, effort, and expense worth it? Absolutely!
Whether you are starting a business, launching a product, or creating a content marketing strategy, you must understand who your best customers are and what is most important to them. Otherwise you’re flying blind.
Conducting reliable research is almost painless. On the other hand, failing to conduct that research may be one of the most costly business mistakes you will make.
