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HOW TO DEVELOP AN EFFECTIVE MARKETING STRATEGY BY UNDERSTANDING MARKETING RESEARCH FUNDAMENTALS
| Guest post by: Francis Kamau |
Article Overview: A marketing strategy is a long term plan of set policies and guidelines to enable your online business achieve its marketing objectives. It revolves around effective ways of executing the marketing mix. Marketing strategy ensures that the customer's needs are met and satisfied and the business makes profit. The key question is how do you develop a marketing strategy? First you need to understand the market; this can be done by marketing research. To introduce marketing research I would like to make you understand three main methodologies applied in the marketing research process. These three methods are desk research, qualitative research and quantitative research.
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HOW TO DEVELOP AN EFFECTIVE MARKETING STRATEGY BY UNDERSTANDING MARKETING RESEARCH FUNDAMENTALS
A marketing strategy is a long term plan of set policies and guidelines to enable your online business achieve its marketing objectives. It revolves around effective ways of executing the marketing mix. Marketing strategy ensures that the customer's needs are met and satisfied and the business makes profit. The key question is how do you develop a marketing strategy?
First you need to understand the market; this can be done by marketing research. To introduce marketing research I would like to make you understand three main methodologies applied in the marketing research process. These three methods are desk research, qualitative research and quantitative research.
Desk research is popularly known as secondary research and involves going through historical documents and data, other research findings as well as industrial documents and information from the search engines. I will not more of desk research now but I will talk about the other tow methods commonly referred as primary research.
Qualitative Research Definition: Qualitative research is the type of research that aims to explore whys and motivational issues, as opposed to how many, the numbers. It a field of research that borrows a lot from social sciences and quantitative research borrows a lot from applied mathematics.
Qualitative research is critical in situations where there lacks basic information or situations where one has quantitative data but cannot derive the motivational factors leading to the numbers. Thus qualitative research is used for hypothesis generation; while quantitative seek to measure and test hypothesis.
Unlike quantitative research, qualitative research do not require representative sample but uses purposive sample, this means the sample for qualitative is not a representation of the population. Whereas quantitative research uses a structured questionnaire, qualitative research do not use questionnaire but a discussion guide. A discussion guide is a data collecting tool that is changed on the course of the process adding and removing questions.
Data collection in qualitative research: The following are method used by researchers to gather qualitative research data: Focus groups discussions: This is whereby a group of people are invited to a place to discuss about their attitude or usage of a product or service. Focus groups are also used in concept testing and idea generations. Other notable areas where focus groups are used are in advertisement and packaging improvement.
The focus groups are moderated by a qualified moderator, who asks questions in an interactive manner using the group dynamics to get the relevant feedback. In a group setting, the group is made to feel free and there are no wrong or right answers from any of the participant. Most of the time the group is either taped by audio or video recorders and these are transcribed and used in report writing.
In-depth interviews: This is a type of interviewing which differ with quantitative research interviewing because of the nature of data collection tool. While quantitative uses structured questionnaire, in-depth interviews uses an unstructured questionnaire known as discussion guide, similar to the one used in focus groups discussions. The sample for depth interviews is not representative of the population and is significantly smaller compared to quantitative sample.
Ethnographies: This type of field data collection method, where a researcher becomes a member of the target group and becomes part of their routine. This helps in understanding the target group through observation and participation. This could be a researcher going to live with a family to understand the way they cook, wash their clothes, what brands they use etc. It is a holistic approach and provides insights based on participant observations as opposed to asking questions. It calls for active involvement with the target group.
Observations: Observations and ethnography differs only in time involvement, while ethnography requires staying with target group for a longer period, observation takes a shorter time. Both observation and ethnography are very ideal in understanding group subculture.
Sampling: Qualitative research sample are far much smaller that quantitative research because as I mentioned earlier they do seek to represent the population.
Uses of qualitative research: The uses of qualitative research include concept testing in a marketing research, branding and usage and attitude research. In other areas qualitative research is used policy and evaluation research. It is also used to back up figures from quantitative research i.e. assuming the results of a quantitative research shows that 30% of men like to have a beer on their way home every Friday after work. Qualitative research would seek to understand why they do that and what else they would do if they did not drink on their way home of Fridays.
A social researcher would also do qualitative research among the spouses of the men and ask if that strains their marital relationship. Qualitative research is also used by advertisers to test upcoming and creative ideas before they embark on a finished advertisement. Here the creative ideas are made either by mood boards, story boards or semi finished adverts and they are used as stimulus materials in advert target focus groups. This way qualitative is used to improve the creative idea making it more consumer and brand oriented.
Outputs of qualitative research are in words as opposed to outputs of a quantitative research which are mostly in figures.
Quantitative Research This is a research techniques that gathers data quantitatively thus deriving numerical data as ways of measuring phenomenon, attributes, relationship and other information that are measurable. Quantitative research is more systematic than qualitative research.
It seeks to quantify and measure relationship of various attributes. Unlike qualitative research quantitative research sampling is far much larger as well as representative of the target population. It is based and borrows a lot from applied mathematics and is used for hypothetical and other mathematical testing. The key data collection tool for quantitative research is the structured questionnaire and this could be administered face to face, through the phone or online.
The process of designing a quantitative research approach is as follows: First the objectives are converted to information areas. These information areas are turned into structured questions that are measurable i.e. use of scales, see this typical structured question: in a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is the least important and 5 is the most important, what would say is driving you to take brand A. In a qualitative method the question could have been asked this way, why do you take brand A, then the researcher will probe whatever comes up to more information.
The questionnaire design is an art by itself, whereby when the researcher is making the questionnaire they have to make sure that whatever the answer they get it will be measurable.
Quantitative research is generally used to model, test hypothesis, track performance, measure satisfaction in customer of staff surveys as well as experimental control. It is the most ideal method of research in market sizing as well as measuring the attractiveness of a market segment when developing a new product.
Statistic plays a big role in quantitative research as most of the outputs are in figures. The data processing of a qualitative research requires software as well as basic training in data process software like SPSS, Quantum among others.
The results are usually in-terms of means, percentage, ratios etc or mathematical models explaining relationships. The participants popularly known as respondents are asked structured questions which are then tabulated to give numerical outputs. We see the use of quantitative research in opinion polls especially during the campaigns of presidential elections to forecast who will win the elections. Quantitative research was widely used during Obama and Macain Campaign and the popularity of both men pitting both men against each other.
In marketing research quantitative research is used to measure the market size, thus leading to strategic decisions based on sound figures. It put figures to your data and helps in measuring the market size for financial and other projections. When both methods are used effectively they produce good results and if applied in your marketing strategy, they give a monitoring tool. I hope now you know that research is not all that difficult.
With those tips on marketing research I hope that you will be able to know what the best marketing research methodology for your objectives is.
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About the Author: Francis Kamau RSS for Francis's articles - Visit Francis's website Click here to visit Francis's website   HOW TO CREATE ADVERTS THAT WILL DRIVES TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG MARKETING YESTERDAY TODAY AND TOMORROW FOR BUSINESSES DEVELOPMENT WHY KENNY ROGERS GAMBLER SONG MAKE A LOT OF BUSINESS SENSE THE CONFESSION OF A FAILED BLOGGER TIPS OF WRITING EFFECTIVE MISSION STATEMENT THAT FITS WITH YOUR ENTIRE MARKETING STRATEGY |
Related Forum Posts
Re: Traffic! How do you get it?
- I agree, [i:1z2pskgt]"The solution before getting traffic, is RESEARCH"[/i:1z2pskgt]. "Keywords" are the source of traffic and its completely true that we should do a bit of research before crafting an article.
Now a days, i see like its quite easy to rank well for long tail keywords esp. on Google because of the "freshness" in serp. The newly indexed articles are placed above the older articles to show fresh content to the user. Its advantage too but the question is, how long you stay in top position ?
Re: Traffic! How do you get it?
- [quote="MrVen":nd7xmoiu]I agree, [i:nd7xmoiu]"The solution before getting traffic, is RESEARCH"[/i:nd7xmoiu]. "Keywords" are the source of traffic and its completely true that we should do a bit of research before crafting an article.
Now a days, i see like its quite easy to rank well for long tail keywords esp. on Google because of the "freshness" in serp. The newly indexed articles are placed above the older articles to show fresh content to the user. Its advantage too but the question is, how long you stay in top position ?[/quote:nd7xmoiu]
It depends on your competition, but to ensure you stay there, simply build backlinks to your site, post, etc. This can be done through article marketing (including web 2.0 sites) as David suggested, blog commenting, forum posting and social bookmarking.
Re: Traffic! How do you get it?
- [quote="Alan Mater":20du3h6t][quote="MrVen":20du3h6t]I agree, [i:20du3h6t]"The solution before getting traffic, is RESEARCH"[/i:20du3h6t]. "Keywords" are the source of traffic and its completely true that we should do a bit of research before crafting an article.
Now a days, i see like its quite easy to rank well for long tail keywords esp. on Google because of the "freshness" in serp. The newly indexed articles are placed above the older articles to show fresh content to the user. Its advantage too but the question is, how long you stay in top position ?[/quote:20du3h6t]
It depends on your competition, but to ensure you stay there, simply build backlinks to your site, post, etc. This can be done through article marketing (including web 2.0 sites) as David suggested, blog commenting, forum posting and social bookmarking.[/quote:20du3h6t]
I'm really bad at just sitting down to write without doing keyword research! Thanks all for the reminder of how important it is to do. I'll work on making it part of my article-writing routine!
Re: Traffic! How do you get it?
- [quote="terriz":1neald8i][quote="Alan Mater":1neald8i][quote="MrVen":1neald8i]I agree, [i:1neald8i]"The solution before getting traffic, is RESEARCH"[/i:1neald8i]. "Keywords" are the source of traffic and its completely true that we should do a bit of research before crafting an article.
Now a days, i see like its quite easy to rank well for long tail keywords esp. on Google because of the "freshness" in serp. The newly indexed articles are placed above the older articles to show fresh content to the user. Its advantage too but the question is, how long you stay in top position ?[/quote:1neald8i]
It depends on your competition, but to ensure you stay there, simply build backlinks to your site, post, etc. This can be done through article marketing (including web 2.0 sites) as David suggested, blog commenting, forum posting and social bookmarking.[/quote:1neald8i]
I'm really bad at just sitting down to write without doing keyword research! Thanks all for the reminder of how important it is to do. I'll work on making it part of my article-writing routine![/quote:1neald8i]
Keyword research is a very good habit to get into. It's so easy not to and to just start writing, but it really only takes an extra five to ten minutes to find a keyword or two relevant to your article.
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