High-Tech Research on a Low-Tech Budget
7/30/2009
By Micky Long
Arketi Group
When you give advice to management on positioning, public relations campaigns and marketing programs, what type of feedback do you receive? Do people ask you to back-up your claims with real-world examples? But when you recommend that research be conducted to validate your assumptions, are you told, “We don’t have enough money for that”?
Many times, we marketers want to test our beliefs in the market, but know we have tight budgets. However, even with a limited budget, there are a few research options available that can help you back up your claims.
Research by any other name
PR professionals and marketers schooled in statistically valid research understand how it works: identify a significant sample of people who match your target market, create and field a thorough survey, apply complex analytic techniques such as discrete choice, have your resident statistician (or outsourced market research firm) run elaborate algorithms to identify statistically relevant trends. You end up with a really good answer on which to make a multi-million-dollar decision.
But how many multi-million-dollar decisions do you really have? And who among us has hundreds of thousands of dollars to run these types of studies? Thankfully, there are two different approaches: anecdotal and directional research.
Anecdotal research
The research purist may cringe at the thought of this being called “research”, but whatever happened to getting on the phone with a few customers and asking them some simple open-ended questions about your business, pricing, message, or whatever? Or doing the same with prospects or even lost deals?
Consider how well this technique works for your sales organization – isn’t it the case that sales teams often win arguments because they have real customer anecdotes to support their proposition? Well you too can talk to customers to back-up your recommendations.
Here is a real-world example from a software company: the company’s executive team could not come to an agreement on what the win-loss reports meant, and specifically, whether pricing was the issue. To uncover the truth, the VP of marketing picked up the phone, called eight lost or stalled deals and asked them what kept them from buying. Sure enough, seven of them said “price.”
In the next meeting, he presented these conversations. He had the data. He ran the meeting. His recommendations were taken. He carried the day. Now, this may not win a Nobel Prize for research, but it clearly enabled the VP to speak from real market feedback.
Directional research
Directional research is more formalized than anecdotal research. It takes a formal research premise and builds a more complete survey using simple choice and open-ended questions.
Rather than reaching out to only a handful of people, as in anecdotal research, directional research takes a sample of 30 or 40 people in personal interviews, or as many as 60 to 100 if the survey is executed online. While this is still not full-blown “market research,” the results are more statistically valid, which will help you feel more comfortable discussing the results as directionally sound for your business.
Where do I go from here?
If you are PR or marketing executive, start putting anecdotal research into practice. In fact, we would argue that if you are not actively talking to your market to test your assumptions today, you are not doing marketing. Pick up the phone and talk to customers, prospects, and lost deals on a regular basis. Ask them about your sales team, your messaging, your product, your pricing and more.
For more detailed or complex questions, try some small focus groups, personal interviews and online surveys to test your company’s proposition and differentiators. One highly effective way to do this is in an annual survey.
This kind of research helps the PR and marketing organization become a source for actively sharing data from the market. Work with your sales team to get their market feedback and document it, too. Because when you speak with data from the market, you speak with power.
Micky Long is vice president of Arketi Group (www.arketi.com), a high-tech business-to-business PR and marketing firm. He is a former Aberdeen Group analyst, serves on the board of the Technology Association of Georgia Marketing Society and on the board of advisors for Sales and Marketing Executives International’s (SMEI) Atlanta chapter. He can be reached at 404-929-0091 ext. 214 or mlong@arketi.com