5 Reasons So Many Market Research Pros Suck at Marketing Themselves

December 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

nerds

[Editor's Note: this post originally appeared on my personal blog, DanaStanley.com.]

It’s ironic, isn’t it? We’re advising others on marketing strategy and tactics; our advice is used to formulate email campaigns, website copy, online and offline advertisements and more.  Yet our own marketing is often no better, and in some cases is even worse, than that of many other industries.  I’ve discussed this observation with many others in market research, and I’m far from the only one with this opinion.

As marketing advisors, shouldn’t we be leading most, if not all, other business categories when it comes to marketing our businesses?

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I do have a few thoughts about why many market researchers aren’t particularly good at marketing their businesses.  Here are the top reasons I came up with.  I invite you to comment on these ideas and suggest others as well.

1) We are not comfortable with self-promotion.  

Most of us did not grow up dreaming of being business moguls.  We tended to be good in school and nearly all of us went to college.  We “fell into” the research field because we were good with numbers and interested in social science.  Marketing doesn’t feel comfortable; it feels too close to its dreaded cousin, sales.

2) We don’t practice what we preach

We spend our time evaluating our clients’ marketing, but for one reason or another, we don’t spend time evaluating our own.  On any given day we may be conducting a website visitor survey for a client.  How many of us invest the same time and effort in ourselves?  Very few, it seems.

3) Our products and services, especially our new ones, are so awesome they will market themselves

This one is simply self-delusional.  If you’re thinking this way, snap out of it.

4) We are wary of new methods

Twitter? Facebook? Blogging? Email marketing? Those take effort to learn and can seem scary at first.  Also, ROI can be challenging to measure, and if there’s anything we love, it’s numbers.

5) We think we don’t have time.

This one is a doozy.

We don’t have time to find more customers? We don’t have time to demonstrate value? We don’t have time to promote our industry?

Please.

What do you think?

Am I wrong on some or all of these?  Did I miss anything?

Filed Under: Essay, Market Research, Marketing Tagged With: ,

Focus Groups are Dead: An Interview with Mike Volpe, HubSpot CMO

November 28, 2011 By 2 Comments
Mike Volpe

Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot

Editor’s Note:  I recently attended the Social Media FTW (For the Win) conference where HubSpot‘s Chief Marketing Officer, Mike Volpe was a keynote speaker.  During his talk, Mike contrasted the analytics HubSpot gives marketers with traditional feedback, using focus groups as an example.  I caught up with Mike afterward to get his further perspectives on market research and marketing. 

Dana Stanley: For those who don’t know, could you please give a quick overview of what HubSpot does for marketers? In particular, how does it help with marketing analytics?

Mike Volpe: HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software platform. Rather than using one tool for blogging, another tool for social media marketing, a different tool for landing pages, yet another tool for email marketing, some other tool for marketing automation and yet an additional system for marketing analytics, HubSpot combines all of that into one.

This is powerful for marketers for two reasons: first, you have one hub to manage all of your marketing which is faster and easier, and second, you can easily measure and analyze things across all these different marketing tools. For instance, HubSpot gives you closed loop marketing analytics, so you can link it to your CRM system and know not only how many web visitors you got from social media, but also how many of them became a lead and how many of those leads converted into customers. Or, you could measure how many of your leads that became customers visited a specific web page on your website or used certain functionality in your mobile app, etc.

DS: In your recent keynote at Social Media FTW, you said, “Focus groups are dead.” Can you tell me what you meant by that?

MV: Of course “dead” is strong language meant to invite a response and dialog. Focus groups still have their place, however they are much less useful or attractive today for two reasons.

First, the low cost availability of other ways of gathering information about your market and customers. You can listen to what they say in social media, you can read the reviews they write. You can analyze how they actually use your website. You can see the videos and blogs they post about your products.

Second, I think the information you can get today is a more accurate view into your customers, because it is based on their actual behavior, not how they answer questions in an unfamiliar room with 5 strangers. I’ll take the status update that someone wrote from the couch in the comfort of their own home as more accurate than the comment they made in a focus group room when they are given a $100 gift card to show up.

DS: Your company has been on an impressive growth path. How does HubSpot take stock of and incorporate feedback from customers and prospects?

MV: We get feedback in a number of different ways. We conduct usability sessions where we have someone use the product online while we watch and they talk us through what they are doing, we have discussion forums for customers that we monitor, we get feedback from the sales team on what people say when they they demo the product, we have usage monitoring built into the product that gives us reports about what customers do and don’t do in the product, we have ideas.hubspot.com where customers can submit ideas to make the product better, we visit HUG (HubSpot User Group) meetings and we regularly survey the customers as well.

DS: What do you envision market research will be like in the future?

I think it will allow for faster and cheaper insights and more witnessing of actual real life activity, not simulated activity.

Filed Under: Digital, Featured, Market Research, Marketing, Planning, Social Media Tagged With: , ,

Sentiment Analysis Firm Metavana’s New CMO, Romi Mahajan: An Interview

November 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Romi Mahajan

Romi Mahajan

Romi Mahajan is a well-known technology marketing speaker and expert; he serves on a variety of advisory boards and speaks at over a dozen industry events per year.  He most recently served as the Worldwide Director of Sales and Strategy for the Digital Marketing and Search team at Microsoft.  Prior to Microsoft, Romi was founder of the KKM Group and served as CMO of Ascentium Group.  
Romi is also one of the founders of Research Access, and he has been a vital contributor to the online conversation about marketing and research.

Dana Stanley: Congratulations on your new position as CMO of Metavana. You’ve been a regular contributor to Research Access in the past, and I hope your new responsiblities will allow time for some continued guest posting!

For those who might not be familiar with Metavana, could you please take a moment to explain what the company does?

Romi Mahajan: Dana, writing for Research Access has been such a joy that I hope you allow me to continue to offer an opinion here and there!

I’m excited about my new role as CMO of Metavana, precisely because I believe we can make a real dent in reality with this company and really serve customers and the industry.

Metavana is at its essence a sentiment engine. What this means is that our engine can parse and make meaning of the geometrically-growing and unstructured/emotional content on the Social Web. We want to help redefine the Voice of the Customer and move it into the mainstream of business planning.

DS:  There are increasingly more companies these days in what’s come to be called the field of Sentiment Analysis. I understand Metavana has some unique ways of analyzing, scoring and packaging web sentiment. Could you give us a sense of the scientific principles used in Metavana analysis?

RM: Metavana attempts to solve a tough problem that is governed by the following 4 connected notions:

  1. The Social Web is truly the “Big Data” Web. There are 250 million tweets a day and 800,000 Facebook posts an hour.  And so on…
  2. The content on the Social Web is unstructured, asyntactic, often ungrammatical, and emotion — versus ordered, clear, factual data. It’s chaos; the tower of Babel writ large.
  3. The Social Web is always-on- 24/7/365 and is worldwide.
  4. Despite all of this, the Social Web reveals important truths about each of our brands….

We believe this is not a smart engineering problem but is really a physics and non-linear math problem. That is what we’ve based our algorithms on.

DS: It wasn’t that long ago that market research was considered to be surveys and focus groups – and that’s all. How do you think Sentiment Analysis – and Metavana in particular – fits into the overall market research picture?

RM: Look, market research has its place in the world but has not quite risen to the challenge of the Internet and Social Age. Market research tends to be episodic, one-off, and sequestered in the organization. Further, market research often lacks timeliness and context. Sentiment analysis (and Metavana by extension) change this by helping organizations understand the Voice of the Customer in real-time and in the real context (emotional, etc.) — that is what will define the next phase in the market research evolution. I believe in market research and want it to shine and have its rightful place.

DS: How will you use analytics and research in your role as CMO of an exciting internet company?

RM: Beautiful question, and I won’t sugar-coat. We’ll analytics and research in the company to determine market sizing, the “nature of the beast” we are trying to slay, and what customers and partners feel and think. But in a startup you go with gut often and you hope that decades of collective wisdom are brought to bear to do the right thing!

Filed Under: Featured, Market Research, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

A Social Media Marketer’s Take on Market Research

November 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Elijah R. Young

Elijah Young

I experienced Elijah Young’s keynote session on blogging and social media at the Social Media FTW (“For the Win”) Fall conference in September.

‘Experienced’ is the right word, because Elijah is such a dynamic and engaging speaker, simply saying ‘saw’ or ‘listened to’ would not due justice to the feeling of energy in the room.  Elijah inspired and motivated people to blog while giving plenty of practical tips and infusing the talk with lots of humor.

In short, he was a big hit.

Elijah is the co-founder of Fandura, a company that creates social web pages and applications for businesses of all types.  He is an expert in a wide range of topics, from social media to application development to entrepreneurship.  He graciously agreed to an interview with me.

DS:  Many of our readers are market researcher entrepreneurs looking to promote their businesses online.  Social media and online marketing can seem like an overwhelming time-suck.  What activities would you advise people looking to market their businesses online to focus on?

EY:  I think a lot of entrepreneurs start with deciding they will use social media, then try to find their customer on those platforms.  In my opinion that’s backwards.  You have to find out where your client is online (if they’re online at all) and then go where they are.

As researchers, I’m sure your readers know that some of the best tidbits of information can be found in an old journal, or some resource that may not be available online yet, and your customers are the same way.

One example I used when I owned a social-type company was that we needed to attract a customer base, but the “in” thing to do was to advertise on social media. In my opinion that’s like being a track and field coach looking for new people to train at the Olympics.  We found that there was a freelance site that had an untapped (at least by US providers) market for people looking to jump into that market, and we were able to take advantage of that entire market, hungry for a provider, by ourselves with little or no competition until we had already created a brand name for ourselves.

We decided to focus on customers who we knew would pay first, because I have a philosophy that you’re not a business if you’re not making revenue.  It may take a while to find out where the people in your market that want to spend money TODAY are, but it’s always worth the effort if you can find them, because your competitors are busy fighting over the low hanging fruit.

DS:  Your company develops mobile applications, including games. One of the hot topics in market research is gamification – that is, making it more fun for survey-takers to share information with us by adding game elements to the way we collect data. What do you think?

EY:  Everybody likes a good experience, and people are inherently competitive, so “gamification” works alot of times. My only concern is that people rely too much on making their system into a game, and they start to forget about the core thing they wanted from the user in the first place.

For example, I’m all for researchers getting users excited about taking part in a “game-style” version of a survey, but think about how that will affect the info that you get from the user.  Will you get a survey skewed by the users emotion, will they be distracted by the gameplay and just blast through the survey to get to the next game-style moment?

I think a lot of entrepreneurs get excited about the bells and whistles and tend to forget about the core, and staying true to your core sometimes means skipping out on all of the fluff.

DS:  How does Fandura make use of research?

EY:  I love research, but I think that tons of businesses miss what I call “free research moments”.  At Fandura we really focus on every question that a customer asks during the sales process, because that’s free market research.

Every question we answer gets turned into an educational piece of marketing material, every stumbling block we encounter gets turned inot a resource guide.  It’s a simple philosophy of, “our clients are more alike than different”, so we think they will ask the same questions, and go through the same troubles from project to project.

If we pay attention to those free research moments, we don’t have to worry about what our competitors are doing.  In our industry, the customer is never educated, and by having the largest library of education at their fingertips, it gives us two advantages:  One, we’ll get to build better customers, more knowledgeable and better equipped to avoid getting into a negative relationship with a developer, and two, we get to frame what a positive relationship looks like.  So with our educational library, we now become the measuring stick that potential clients use when they talk to other developers, and we’ll take that bet every time.

Note:  Elijah Young writes for the Fandura Blog, and he can also be found on Social Media Examiner.  You can follow him on Twitter at @ElijahRYoung.

Filed Under: Featured, Gamification, Market Research, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

World’s Oldest Profession

October 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

MarketerI’m a Professional.  I want to engage my customers and build intimacy.  I want to monetize that intimacy.  As long as my practices are secure and safe, and my customers are happy and pay me, then my job is done.  My friends tell me to be authentic with my customers but in reality I have to create an artificial persona all too often. 

I get in trouble with The powers that be too often.  There are times I feel incredibly diminished as a person.  It’s pretty hard to explain to people what I do and that provokes all manner of barbs and demeaning comments. 

A lot of my peers can’t do the job for more than a few years.  It’s tough.

Who am I?

I’m a Marketer.  (What were you thinking you naughty boys and girls?)

Okay so you’re thinking “Romi, you love hyperbole don’t you?”

And I’m saying this:  While the above is a pastiche of things Marketers do, say, and feel, I’ve seen, heard, and endured each element a thousand times or more.

And I’m saying this as well:  If we want to avoid the direct comparison with the world’s oldest profession then we need to clean-up our language, get off the ledge, and own the problem like people with a lot to lose would.

[Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on our sister site, MarketingAccess.com]

Filed Under: Essay, Marketing

Short and Very Dry, Please

September 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

FoamI like my coffee every day and prefer cappuccinos that are short and dry. Now, for the uninitiated, let me explain. That means a cappuccino with less milk and proportionally more foam. There is no exact measure for what the proportion should be and that is where the skills of a good barista come into play.

But I digress.

I was in a corporate cafeteria this morning and ordered my usual at a Starbucks stand – except that knowing how things are done there, I asked them to make it ‘extra dry’ just to be sure there was no ambiguity.

Sure enough, when I got my coffee, it was far from dry. Actually it was wet enough to be classified as a small latte in some parts. Now this is not completely surprising since as mentioned earlier, this is an art and not a science. Normally it’s a matter of requesting the barista to just make it drier, a request that is usually complied with a smile.

Not here, not today. The barista got into an argument with me debating what dry and extra dry is and should be. At one point, it degenerated into her mocking me sarcastically and wondering if I was in the habit of making my own special cappuccinos every afternoon. And this was not in jest, and there was neither contrition nor acknowledgment that a customer could 1) have a preference and 2) sometimes be right especially when there is no ‘right’ answer.

Fortunately, the café manager happened to be nearby and helped to smooth things over by offering me free coffee which I didn’t accept to make a point (though I’m quite fond of free in general). The barista had quickly and seriously harmed the reputation of that particular coffee stand and turned someone that could have been a loyal customer into someone that well, wrote this blog.

We are reminded of the importance of great customer service everyday – but what a shame that companies seem to invest less time and money in training employees enough in that regard. This is truly an investment, and not an expense.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

The Physical and The Digital

September 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Marketing Punters and Pundits alike make stupid predictions.  One of the most laughable of late was the prediction of the early demise of “physical” Marketing- it will all be digital, in the ether, non-corporeal the big-thinkers said.

And like the seers of a “paperless office,” they were dead wrong.

Case in point is a superb piece of Marketing that just crossed my desk today.  The sexy brand Ferrari built their website on Microsoft’s Sharepoint for Internet Sites (FIS) platform, as have thousands of other companies.  Seeing an opportunity, Austin-based Catapult Systems decided to build a Practice out of planning, developing and maintaining websites built on FIS; in order to drive (excuse the pun) the business forward, they decided to do a Marketing campaign leveraging the Ferrari brand in a smart, fun way.

They sent a physical mailer with a nice Ferrari keychain attached.  A VIN number was etched on the keychain.  With simple text, the physical mailer drove (there we go again) folks to a website where one can watch a very simple-yet-compelling video about Sharepoint FIS and how Catapult systems can help companies engage their customers with the Sharepoint technology.  After watching the video, one had to register (with only a few information fields.)

And guess what?  No matter what happens, you get to keep the keychain (and who doesn’t love Ferrari products!)

In one fell swoop, the consumer got a very compelling digital and physical experience.

Now, I’m not trying to stump for Catapult; that’s not my intent or the intent of this blog.  But I do want to heap praise where praise is due.

But more than that, I want to share a bias with you all- I still love physical marketing.  A good giveaway is as compelling as any website.

So throwaway the bathwater but keep that gorgeous and gurgling baby!

[Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on our sister site, MarketingAccess.com]

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

What’s Your Beef?

September 15, 2011 By 1 Comment

Airline food for vegetarians sucks. End of story. Think I’m wrong? Talk to the hand. Seriously.

Now before you think the obvious and say “Romi, all airline food sucks so clearly vegetarian airline food does too.” Put your Venn diagrams away because my point is different.

Veggie airline food is crappy because of a Marketing and Market Research problem. Not because of bad cooks.

For those of you who have suffered uncooked potatoes or been forced to daintily pick at fruit when you are ravenous, you very likely know where I am going here.

Which is this: Too much segmentation is a BAD thing. Too much “correlation” is a BAD thing.

Because airlines seem to think that if you are vegetarian you are either 1. On a diet; 2. Hindu; 3. Lacto-Ovo-Pyscho.

In my case I’m none of the above though I probably should be 1. Being vegetarian doesn’t mean I lost my taste buds in a freak accident. Nor does it mean that I hate fat or think protein is an organization fighting for adolescents’ rights.

Bro, I am HUNGRY, just like you are.

Okay I made my point.

So just remember, figuring out “coupled traits” and “buying adjacencies” is a cool exercise but often you’ll just get nonsense data.

Remember, Marketing is more art than science.

Anyway, enough. Off to drink a Jicama shake for breakfast.

NOT.

Filed Under: Essay, Market Research, Marketing

Early Demises: Why Zealotry around Digital Hurts Marketing

September 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It is NOT all about digital. I swear I read that somewhere in a magazine. Or, maybe, I saw it on TV. Not sure, but I do know that Marketing is a many-splendored thing and shouldn’t be cast as narrowly as it has been of late.

This piece is an admonition not a statement of nullification.  But we need to make it clear that Marketing is still about the “mix” and about “context.”  So the intended audience is those of you who are in “digitally zealous” mode – head out of orifice please!

My favorite piece of Marketing over the past 5 years has to do with the TSA. Yes the Transportation Safety Administration. No, not their cool outfits.  No, not their incredible customer-service. And not the **** probes either.  Instead, I love the trays. Because Zappos “owned” them for a long time and it made sense: advertising shoes where you put your, well, shoes.

Nothing like a captive audience, already immersed in “context.”

I have to admit I still believe in magazines too. While I think there are serious considerations around the environment that might militate against the growth of the magazine base in general, I still subscribe to no less than 10 magazines. In many ways, I still have a bias towards what I call the “burden of authorship” which characterizes the print editorial process. Because of that, I pay more attention to the advertisements in magazines because I find the surrounding content valuable.

And so on. You get the point.

Look, I embrace digital too – when it makes sense. The possibilities unmasked by the digital media are fantastic: measurement, quick-revolution, interactivity, deep experiential value, and so on. Wow. Because of these, it’s easy to get sucked into that world and to think “Digital is everything.”  It’s easy to get sucked into religion as well but so far I’ve steadfastly avoided that as well.

Because zealotry of any fashion hurts the whole.

So as Marketers, let’s reintroduce ourselves to our complex and wonderful craft.

In all its forms.

[Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on our sister site, MarketingAccess.com]

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »