Rethinking Market Research Incentives

March 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Participation is the underpinning of market research. If not for respondents agreeing to respond, our jobs as market researchers would be pretty boring indeed. As a result, much of our time is focused on what it takes to instigate participation. What incentives do we, as those asking for someone’s time and information, need to provide?

I came across a great post on this very subject earlier this week. The post was actually written around this time last year by Diane Hagglund over at Dimensional Research, but I’m glad she resurrected it via Twitter (you can find her at @DimensionalR), as a missed it last time around.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Budgets, Featured, Market Research, Planning Tagged With: , ,

Budgeting for Social Media

September 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The good folks over at the QuestionPro Blog have a great post this week that gets us thinking about the impact (both in terms of spending and savings) that social media can have on our marketing budgets.

Budgets for Social MediaImplementing social media solutions certainly has costs, especially in terms of time and people resources. As the QuestionPro folks point out, a study by Marketing Sherpa suggests that social media is expected to be about 11% of the average marketing budget. But there can be significant savings associated with leveraging social media as well, particularly in the market research industry. By leveraging social media to “fish where the fish are,” finding sample subjects in communities where they are already active, we may find ways to dramatically reduce the cost of conducting new studies.

How are you accounting for  social media in your marketing budgets? Are you finding any significant savings to help balance the cost? And how much of your marketing and research budgets are being allocated to new media efforts? Be sure to share your story in the comments of this post.

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

Good News for Marketing Budgets…?

August 30, 2010 By 1 Comment

Forbes Insights released the results from a study that surveyed marketing executives on their spending habits and their expectations for the coming year. A significant portion of the executives surveyed reported that they expect budget increases in the coming year. But the part of their organizations in which they expect to see the most growth was measurement as marketers continue to work to prove their worth through ROI. Nearly 65% said that the main reason for wanting to increase marketing efficacy was to prove its worth to senior executives.

So, as these key marketing executives remain optimistic about spending, they also remain acutely aware of proving their own value. That should function as an imperative for all marketers to make sure that they are measuring and optimizing every experience, no matter what channel they’re working in.

Within your own organizations, have you noticed changes in how you demonstrate the ROI of your marketing efforts? Is the need for explicit demonstrations of a return on investment necessarily a good thing? While we have better measures of the cause-and-effect efficacy of specific campaigns, does the need for capturing specific metrics prevent us from taking chances on big ideas? As always, we want to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,