Two things you need to do before you start planning digital campaigns

There are two very important things need to be done long before you decide to go on Facebook, Instagram, Google or plan digital campaigns. And these things are: Market research and Marketing research. Do you know the difference between those two?

Good foundations make the difference between successful and unsuccessful campaigns – whether offline or online.

In order to help you define the foundations of your marketing strategy (before you go on Facebook, Instagram, Google or plan digital campaigns), you need to know:

• What are the differences between Market Research and Marketing Research?
• When to use Market Research and when to use Marketing Research?
• What are the variables and components related in doing Market Research and Marketing Research?

Three C’s of marketing

Let’s start with the three C’s of marketing. We have the company, the customer,  and the competitor. Therefore, each of the three C’s has its own objective.

Let’s start with the company. What’s the goal of the company? Of course, it’s to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, and profit.

And for the customer, it’s about convenience, value, customer solutions, awareness and communication.

And for the competitor, it’s about outperforming the competition, which means, they have to differentiate themselves from the competition, so they could outperform them.

So those are the 3 C’s of marketing which are very important in determining the difference between market research and marketing research.

What is market research?

In order to implement your marketing strategy, you need to perform a customer analysis, that’s the first step.

With a customer analysis you can segment your (existing) customers:

• What are the demographics of your customers?
• Where are they located? Geographically?
• What are their preferences, lifestyle, values attitudes? That is the psychographic.

To understand this, you need to look at historical data from your purchases. That’s how you can identify a specific target audience, that you want to have. And once you’ve identified the target audience, you can more easily develop a positioning  strategy, for your product or service. The „tool“ you can use in your customer analysis could be „STP“ (Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning).

Second, you need to do a competitor analysis. Again, this is about you outperforming your competition.  Basically, you can use the simple SWOT analysis that describes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Don’t underestimate SWOT analysis. A well-done SWOT analysis can give you more useful insights, than some complex tools you don’t know what to do with. Of course you can always look at what your competition is communicating through (digital) campaigns – and see what things they have put in focus.

So you can find out and really understand what the competition is in terms of product and service, especially if you have the same product or service. 

Once you’ve done the customer and the competitor analysis – you’ve actually done market research. That means  you’ve understood your customer and your competition.

What is marketing research?

Now you have to do a marketing research.

Therefore, you should start with PESTEL analysis:

• Political factors (e.g. government policy analysis),
• Economic factors (e.g. economic growth),
• Social factors (e.g. demographics),
• Technological factors (e.g. new ways of communicating with the market),
• Environmental factors (e.g. shortage of raw materials),
• Legal factors (e.g. consumer rights and laws, product safety).

Next you can use Porter’s five forces:

1. Supplier power. An assessment of how easy it is for suppliers to drive up prices.
2. Buyer power. An assessment of how easy it is for buyers to drive prices down.
3. Competitive rivalry. The main driver is the number and capability of competitors in the market.
4. Threat of substitution. Where close substitute products exist in a market,
5. Threat of new entry. Profitable markets attract new entrants, which erodes profitability.

So, once you’ve done your PESTEL analysis and your Porter’s five forces now you are fully equipped to make a second part of this research – Marketing mix.

What is Marketing mix?

Now it’s time to start developing the marketing strategy, And the marketing strategy can be the defined by the marketing mix – which consists of product, place, promotion, and price. (yes, here we have 4P model, and there’s also 7P model, but that could be topic for another article).

So, the first is the price, the objective is the customer cost or the value the customer gets for their money.

Then we have the product – your solution to your customer’s problems. Your product/service provides an opportunity to your customer.

The next is the promotion – the goal is simply communication. You want to communicate your brand, your public relations, your social responsibility, the benefits of your product. Promotion objective is two-way communication. And there are many ways to promote. We have advertising, direct marketing, personal selling,  public relation, social media, sales promotion etc.

The final P is placement. The purpose of placement isn’t literally „the place (in the store)“, but rather convenience, such as how your product is placed in the mind of the customers and consumed.

In order for you to understand and how strategically align your marketing mix, all of these P’s are working like mechanical gears. They work hand in hand, one P benefits the other three P’s so on and so forth.

What to do next?

Once you’ve completed your market research and marketing research – it’s much easier to create a complete marketing strategy. And now it’s the right time to decide on which channels you want to go. On our blog you can find 5 things to avoid in your digital marketing strategy. In case you’re doing B2B marketing strategy you can read some useful tips on our blog A Guide For B2B Social Media Marketing: 5 Tips For A Killer Strategy.

A lot of things on digital channels have changed in the last year and it may not be your primary job to keep up with everything. So, if you’re looking for a reliable team to take care for your digital campaigns feel free to contact us.