Wow, it’s already June and I feel like I haven’t blogged enough this year. I had a cool experience the other day, though, and that inspired me to want to get a short article together. See, I spend a lot of time on this blog helping marketers understand what is an insight and how do they find marketing insights for their specific audiences. But instead of talking about how to do market research today, I instead wanted to focus on the power of market research at the next step in the marketing process – the brainstorm!
One of my favorite things to do is present on marketing and market research data – maybe I just love the sound of my own voice – and often that’s the deliverable my clients are looking for most. They don’t want a big audacious statistics report to review, they want me to come in and explain what it means.
The challenge in presenting great market research, I’ve found, is that the presentation gets interrupted a lot. And that’s exactly what I want to have happen!
Why? Why do I think it’s great that marketers so often want to interrupt the research guy? Because it means the research is working!
So pick up your nearest quarantine snack, and be sure to put on your thinking cap, because we’re about to dive into the power of insights and ideas in marketing, and why it’s awesome when they lead to interruptions in market research presentations!
What is an insight? And why does it matter to marketing?
First and foremost, insights are what we’re trying to find when we set out to do market research. They’re nuggets of truth about specific audiences and audience segments, and when examined through the lens of marketing, they reveal opportunities to make a bigger splash with your marketing efforts.
When we’re talking about presenting research – in any format, but especially during in-person presentations – we’re talking about sharing insights.
I’ve sat through a lot of research presentations that cover every bar graph under the sun, and my takeaway from those is that what we’re trying to communicate in research, the insights, is not coming through.
Note: if you need a good insights definition, click here.
Marketers don’t need every piece of information, and they often don’t need it presented as complicated statistics.
Instead, a great market research presentation focuses on shedding light on hidden insights.
Does your audience have a specific buying habit that could impact your sales?
Does your optimum audience segment have a specific perception of your brand or industry?
Is there something specific about your competitors that your audience really loves? Or hates?
Great market research uses a combination of surveys, data, interviews, meta analyses and more to make sense of the information and also uncover the secrets we didn’t even know we were looking for. And when refined into actionable insights, research becomes the catalyst for the entire creative process.
That’s because insights often lead to ideas…
How do market research insights create marketing ideas?
I mentioned before that insights, when viewed through the marketing lens, become marketing opportunities. That marketing lens is the important part here, because it’s what makes marketers so excited to work with market research information.
Marketers often understand the power of insight-based opportunities. It’s in their nature. Just like a PR person hears opportunity in a media contact’s upcoming story, just like a digital team sees power in an untapped high-volume keyword, so it is that virtually all marketers sense opportunity when they receive a great market research insight.
Marketing – the power of promotion, communication and more to influence a buyer to go from awareness to purchase to repeat customer – is the link that ties insights into ideas for marketers.
If you’re a marketer, take a look at some of the aforementioned example insights a few paragraphs up, and see if your own brain starts buzzing with ideas.
Let’s say your B2C audience prefers to purchase your product most often in the morning. This is an insight.
Could your marketing team create a promotion that brings in more customers during their preferred buying time?
Could you bundle this morning product with other morning products you’re not currently selling to create more upsell opportunities?
If everyone’s coming into purchase in the morning, could you create an additional marketing opportunity that incentivizes them to return later in the day as well? (Starbucks’ afternoon coffee codes is a great example of this in action!)
Or, let’s say your B2B audience thinks your service is great, but just doesn’t have the ROI they’re looking for to justify spending larger amounts of money with you.
Do you have data that can make them realize the true ROI of your services? And perhaps change their perception?
Can you add a data-tracking system with your services to prove ROI throughout the process?
Could you change your pricing model to better match what your client is looking for overall?
Every decision listed above falls under the category of marketing, both for agency and in-house teams, and all of them are influenced by specific insights from the market research process.
Marketers often hear insights, and suddenly the ideas start buzzing. They might seem mundane, and not always as innovative as possible, but what they do is shed light on an opportunity. And whether a creative designer, a copywriter, a media planner, or a social media guru, the ability to connect the dots between insights and innovation is one of the chief skillsets of experienced marketers.
Which brings us to our last point in this article, which is the power of interruptions…
Why interruptions in research presentations means I’m doing my job!
Look, I’m a market research partner for agencies and marketing teams. As such, it’s my job to find insights, and essentially light the fuse that sparks the ideas.
Also, something I love about most marketing people is their desire to dive into creative thinking. And that’s exactly what happens when I’m giving a great market research presentation!
For anyone who’s ever had an idea, a really truly great idea, you know that when you have that inspiration, it can’t wait. You need to follow that creative thinking in your mind, collaborate with your teammates if possible, and while the idea’s fresh and exciting, start to manipulate it into something actionable and meaningful.
This is exactly why marketers so often interrupt market research presentations, and it’s awesome when it happens.
When I’m giving a presentation, especially when it’s for a specific audience data set commissioned by a marketing team, I have the privilege of answering some of their most pressing marketing questions.
What matters to this audience?
What are the existing perceptions of the industry and the brand?
How can we convince this audience that my brand is the right one for them?
In answering these questions, by providing insights, I’m sparking ideas. And, as happens a lot, the marketing audiences I speak to get so excited about their ideas that they want to dive right into the brainstorming session.
This is my job, in a nutshell. As a market research partner, I’m tasked with providing sparks and letting marketing teams run with them until they’re full-blown strategies.
Bottom line, if I’m presenting such useful information that a marketing team feels compelled to stop the presentation and start mapping out ideas and strategies, then I know the market research has provided value.
Have I told you the best part yet?
Book recommendation!
If you want to see how powerful brainstorming and thinking big can be for your marketing, be sure to check out The Magic of Thinking Big!
The most exciting thing about these market research insights-driven brainstorms is that the marketing ideas that come from them are based on real data.
Imagine we conduct an audience survey, and the result is several insights and potential ideas about your primary audience segments. The ideas you formulate from those insights aren’t the byproduct of potentially biased expert opinions, but instead from specific details shared directly to you by the whole of your audience.
Bottom line, ideas that come from data-driven insights are very, very strong.
What to do with interruptions when you know they’re coming?
Great market research presentations get derailed often. And really, in my experience, if you go through a whole market research deck that doesn’t inspire ideas and interruptions, there’s a good chance your insights aren’t as meaningful as they could be.
But since so many people come to this blog to figure out how to do market research themselves, I wanted to address how you can take advantage of those interruptions too.
As a market research partner, I love to sit in on brainstorms and let them play out. Often, I’m familiar enough with the data that I can even provide more insights as the ideas bob and weave through different possible executions.
So, step 1, embrace and be helpful. Take advantage of your knowledge, and know now that your presentation will probably be held up by brainstorms. Let it happen, and be as useful a resource as possible for that process.
But step 2 is to make sure your deck isn’t the whole of it all. If you’re on a time-crunch, which a lot of presentations are, market research presentations can’t be the only way you’re sharing the insights.
Instead, be sure to include some deliverables that complement the deck and help cover all the material – like research reports, short briefs and memos, etc. – that catch up the audience to anything they might have missed due to time.
Finally, step 3, make sure your most pressing insights are up-front in the deck. Assuming you have a few pieces of information that matter most to marketing, get them spelled out early in the deck. This way, not only will your most important insights be guaranteed to be heard, but your marketing team’s brainstorm process will be even more influenced by the most meaningful insights from the research.
Embrace brainstorms, because it’s the entire point of the process.
When it comes to market research, knowing what is an insight is less important than being able to implement and take action on those insights.
In market research, great insights yield great ideas. When you’re presenting research, and when I’m presenting insights to my clients, it’s important to focus on the fact that the entire point of market research is to spawn creativity.
So, what do you do with this information? Take advantage of it. The next time you conduct market research, or even when you work with a market research partner to execute a great strategy, be sure to focus on the fact that we’re trying to instigate great ideas and powerful brainstorm sessions. Build that reality into the final phase of your market research process, and you’ll be amazed at the incredible marketing ideas that result!
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