3 Reasons to Add MAP Marketing Research to Your 2024 Strategy
Explore how MAP Marketing Research, powered by machine learning and AI, can unveil your customers’ true pain points, delve into the “whats” and “whys” behind their sentiments, and addresses industry challenges to ensure a successful year ahead.
Marketers are scrambling to finalize 2024 marketing strategies and plans, but in the rush to meet internal deadlines to set your business up for success, take a step back and ask these questions:
- Do we really know our customers’ most critical pain points?
- What data am I relying on to confirm our strategy will meet customers’ most pressing needs?
- Is there time to pivot should customer insights contradict our assumptions?
To help businesses quickly answer these questions, Responsory officially rolled out its proprietary machine learning/AI marketing research platform – the Mindset Analytics Process℠ (MAP). Our MAP research methodology discovers what matters most to your customers by understanding exactly what’s on their minds and in their hearts, giving you the confidence that your marketing decisions are precisely on target.
How? We analyze unbiased, organic digital conversations and deep discussions your target customers are having about your brand, products, services, wants, needs, and even your competitors and how your brand stacks up.
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MAP Research Explained in 2 Minutes
Here are three ways marketers should use MAP market research to help plan or fine-tune 2024 marketing strategies:
1
Understand your customers’ most important needs
All too often, marketers plan in a vacuum, leaning on what they know or think they know about their customers. And, the result is the same year after year after year. Even if they have traditional research as backup, these methods may lead marketers to a dead end.
Why? Customers are hesitant to share what’s really on their minds (what they believe and value) unless, of course, they’re deeply dissatisfied.
Responses to traditional market research, such as focus groups and interviews, often live in the “polite zone.” Humans won’t share their deepest thoughts with strangers. And focus group leaders or alpha participants steer conversations down a preferred path, bypassing real truths. Same goes for surveys — bias is inherently built into questions.
Here’s where MAP insights stand out from traditional research:
- Millions of Data Points: Machine learning and AI tools collect millions of unfiltered data points on any category, brand or topic. These data sets are far larger and more complete than smaller traditional sample-sizes.
- Deeper Discussions: While MAP research does include social media content, it digs deeper into topical sites, industry message boards and forums, ratings and reviews, and even videos and images. To build a complete understanding, we’re going where your audience takes us with the most relevant and meaningful discussions.
- Quantifiable Results: Unstructured data is hard to wrap into actionable goals and objectives. MAP research distills qualitative data into quantitative insights you need to make smarter decisions.
The result is understanding your customers more deeply than ever. Your strategy may have to pivot based on data. But now would be the best time to do it—before you spend a single dollar of your marketing budget on campaigns that won’t work.
2
Discover the “whats” and the “whys”
Before implementing any marketing strategy or plan, ask yourself this important question: “Do I completely understand what my customers are saying and thinking about my brand? Products? Services? Competitors?”
Odds are the answer is “no” to one or more of these categories, but insights can be found for any one or all of these buckets with MAP marketing research.
Using sentiment analysis, we find out the “whats” – key drivers (positive sentiments that rise to the top), barriers (leading negative sentiments), and neutrals (uncommitted thoughts, concerns, comments and questions) – then uncover the “whys” in more detailed drilldowns.
In most traditional research, the neutrals are frequently overlooked. However, we find some of the richest analysis coming from neutral sentiments. Those discussions lead to a better understanding of the most pressing questions and concerns straight from your customers. Address their pain points and successful marketing follows.
3
Solve your industry’s most challenging issues
If an ounce of data is all that’s needed to make a difference, just think of what could result from a deep pool of insights and analysis of an entire industry or category? Many clients have identified critical pressing issues within their industry and use MAP marketing research to answer those critical questions. The best part: The insights are first-party data belonging to our clients. They use these insights to drive strategic thought leadership:
- Internal sales education. Proprietary data and findings can be shared with sales team members, who educate their clients with exclusive insights.
- External reporting. MAP research can be easily turned into industry reports, whitepapers, webinars, keynote presentations, podcasts and more.
- Exclusive data and analysis. Gated reports can be used as value-added content for nurturing campaigns, retaining your best clients and moving qualified leads through the sales funnel.
Start by asking the tough questions that face your industry or category, and use MAP insights to discover what customers are talking about.
What’s next?
There are unlimited ways that MAP can take unstructured data and lead to solutions that matter to your customers. The first step on a path to success starts from your customers’ vantage point.
Share your burning questions with our team of researchers and data scientists and we’ll create a marketing research MAP that will lead you to success in 2024.
Contact us today to get started.
About the Author
Jeff Nowak joined Responsory this year to develop our proprietary research method called the Mindset Analytics Process℠ and lead our content team. He is a lifelong content creator with a love for video and photo storytelling. In his free time, he enjoys the solitude of northern Wisconsin with his family, including their newest addition — Leo the mini Sheepadoodle.
