Should a Research Campaign Be Your First Campaign?

With a plethora of marketing channels to choose from and a strong desire to get your marketing plan and mix right, and normally a short window to get it all planned and in play it is tempting to just get stuck in; do what you did last year.

Markets change though, new competitors enter the market and new ways of dealing with problems become available to your customers.  It is important to understand where markets are today, what customers and prospects are thinking, what they are doing and why, so that you can tailor your marketing plan and channels to maximise the return on your time and budget.

The value of a short marketing campaign can deliver the insight you need to focus your marketing budget to maximum effect and allow you to deliver and demonstrate the value marketing is delivering to the business.

Not only can it tell you wish organisations and cohorts you should be targeting but with which messages and through which channels.

Finally, you probably need more than a consultancies high level overview of a market, you want specifics that you act upon for example:

• Within the SME Market (10-1,000 employees) 80% of decision making is held by their primary IT support partner – We need to target the channel!
• Within the smaller Enterprise sector (1-5k employees) 95% of decision making is held by the IT Manager/IT Director
  • 20% of this sector have an approved supplier framework
  • 15% have a scheduled project this year – If we can engage this pays for the research campaign
  • 30% expect to have a project in the following year – This could be a growing trend and represent growth in this sector
  • 80% of organisations that have a project planned over the next 24 months are looking for solution that:
    • Saves operational time
    • Allows then to incorporate and manage multiple vendor solutions
  • Of the 70% of organisations that have no plans for a project in the next 24 months
    • 20% are focused on enterprise software projects – leaving a lack of resource
    • 30% have no budget for new solutions
    • 40% don’t recognise this as a problem
    • 10% of organisations did not give a reason

And of course, a good research campaign will also tell you exactly which organisations and cohorts gave these answers.

Will a research campaign be the beginning of your planning for the current year?