Impressing clients has become increasingly difficult with various market research and marketing consultancy companies that are being started. It almost seems that everyone who spends a few years in marketing consultation and marketing strategy wants to open shop and create strategies for various clients. While the competition is tough, there are various advancements in technology that have taken place that help you create savvy and impressive presentations and data demonstration at the click of a button. These techniques not only save you time and money but also help in ensuring that you can look at data from various angles in order to provide valuable and meaningful interpretations and recommendations to the client.

If you as a marketing consultant are running against time getting in the last minute data, analyzing it using old age excel files or slow survey analysis software you are not likely to get any time to sit back and look at the data in detail. All that you are likely to be doing before the big day of the presentation is putting the data together with no time left to add that value that you bring to the table.

What kind of marketing analysis software or technology do you need? Mineful has a large variety of features that can help you collect data, integrate databases, and create reports at the click of a button so that you can concentrate on your forte and strategic approach.

Marketing campaigns typically involve three stages. First an advertiser or ad agency hires a marketing research professional to collect data about the target market: demographics, purchasing habits, wants and needs. Then the professional consultant analyzes the data, attempting to create a customer profile that can form the basis for a marketing plan. Finally, the advertiser or ad agency creates and implements a marketing plan using the research it has commissioned.

At least that’s the way things used to work. Today, digital tools available from companies like Mineful enable advertisers and ad agency to do their own research, in effect cutting out the middle man between themselves and the marketplace. The potential for cost savings with this new approach is obvious. Data collection and analysis can be expensive, and if marketers can handle these two stages of the process themselves they can save a considerable amount of money. But there are also other advantages of taking control of your market research.

Research on Your Own Terms
Although it can be worthwhile sometimes to get an outsider’s perspective on your market research efforts, hiring a consultant to collect and analyze market data has some definite drawbacks. After all, no one knows your business better than you.

Conducting your own research gives you complete control of the process. You can decide which potential customers to survey, how and when to contact them, and exactly what to ask. If the results of a survey don’t provide the kind of information you need, you can easily change the survey parameters and try again. Keeping the cost of surveys down also allows you to reach more people or conduct surveys more frequently.

Taking charge of the analysis stage of the research process gives you more control over how you use the data you collect. For example, if you decide to change your store hours or product offerings, you can use the results of your last survey to see how customers might respond to these changes. Since you have complete control of your data, you don’t need to go back to consultants when you want run a new analysis.

Powerful, Easy-to-Use Tools
One of the main reasons why more and more companies are taking over their own market research is that the digital tools available for this purpose have become increasingly easy to use. In the past you would probably have to hire a statistician to help you analyze survey data. But now you can conduct your own sophisticated analysis using tools that require no specialized knowledge. For example, Mineful’s software lets you use a tool called conjoint analysis to see how responses to various questions are related. This sort of analysis can help you understand such things as how customers make trade-offs between price and desirable product features.

Survey software also makes it easy to display the results of your analysis using widely understood formats such as pie charts and bar charts. Dashboards, a relatively feature, summarize data in a format that can be understood with just a glance. Dashboards make it easy to create different types of displays for different levels or functions in your organization.

With tools like these, it’s no wonder why a growing number businesses are taking control of their own market research.

Before you commit thousands or millions of dollars to an ad campaign, you would like to have some reassurance that you will be getting a decent return on your investment. The best way to predict whether a campaign will be effective is to do some upfront advertising evaluation.

In the past, pre-testing ads was a cumbersome, time-consuming process, typically involving focus groups and in-person interviews. Today, online surveys offer a fast, cost-effective alternative to traditional testing methods.

Advertising Evaluation

What should an online survey measure? Most advertisers would agree on these eight parameters:

1. Recognition. When advertisers test recognition, they are just trying to determine whether respondents remember seeing an ad before. For example, a survey might show respondents several ads and ask which ones they remember.

2. Recall. Advertisers use the term recall to describe what a viewer gets out of an ad. For example, a survey might show respondents an ad with the brand name removed and ask what brand the ad is promoting.

3. Attitude and opinion. These questions are meant to determine how respondents feel about a product based on an ad.

4. Comprehension. Questions about comprehension test how well respondents understand an ad. These questions are particularly worthwhile for ad campaigns that rely on allusions or subtle messages.

5. Credibility. These questions are meant to determine what portion of respondents believe the claims made in ad.

6. Persuasiveness. Questions in this category are meant to determine to what extent respondents are persuaded to adopt a viewpoint promoted in an ad.

7. Buying predisposition. These questions may take a variety of forms. For example: “How likely are you to buy this product in next month?” “How do you think this product compares to specifically named competitors?” These questions are meant to determine how much an ad encourages participants to take the next step and make a purchase.

8. Ad rating. This is a subjective overall measure of what respondents think about an ad. Do they find it amusing, annoying, aesthetically pleasing?

Depending on the circumstances, advertisers may decide to weigh some of these parameters more heavily than others. For example, if an insurance company is trying to counteract stories about unfair treatment of policy holders, it may value credibility more than other parameters.

Making Sense of Survey Responses
Responses to questions in each of these categories can be useful in themselves, but they become more useful when viewed in relation to each other. For example, what topic correlates most strongly with buying predisposition? How is comprehension related to recall? A statistical tool called conjoint analysis can help advertisers understand these relationships by showing how specific variables interact.Conjoint analysis can also show how different features of an ad affect the eight parameters discussed above. For example, respondents might be shown different versions of an ad and asked questions intended to measure recall. The goal is to determine what combination of features in an ad has the strongest positive effect on a given parameter.

Mineful’s software makes advertising evaluation easy to perform, giving advertisers valuable guidance before they invest in major new campaigns.

Mineful released today the first solution to easily integrate customer or products data with survey data. This allows researchers to see how customer information and survey answers are related. Mineful’s survey data integration gives researchers a powerful yet easy way to integrate survey data with respondent characteristics, such as shopping patterns, customer segment, and geographic location. The result is a clearer understanding of different segments of the market.

For example, suppose that a grocery store chain conducts an online survey of customers who have signed up for shoppers’ discount cards. The survey might ask customers how important they consider things such as ease of checkout, expanded store hours, and availability of special services, such as pharmacies or florists shops, in the store.

A survey like this will be valuable in itself, but it will be even more valuable if the consultant can integrate survey data with data gathered from discount cards. These cards typically provide information about where, when, and how often customers shop, what they buy, and how much they typically spend on each shopping trip.

If a consultant attempted to ask for this information as part of a survey, it would create two problems. First, respondents might not be able to provide accurate information about such things as how often they shop or how much they typically spend. Second, asking for such information would make the survey considerably longer, and the longer the survey, the less likely it is that people will complete it.

By integrating survey results with data from shopping cards, a researcher can determine answers to questions such as:

• What services are most important to the chain’s best customers?
• Which stores have the highers customer satisfaction?
• How does customer satisfaction affect purchase frequency?

In technical terms, a user can upload two kinds of files: 1) a respondent list with customer emails and other columns that describe the respondent or 2) a general data file that could describe a product, store, or something else about the organization. The respondents’ list is the example we explained above.

In the second case, a user can upload a table for which a code or an answer must be entered to retrieve information. This could be a products table, store level table, demographic table, etc. For example, a construction company that replaces windows, siding, and gutters might have information on its products serviced by warranty number. The first question of the survey asks the respondent his warranty number. The information on the table (product category, date, service representative, price, location, etc.) is then linked to this person’s responses.

Survey data integration tools, such as these, allow marketing departments to give decision makers the information they need to get the most out of their marketing efforts.

As a leader in online survey software, Mineful helps you use marketing technology to make better decisions for your business. We have the software, the services, and the people to help you keep your current customers and attract new ones.

Mineful Software — Market Research Results in Real Time
Our online survey software lets you see how well your business processes are working and how they can be changed to do a better job of meeting your customers’ needs. Once you decide on a change, our software helps you monitor your initiative to see if it is achieving the intended results.

This process works smoothly with a minimum of effort and expense. It’s easy to customize your data gathering and analysis to gain the specific business intelligence you need to make more informed decisions. You don’t need to hire expensive market research consultants and wait for their reports. You can conduct your own analysis in real time and put your findings to work right away.

In simple terms, Mineful lets you do more with less. Since it is a web-based tool, you can skip the expense of installing, maintaining, and updating someone else’s software. Mineful’s well-designed interface is intuitive and easy to use. You can try it out for free before you subscribe.
Mineful makes the power of marketing technology available throughout your business. You can set different permissions for different users. It’s easy for users to collaborate and share the results of their analyses. Users can choose from a variety of powerful analytics, such as frequency distributions, cross tabs, and correlations. Reports are available in real time, so it’s easy to keep in touch with what customers are thinking.

Keeping in touch with people — maintaining relationships — is what surveys are all about. Improving customer relationships is the key to improving business performance.

Mineful Services — A Tech Savvy Team Working for You
Market research consultants can be prohibitively expensive, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. And too often they take a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t respond to your particular needs. Large companies can afford to hire tech-savvy employees to gather and analyze survey results, but for most businesses this is just not feasible.

Mineful offers a powerful and affordable alternative to hiring outside consultants or additional staff. For the cost of less than one employee, we can provide you with the technology and analytics you need to keep in touch with what your customers want and need. Our Strategic and Analytical Services team can help you define, develop, or redesign a successful program quickly and economically. We take a simple but effective approach to this task: set clear objectives up front, design a program to meet these objectives, and then test and learn.

Mineful People — Smart, Dedicated, and Experienced Professionals
Our staff have many years of experience in statistics, survey methods, and market research, enabling us to tackle even the most complex projects in marketing technology. We not only perform advanced analytics, but we communicate the results in an understandable, visually effective way. Our worldwide customer base includes Allstate, the American Society of Clinical Pathologists, KWT, MediaBank, and the Chicago public schools.

We have the resources — the software, the services, and the people — to help you keep in touch with your customers and gain a greater understanding of their wants needs.

Market research reports and customer satisfaction surveys provide truckloads of valuable data. The challenge for marketers is to make sense of it all and present their analysis in a clear, useful way. Dashboard reports help marketers meet this challenge. They provide simplified data analysis that allows decision makers to see at a glance what’s working and what needs to be changed.

Dashboards Display Key Indicators
The dashboard in a car allows the driver to see at a glance key indicators such as speed, RPMs, and engine temperature. The dashboard in a management information system works the same way. Any organization collects an enormous amount of data. The problem is that all this valuable information is not easily available to the people who need to use it — the people in the driver’s seat.

Dashboard reports provide key indicators that show how well an organization is functioning. Specialized dashboards have been developed for all sorts of business operations, everything from sales to security. They are especially useful for data-intensive operations such as survey analysis and market research.

Here’s how they work. Programmers use efficient software tools, such as those developed by Mineful, to create customized displays of data gathered from customer satisfaction surveys or market research reports. These displays might include bar graphs, pie charts, or other visual representations that are easy to interpret. Different displays can be created for different types of users. For example, high-level executives might see a summary of customer satisfaction data for different parts of the business, while product managers might see results just for their own operations.

Key Features
Dashboards are showing up on more and more desktops because they offer a number of valuable features. For example:

It’s All in the Numbers

• Web analytics. Many software companies have developed tools to help marketers collect and analyze data on how visitors interact with their websites. For example, an analysis might show which landing pages encourage visitors to make a purchase.
• CRM. Customer relationship management (CRM) uses software tools to help a company keep track of its customers — who its best customers are, what they buy most often, what new products they might be interested in.
• Online surveys. These powerful tools can give marketers vital insight into what customers value and how they make purchasing decisions. Online surveys are an efficient way to profile different categories of customers and identify their needs.
• EMM/MRM. Enterprise marketing management (EMM) uses software tools to manage and measure all aspects of a company’s marketing efforts. The goal is to determine which efforts are producing the greatest return on investment. Marketing resource management (MRM) is a part of this effort. It allows a company to manage and coordinate it marketing resources.
• SEO. Search engine optimization is a method of bringing more visitors to a website by using appropriate key words. The goal is to move the site closer to the top of lists generated by search engines such as Google.
• Media buying. Companies such as Mediabank help marketers use their data to make media buying decisions. These firms also offer software to help marketers track the effectiveness of their ads.
• Social bookmarking. Sites like delicious.com allow people to share their lists of bookmarked sites. People can check out their friends’ lists or search lists by key words called “tags.” Marketers can encourage visitors to bookmark their site on shared lists, gaining broader exposure for their site and attracting more visitors.