Check out any marketing blog today and you’ll see pages of posts about social media and relationship marketing. While social media is a very important and effective tactic, I think we all need to step back and realize that it will take more than one tactic to win in this game called marketing. While you may say that traditional marketing is not as effective as it has been in the past, I would argue that these tactics are the foundation of a solid marketing plan. Perhaps they need to be applied in a different way to be effective in this new era of marketing, but whatever. Anyway, I’m beginning a new series: Traditional Weapons of Marketing, starting with my favorite subject marketing research.

Marketing research is my favorite of the traditional tactics, but that’s not the only reason why I’m discussing it first. Your marketing plan begins with solid research. Let me be very clear, all of your marketing decisions should be based on facts (I didn’t understand this when I first started my career, but it is in fact true). Research is where you get those facts. You can either collect and analyze the data yourself, or you can take it from a 3rd party’s already established results. This breakdown looks like this:

- Primary Research: If you need to know something specific, sometimes the best way to find out is to conduct your own research. There are alot of elements to gathering quality data, such as your collection methodology, survey design, incentives, analysis methods, and so on, but I’ll leave that for the research pros to discuss… or maybe for a future discussion.

- Secondary Research: Why go through the expense and effort of conducting your own research when the hard work may have already been done by someone else. There are tons of research findings, reports, and statistics out there for you to find. Sometimes it seems like these findings have nothing to do with you or your business, but you still may be able to apply them somewhere. The new US Census data for example is invaluable to marketers in that it describes what the standard US household looks like in each geographic region. Pretty handy if you’re looking to open a new market, or simply gain a better understanding of your current market.

All research is either quantitative or qualitative. Meaning that it can either be expressed in numbers or in a more abstract way. I’ve seen many companies only focus on quantitative research, or statistics. This is a mistake and is the reason why focus groups exist. Talk to your prospects and customers and try and understand their mindset. You may have a great product, but it may not be practical for the common user. Your inexpensive food may taste excellent, but perhaps your customers want a healthier choice. You need to know the right questions to ask so that you can get the information you need to make a good decision.  

Just one type of research isn’t going to cut it. So you put together an excellent survey, and collected data from a very good sample. You’re still only looking at the results of one study. You should also look for existing data (like the census), conduct focus groups (have a discussion with your prospects and customers), and in general find ways to conduct research in your everyday business (go to a fast food restaurant and look at your receipt… you see that phone number to take a survey?). Research is not something that you do and then forget about, it should be conducted year round so that you can be sure that you are making sound business decisions.

So how can I use social media to conduct research? In this era, people are more connected than ever before, not just to each other, but to your business as well. Use this connection to open discussions with your customers. Ask some questions, and you may find some eye opening points that you never realized before. There are more obvious ways to use social media to your benefit (emailing surveys to people and so on), but you should look at the non-obvious and most importantly the non-intrusive ways to getting your information.

Anyways, enough of that. You get the idea. To paraphrase one of my favorite lines from The Godfather, a marketing plan that doesn’t include research is not really a marketing plan. (the original line is “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” and is my favorite line of that great film).