Page 61 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

First, the good news. Qualitative research, as you probably know it in the tradi-
tional marketing world, hasn’t changed. You can still use interviews, focus groups,
shadowing, and other ethnographic research techniques to understand your con-
sumers. There are dozens of authoritative books on the subject — including a few
excellent ones from the For Dummies series, such as Marketing For Dummies, by
Alexander Hiam (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) — on qualitative research, so we won’t
go into those research formats. All the same best practices of recruiting effectively,
knowing your objectives, and having good interview guides and moderators apply.

And now for the bad news: The questions have changed, and you won’t get all your
answers from the qualitative research. Unlike qualitative research in the past,
which focused on understanding a specific consumer’s goals and needs, you must
pay attention to the consumer’s surrounding community and influencers within
that community. For example, you need to ask who influences your consumers
when they make specific purchasing decisions.

Running surveys and quantitative research

Similarly, quantitative research in the form of statistically significant surveys can
be most helpful. Keep in mind that you must run surveys at regular intervals to get
valuable, statistically significant results. The reason is that influence changes
more rapidly in an online environment, and the social media platforms on which
people participate change, too. Don’t run extensive surveys irregularly. Run short,
quick surveys about your audiences on a frequent basis to glean important insights.

Pay attention to where you run the surveys, too, because that can affect the results.
A good strategy is to run the survey on your corporate website but simultaneously
use a third-party survey vendor to run the same survey on the social media plat-
forms. This way, you’re gauging how people participate and socialize in their own
contexts. Very often, the quantitative research can give statistically significant
results about influence, with the qualitative research being used to explain the
hows and whys of the responses. The two kinds of research go hand in hand.

Some of the survey vendors that you can use include

» SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com); see Figure 2-11

» Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com)
» SurveyGizmo (www.surveygizmo.com)
» Key Survey (www.keysurvey.com)

CHAPTER 2 Discovering Your SMM Competitors 45