Good quality data is absolutely essential to any segmentation programme. We have already discussed Qualitative techniques for research and here we look at the opposite. Quantitative helps you to understand the key dimensions that pull consumers apart in the market and includes the following methods:
Public Channels
Most often you can find some level of demographic information through public sources. This could be governmental, chambers of commerce, national press, industry specific associations or even from trade fairs and exhibitions. The great thing about public sources is that they tend to be free to access, but the information within may be limited in nature.
This information can help you to identify the differences between your audience against say a national average. This could also be used at a broad level to understand market penetration or the potential market size.
Marketing Channels
One channel you can easily take information from are marketing and advertising channels such as website analytics, social media accounts, email lists etc.
Social media is the main reason why the everyday person has an understanding of analytics and demographics. Most data including website visitors or video viewers is broken down into sex, age and location. Although this can help us to understand our audience at the broadest level, it offers little insight beyond this. Social media platforms collected user data for years before turning this data into a source of revenue through advertising. Despite the amount of data being captured, many criticise the broad nature of the output. As an example for nearly every twitter account, ‘Dogs’ will be the number one interest. Whilst there has never before been a way to collect such information at such volume, we must question the value of the information we are getting from social channels, and this will undoubtedly need to be combined with qualitative research to form a full picture.
Data gathered from your website/social media channel should give you a good idea of how and who is currently interacting with your marketing efforts. There has always been an issue though that marketing and sales systems rarely link up and so seeing the relationship between social media activity and your sales figures may not be as simple as is desirable. The same data is often used as the starting point on native advertising platforms, allowing you to tailor messaging to those already interacting with your brand. Even where more advanced system offer greater levels of attribution, they are far from being perfect systems, but marketing lists and website data are certainly a good starting point.
5 tips for using social media for surveys
