Marketing Research Reports to Drive Digital Wins With Data
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Published on: Sep 14, 2023 Updated on: May 22, 2024
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The ever-evolving digital landscape demands marketers to adopt data-driven strategies, and none are more effective than those of marketing research reports.
With their utilization of data collection and analyses, these reports garner generous results that actually work towards the benefit of brands and their overall business goals.
If you’re a marketer who’s looking to drive results for your brand, then you need to utilize this tool for your strategy development and execution needs. From exploring various experimentation types tailored to digital campaigns to understanding the use of visuals in marketing research reports, this guide will help you discover all the services you need to know about research and exploration today.
Ready to gather real-world insights for real-life impact on your brand? Then check out this comprehensive guide by Propelrr right now.
The role of research reports in marketing research for digital
Before getting into the nitty gritty of writing these types of analytical papers, let’s familiarize ourselves with the role of this exploratory tool in the overall drive for your business’ online promotions.
Marketing research reports are presentations, studies, or articles that provide valuable insights into consumer behavior, enabling you to make data-driven decisions based on real-world trends and preferences. By analyzing the data and experiments presented in such studies, you can identify target audience demographics, refine strategies, and allocate resources more effectively to maximize wins in future campaigns.
Ultimately, these presentations empower businesses to adapt and optimize their online promotions, ensuring they remain competitive in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Whether you use it for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, ecommerce, or content creation, it hosts the potential for impactful outcomes through the presentation of strategic insights.
Given the role of such studies in your business, let’s get into the rules and uses of these exploratory papers in all aspects of your online promotions, from PPC to social media management and many more.
Navigating the rules of writing marketing research reports in digital
In this section, you’ll get to define and detail the different types of research studies for online promotions, including but not limited to content marketing, user experience (UX) design, social media, and more. As you go through this section, take note of how these studies may help you fine-tune efforts for optimal results and engagement:
1. Audience segmentation reports
An audience segmentation study is an analysis that segments target audiences based on demographics like age, gender, or location, and psychographics like interests, political leanings, buying habits, and more. Through this data collection process, you gain insights that allow you to group audiences together for effective strategy-making with content marketing services, UX development needs, and more.
The resulting study you get from this type of analysis can be used to profile website visitors, refine campaigns for social media marketing, and even create ideal buyer personas. All these lead to more strategic efforts towards the achievement of your overall business goals.
2. User behavior reports
A user behavior analysis, on the other hand, is a deep dive into digital user interactions and patterns. It provides you with an understanding of how users interact with and on online platforms, covering the pages users visit, how long users stay, and what they do on said pages. This data informs your behavioral analysis to comprehend user wants and needs.
The resulting report that comes from this analysis can include detailed patterns, trends, and preferences from users’ digital interactions. It tracks heatmap results, paid ad clicks, scrolls, and more to shed light on the strategies, executions, and designs that work - or likewise require improvement.
3. Competitor digital presence reports
A report on your competitors’ digital presence is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s an evaluation of your brand’s competitors online, alongside social media trends that may affect your promotions’ success as well.
By analyzing your competitors’ online activities, you can identify their strengths and weaknesses, understand trends in a timely manner, and leverage opportunities for your brand’s own differentiation. This can result in a more unique online presence for your business, along with a better identification of gaps that you can exploit as well.
4. Website or app usability reports
A website or app usability study usually entails an assessment of the UX for your brand’s digital platforms. It can include investigations into the quality of your users’ experiences and interactions with your platform and informs the ways in which you optimize said platform for better results.
By diving deep into your platform’s usability, you can unearth user pain points, navigation issues, and areas of confusion. This identification process can lead to actionable insights that enable you to enhance your UX with efficient digital strategies too.
5. Social media engagement reports
A social media engagement report is a measurement of the effectiveness of your social media marketing strategies, in terms of reach and engagement. It provides insight into things like the social platforms most frequented by your target audience, the types of content they prefer, your optimal posting times, and more.
Studies obtained from this type of investigation can help quantify the real-world effectiveness of your social media executions. It can help you detail social media metrics like shares, comments, likes, and more, and can even provide insights to refine your content on social media today.
6. Online brand perception reports
Last on this list of various study types is the online brand perception assessment. This is usually an appraisal of audience sentiment towards your brand across multiple digital channels and can gauge how you are perceived by a target audience group online.
In this assessment type, you can collect positive and negative sentiment data, identify brand associations, and see where your messaging aligns or diverges from your intended image. This allows you to make improvements that can have lasting effects, not just online, but in real-world arenas like revenue for your local stores as well.
Benefits of keeping marketing research reports
Given all these rules and definitions for the different types of analyses, you might be wondering what the benefits of these assessments are as well. Aside from providing you insight into user behaviors, web or app usability, social media metrics, and more, the benefits of turning these appraisals into real-life strategies include:
- Data collection. Each of these processes precludes the act of collecting data from online platforms and interactions, which can be used in all sorts of strategies and executions for optimization.
- Data analysis. By collecting and extracting this data, you can gather insights and information that you can deeply analyze for better target audience understanding.
- Strategic formulation. These analyses and assessments allow you to develop well-researched plans based on trackable and real-world insights too.
- Implementation and optimization. Given the wealth of data offered by these research types, you can execute masterful strategies and refine them based on real-time feedback as well.
With the help of such analyses and summaries, you can formulate a streamlined strategy that translates intangible digital insights into impactful, real-world results for your brand.
Examples of marketing research trend reports
Still not convinced by the effectiveness of research articles for your online promotions? Then you should take a look at these real-world examples of marketing research trend reports to see exactly how useful these tools are for your business success today:
- The North Face. To get as many users as possible to sign up for the TNF 100 event, the team under The North Face analyzed the company’s target audience behaviors and identified a mobile-first approach to their signups. Through their assessment, they were able to produce a mobile-first microsite, a social wall, and geo-targeted event ads to reach more mobile users for higher signup rates.
- OSP International LLC. To analyze platform usability and drive up conversion rates, the team under OSP conducted studies on the company’s website to see what could be done to improve the UX of their PrepCast PM Exam Simulator site. Through this assessment, the team was able to enact changes that caused a 13% conversion rate improvement for the PrepCast PM Exam Simulator, and a 78% lift overall for the site’s UX.
Crafting effective digital strategies with research insights
With the real-world examples given in the previous section, there’s no question that you should be able to craft your own campaigns given the right insights. But there’s something that you should also keep in mind when creating effective digital strategies - that is, to align findings with the right actions through iterative stages of improvement.
To craft an effective marketing campaign that aligns insights with action, you need to constantly test and experiment with your collected data. Through experimentation, you can constantly discover new insights that allow you to refine campaigns, thus providing better actions that lead to the best possible results for your business.
How might you leverage the values of experimentation to gather insights and turn them into real-world actions? Here are a few final tips:
- Utilize various data analytics tools. These reporting tools can run and automate experiments for you, thus making insight extraction even more effective than usual.
- Consider cross-channel strategies. Your brand shouldn’t just be promoted on a single channel, after all. Gather information on multiple channels to create cohesive strategies for better digital success.
- Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs). By constantly measuring and tracking your KPIs, you’ll be able to identify opportunities to optimize and experiment with strategies, making for better executions in the long run.
Key takeaways
Given all these insights for making the most out of your research, it’s time for you to embark on a new and improved journey for your brand’s marketing today. Here’s a list of the main takeaways of this guide, for you to keep in mind:
- Ground your strategies in data. This is how you’ll create a stable foundation for all your marketing strategies - with real-world insights from valuable trends and audience preferences.
- Use reports to organize insights. By utilizing reports, assessments, and presentations to organize your findings, you make it easier to develop actionable strategies for your business as well.
- Create actionable strategies with experimentation. Want to make sure your strategies actually work? Test them out with experimentation with the help of an expert digital marketing agency today.
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