Marketing & advertising agencies have a lot on their plate--not just because digital mediums are rapidly replacing traditional marketing but simply because their job is insanely difficult when you think about it: marketing agencies have no product control, are rarely involved in development or customer outreach, and yet are responsible for ensuring those products have customers once brought to market.
That's a tough ask.
Frankly, marketing agencies need all the help they can get when it comes to designing effective campaigns for their clients. Enter market research.
What Market Research Brings: Research and Validation
The research part is easy to explain: the more you know about your client's market--its products, consumers, and competitors--the better you can design and deploy effective advertising campaigns. Understanding how consumers engage products, the customer journey, pain points, and trends--this knowledge is truly indispensable to any marketing campaign. Methodologies such as panel surveys, shopalongs, and even focus groups will quickly get you to the heart of matters.
Validation is, perhaps, the most crucial function a market research firm can provide a marketing agency. Think of validation in two ways: as a means to monitor in-field execution, and (let's be frank), a means to ensure credit is given where credit is due. Marketing agencies can design a flawless campaign for their clients, but if it is not properly executed the field, it will never get off the ground. For that reason, dispatching field agents to in-store or online locations to ensure that your marketing vision is being accurately and completely carried out ensures that you can make in-field changes to get it right before it is too late.
On the other end of the validation spectrum, let's say the campaign is perfectly designed and perfectly executed and sales are exceeding even your client's wildest expectations. You must tie these results to your efforts. Deploying Voice of Customer methodologies will give you data directly from consumers that will let you and your client know just where to attribute success.
Expertise, Capabilities, and Time: Don't Try this at Home
You're thinking, well, that doesn't sound too difficult. And yes, of course marketing agencies could perform their own market research--build out a field team and an analytics team, start from the ground up, and get 'er done. Nobody is doubting they could do it for themselves. But they shouldn't have to, and even if they did, it would be their first rodeo.
Market research firms bring capacity expertise to marketing agencies. At TrendSource for example, well, this is far from our first rodeo. We are pioneers in the market research industry and bring 25+ years' experience to the table--that's a lot of rodeos. This means we know how to design programs, and we get it right the first time. A market research firm like ours will custom build programs,, partnering with agencies to help them with the complexities of data collection and analysis.
And once that program is designed, market research firms have the assets in place to quickly, efficiently, and accurately execute it. That means, for example, having a Field Agent Database that spans all of North America and guarantees 100% coverage and completion 100% of the time. It means having a samurai-sword sharp analytics team already in place, with the experience and power to turn raw data into actionable insights that will provide a foundation for future campaigns.
Even if marketing agencies had these capabilities, they certainly do not have the time to eat, drink, breath, and live market research. We do.
In partnering with market research firms, marketing and advertising agencies augment their capabilities, adding market research to their full stack of services, delivering more to their clients, expanding their services, enhancing their pitches and getting the support they need to plan, create and execute winning advertising and marketing campaigns.
