Maximized Your Market Research to Develop Business

Transcription

1 Maximized Your Market Research to Develop Business By: Matt Mickelson Allison Thom National Business Institute Presented at: ACLEA 50 th Annual Meeting August 3-6, 2013 Baltimore, MD

2 Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about target markets. It is the process by which organizations answer questions about market size and composition, market needs and competition. It is also used to observe market actions and to predict market potential. The goals of market research are to identify where opportunities exist for your organization and to inform resource allocation decisions. This presentation will focus on four core functions within CLE organizations programming, marketing, customer communications and branding and the market research opportunities that exist for each. What can you learn from other providers? What better place to start your market research than your own back door? By observing other providers facing many of the same successes and challenges as your organization, you can remove some of the burden of market research. Not only can you learn best practices from other providers, but you can also learn to avoid the mistakes they make. In addition, you can gain a better understanding of your organization s position in the market, relative to others. You can spot industry trends and remain competitive. Who to learn from Other Leaders in Continuing Education At this conference, we focus on CLE, but we can also learn a great deal from looking outside of CLE to the larger continuing education space. We are fortunate to share this space with some incredible organizations that have market research budgets much larger than ours. The idea is to glean what you can from the research they have done and put that information to use in your organization. Market leaders to watch: AICPA /CPA2Biz, Skillpath, National Seminars Group, AMA, Kaplan, etc. Other CLE Providers ACLEA provides a great forum for us to learn from each other. Look around the room today. Experts in your industry are sitting all around you, they are presenting at sessions throughout the next few days, they are sharing their experiences on the ACLEA list serv, and they are blogging about their discoveries and their points of pain. Take advantage of this information sharing.

3 How to learn from other providers Join their mailing lists What types of marketing are they doing? What types of promotions are they offering? How often are they contacting their mailing list? How are they positioning their products? How far in advance of an event do they / send a brochure? How many times is a single event advertised? Follow their organizations in social media What is their brand identity? What is their following? How frequently are they mentioned in social media channels? What types of promotions are they offering? Visit their websites What is the content of their catalog? How are product lines broken out? How many events are they holding? How many online courses are they offering? What types of credit are available? How do customers purchase products? What does the pricing structure look like? What types of content are they featuring? Read their blogs What are trending topics? What are their core company values? Are there any MCLE credit changes? What new legislation or regulations are being discussed? Engage as a customer What is the purchase process like? What is the cadence of customer communications after purchase? What is the content of those communications? What is the format of those communications ( , postal mail, phone call, etc.)

4 Join communities like ACLEA Get involved Actively engage in the ListServ Learn from other providers Develop relationships with leaders from other organizations How can you help each other? What solutions have they found to challenges you are facing? What types of market trends can you identify? There is also heaps of insight that can be gained from observing other providers over time. Trends will emerge in their programming, scheduling and marketing. Event volume trends Is overall event volume up or down? Is volume focusing into any one time? Geographic trends Are more seminars scheduled in rural versus urban locations in recent times? Are there any new locations being tested? Content trends Are there any emerging topical areas? Are seminars becoming more basic? Content delivery trends Are providers shifting to online delivery? At what rate? Are lecture-style, one-day seminars a thing of the past? Pricing trends Are prices going up? At what rate? Are discount promotions increasing? What about bundling? Branding trends Are there any changes in messaging or voice? Does there appear to be a change in overall visual identity?

5 What can you learn from your customers? A key component of your market research plan must be a customer analysis. It is important to understand the needs and potential of the customers you already have. You should also measure your success in meeting those needs. What questions should your market research answer and how? Who are your customers? Identify customer demographics What types of businesses do they come from? Which states do they come from? What are their occupations and/or titles? What are areas of specializations? What associations do they belong to? Identify customer purchasing behavior What types of seminars do they attend? What do frequency trends look like? What do recency trends look like? How many new customers have been gained in the last 6 months? Create segmentations or groups of customers based on those attributes and determine their group worth Why did they choose you? Marketing / sales triggers Marketing response measurement (on- and offline analytics) Ask your customer communications team Customer surveys Were they satisfied? Course evaluations Ask your customer communications team Will they come back to you again? How often can you expect them to? Retention rates Lifetime value assessment Predictive modeling

6 What motivates them? Is it credit, price, faculty, content, networking or combination? Ask your customer communications team What challenges are they facing? Monitor social media Customer surveys Ask your customer communications team How can you learn more about customers and prospect behavior? Both quantitative ( What? ) and qualitative ( Why? ) marketing research can be done to better understand customer needs and behaviors. Qualitative Market Research (Why?) You can learn a great deal about your customers by simply listening to them. Provide them with every opportunity to tell you what they want, what they need and why. And listen to what they have to say. In most cases, this listening is done through qualitative research methods course evaluations, focus groups, interviews, etc. Document all customer interactions with your organization. If a customer calls in to ask about credit requirements, that s a motivator. Document it. If a customer expresses frustration with the parking arrangement at your event, document it. Try not to waste any opportunity to learn more. However, you will often find that what customers say they will do and what they actually do are quite different. So measuring qualitative feedback only can be a huge mistake. Quantitative Market Research (What?) The idea of quantitative market research is to put your customers to the test. Send two different messages and see which one customers respond to best. Hold two different programs on the same topic and see which gets the highest attendance. Schedule events in two different weeks to see which week draws the highest attendance. Offer a bonus with membership renewal You get the point. Test!

7 You do not need to be a statistician to conduct testing. There are a variety of ways to set up and measure your test. The following is a list of the simple methods: Inferential testing. This is the type of testing where you make a change to something, such as holding events in a new location, and then observe (and infer) whether or not your change made a difference. For example in a marketing context, if you have a green brochure that you use regularly to promote your seminars and want to change the color to orange, you would just change the color, mail it and then watch the results come in, compared to the results of previous mailings of your green brochure. Market testing. This is a type of inferential testing, but a little more sophisticated. Using the brochure color example, some of your events would get mailed the control green brochure, and some events would get mailed the new test orange brochure. Split / Experimental testing. This is one of the most reliable types of testing, that you can have the most confidence in. Using the brochure color example, you would take several events and split the mailing lists for each of the events in half. So, for each event, half the mailings would get the control green brochure, the other half of the people for each event would get the test orange brochure. To design a test you need to consider sample size for both your events and mailings, the confidence you want in the results, and the level of variation you are willing to accept when the results come in. There are many books and articles on this, for example, The Complete Guide to Direct Marketing (Chet Meisner, copyright 2006) if you would like to learn more on this type of testing. There are pros and cons to these testing options. Inferential is the easiest and quickest to implement, but the least reliable. Split testing is more involved, takes more time. However you can have much more confidence in the results. At NBI we do all three types of testing, it depends on what we are testing and the level of risk that test represents for us. For example changes to our brochures for seminars we will usually split test, as we are hesitant to risk in this area. On the other hand if we are trying a new mailer for in-house seminar services, we may just put it in the mail and infer how it does compared to the regular mailer.

8 How does market research contribute to brand development? After you have completed market research on other providers and your current and potential customers, you should have been able to define who your target markets are, what they want and what they will respond to. You should also be able to answer the following questions. The answers will help you effectively position your brand, your products and your company. What needs does your organization fill that others cannot? Why did your customers choose you over your competitors? How do customers identify your brand? How do customers identify with your products?