5 Minute Read

In our last blog, we looked at how to grow leads with market research, but what if your looking to check-in on your market’s perspective? What if your itching to know what your target base thinks of your brand? If you’re looking to understand the trajectory, a tracking study might be your best bet. Read on some tips on marketing tracking study basics and for ways to do better marketing tracking studies.

What’s Inside:

1. The Basics for Better Marketing Tracking Studies
2. Roll Your Own with Open Source Technologies

The Basics for Better Marketing Tracking Studies

Mama always said that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. It might be cliche, but it rings true here. With all the survey app choices available today, it’s hard to choose the right one. With licensing fees, studies get expensive fast. But if you’re savvy, you may find it pays to aim for news way for better marketing tracking studies. Ways that yield better results – and saves you money and time in the process.

So now, back to those tips for better marketing tracking studies….

Keep It Consistent.

Tracking studies measure change on a constant set of metrics, or question. Like stones in a fast-moving river, your metrics set must remain the same against the flurry of waves. Tracking waves, that is.

Generally speaking, tracking studies keep tabs on some pretty important stuff:

• Awareness
• Usage/behavior
• Brand/product attributes
• Intent to buy

This is why you should make sure your question series is thoughtfully-worded. And make sure that your next iteration doesn’t stray from it at all. Such strict consistency allows you to monitor both positive and negative trends. Don’t muddy your results by switching it up. And if you do need to change wording, make sure to ask both questions for at least two tracking intervals – the old wording and the new wording. This way, you don’t lose the ability to track.

Choose Intervals Wisely.

When it comes to better marketing tracking studies, intervals depend on the market. After all, you don’t want to waste time and effort when it’s not necessary. For organizations in fast-growing markets – and you’re doing a brand tracker, it’s a good idea to do brand-tracking on a quarterly basis. If you’re in a steadier lane, however, an annual check-in should be enough to gauge progress. Consumer packaged goods markets are good examples.

Consumer preferences change, evolve, and respond to different campaigns and stories. One of the better ways to do marketing tracking studies, you’ll find, is to know when to define timing for each wave.

Resist the urge to be inconsistent about your intervals. If you measure too often you risk losing sight of the bigger picture. You want to see how these responses are changing over time, not babysit the data.

Remember: this is a marathon, not a race!

Take Matters Into Your Own Hands.

Ah, good ol’ open source tech. Who doesn’t love the chance to roll up their sleeves and get their hands into the process?

If you’re not excited, first consider the typical marketing tracking survey process. Say you’d like to do a multi-wave customer satisfaction study. Your targets respond to the survey, and you then wait a couple weeks to collect all that data. Unless it’s super simple and you can rely on the survey tool reporting, you then gotta download it. From there, you pop it into good, ol’ SPSS. This way and clean and transform it, analyze it, and then use yet another program to create reports.

Time-consuming? Yes. Expensive?  Definitely. Goodness help your budget if you do multiple tracking studies a year. You’re always on the lookout for ways to do better marketing tracking studies.  Yes, you can always create your own panel, but you can also build your own app, too.

Rolling Your Own With Open Source Technologies

Now with open source technology, there are cheaper, more timely ways to get even better results. You just need to be willing to get a little more involved to build your own marketing tracking study.

Of course, we’re not talking about you. After all, you’re a marketer and even the most tech-savvy marketers among us are not building their own apps. We’re talking about using a developer who specializes in certain technologies. A good developer builds your survey to host it on your infrastructure or a public cloud. I know what you’re thinking – why do I want to build a custom app when there’s SurveyMonkey?

How can a custom app lead to better marketing tracking studies?

The Secret: Find a React Developer.

ReactJS and React Native are new technologies used by developer for mobile and web apps.  It started at Facebook in 2011 to simplify development – to make it fast and easy to develop new, great-looking, SEO-friendly applications.  It’s been quickly adopted and now runs many major web sites and apps. It’s catching on fast and we expect more MarTech apps, like interactive content pioneer Coglide will use them.

Your developer simply define forms using static markup and compiles it into a dynamic React application. There are literally thousands of free, open source React components in the form. This gives survey writing the same huge choice of question development they need. You then store survey data in an open source Postgres database. And since you host your survey on a cloud service like Windows Azure, it’s easy to adhere to security and compliance standards that your company or industry may require.

Makes for a More Engaging Respondent Experience.

This approach to better marketing tracking studies allows savings in SaaS subscription fees.  You only pay for hosting and for development time. Further, you’re in complete control and build a more engaging respondent experience.

React is built on the premise of a beautiful user interface, to help foster a more dynamic user interface – all of which add up to a better user experience. In the world of surveys, and getting those precious completes, a cool experience is everything. Appealing design is an imperative and with React, it’s baked in the cake.

But almost as important, React-built marketing tracking studies promises to save tons of time in program management and reporting.

Offers Real Value with Real-time Results.

Survey respondents get invitations via email – the usual way. Once a respondent completes a survey, the data updates real-time results.  In other words, the reporting dashboard processes and analyzes the data. This happens every time a respondent submits a completed survey.

What’s the real value of this approach to better marketing tracking studies? In addition to cost savings, you always have up-to-date analysis and reporting. At any given time, you can always report and compare against benchmarks. Furthermore, you’ll have more flexibility to define waves. This means you can compare intervals like “the previous 30 days.” Or “the last calendar month” or whatever interval makes sense based on your market.

All in all, rolling your own tracking study survey with React is a way to do better marketing tracking studies. It’s less expensive, more flexible, and less time-consuming. It’s the fastest way to awesomely up-to-date marketing tracking study results. Now that’s definitely worth hiring a marketing agency for developers to apply some elbow grease.

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