Leverage Market Research to Build Content Strategy

In todays online and socially connected business world, leading organizations know that developing a successful brand involves access to timely market research. Market research can help you understand the needs of your customers, define their attitude toward your brand, and ultimately help you successfully execute your content strategy. There are four key criteria for successful branded content strategy, they are: relevance, attractiveness, timeliness and consistency.

 Define Your Target Audiences and Analyze Competition

Defining and prioritizing your target audience is the first step. This will enable you to build an approach that raises awareness to motivate your target audiences to act on your digital marketing and social media brand messaging. A particularly important but often overlooked step is to understand your competition. This will require the use of publicly available information and online data. In the process of completing a competitive analysis, you should focus on your competitors’ market positioning and brand messaging.

 Qualitative and Quantitative Brand Research 

It is often challenging for marketers to decide whether to employ qualitative or quantitative research. There is the perception that brand research is strictly a qualitative endeavor. While there are numerous qualitative elements to any type of business research, brand research should also involve quantitative information, which can help your organization make informed, data-based decisions. The qualitative information derived from brand research can be applied in the initial stages as your organization prepares to develop a brand strategy or later should a brand repositioning be required. In addition powerful quantitative research will help your organization directly measure the realized results of your branding efforts and keep track of any changes in perception of your brand over time. This is often referred to as brand tracking research. As businesses communicate through multiple platforms, it is essential that they monitor any changes or inconsistencies in their brand perception with key target audiences. When changes do occur, our customers find it helpful to go back to basics – the previously established brand strategy can help course-correct your content strategy.

On-going market research will help your organization successfully direct its brand and content strategies. Marketing Prof describes this process as “branding marketing research strategy” as it relates to the business plan. As brand management is a continuous process, it is extremely important that organizations make use of brand research to understand the effects of their current initiatives and how to direct future branding efforts and course-correct their content strategy to ensure optimal brand messaging.

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