Customer-First Marketing Research: 4 key data points from research with 2,400 consumers
All marketers should have three key questions in their head at all times. What do consumers really think about your business practices? What marketing approaches can I use to tell them about our business? And where do they want to hear these messages (i.e. channel preferences)?
To help you get an answer to these questions, we conducted research with 2,400 U.S. consumers, sampled to reflect a close match to the U.S. population’s demographics. But we also split them into satisfied and unsatisfied customers to understand how these marketing and business behaviors affect customer satisfaction, especially taking a customer-first marketing approach to all of these business decisions.
We published what we discovered in a 54-page free report filled with oodles of data for the customer-first, data-driven marketer.
But that’s much too much to dive into on a Friday.
So here are some snack-size, social media-friendly (wink, wink) videos to provide you some quick consumer insights from the study.
But first, here’s a little more background about the research.
And now a look at a few of our discoveries…
The top way unsatisfied customers describe that company’s marketing — “The company does not put my needs and wants above its own business goals”
The most frequent response from satisfied customers when asked about the company’s marketing was, “I consistently have good experiences with it,” chosen by 56% of respondents.
When asked about the marketing of the company they were highly unsatisfied with, the top way unsatisfied customers described the company’s marketing was — not customer-first. This description was more frequent than complaining about privacy issues or intrusive, boring or irrelevant marketing.
“The company does not put my needs and wants above its own business goals” was chosen by 35% of unsatisfied respondents.
Print ads most trusted by consumers when making a purchase decision; online pop-ups least trusted
With the digital marketing industry abuzz about ad blocking, it’s not surprising that online pop-ups were significantly less trusted than other advertising channels we asked about — only a quarter of Americans (25%) indicating they trusted these ads when making a purchase decision.
Prints ads were the top trusted advertising channel, according to our survey, with four out of five Americans (82%) telling us they trusted newspapers and magazine ads.
Traditional channels are still popular with consumers
Watching TV ads was the most popular overall channel, with 52% of satisfied customers saying they often or always do it and 29% of unsatisfied customers saying the same.
It’s easier to lose customers with product reliability than it is to win them over
The most frequent response from satisfied customers (43%) was that the company’s products or services were “very reliable.” However, the most frequent response for unsatisfied customers was “fairly reliable” (34%). The responses for satisfied customers skew heavily towards reliability while the responses from unsatisfied customers were much more evenly distributed.
You can follow Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, on Twitter @DanielBurstein.
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Categories: Customer-Centric Marketing ads, Channel Marketing, Channel Optimization, channels, customer satisfaction, customer trust, customer-centricity, customer-first marketing, product reliability, survey
