One of the many things TEAM LEWIS does is review brand messaging and communications as a part of a larger marketing and brand strategy plan. Too often, we see messages that are too generic or complicated. In this blog post, we’ll explore how you can leverage marketing research to ensure that your brand message is original and resonates with your audience.
How Message Testing Can Achieve Your Objectives
TEAM LEWIS advises companies to use market research methodologies to perform message tests. Message testing – which can be conducted through surveys, focus groups, or in-depth interviews – helps organizations uncover what their customers and potential customers are thinking about their products, corporate communications, and messaging. Message testing can help determine what themes and content will resonate best among a target audience.
Why Your Strategic Planning Should Start with a Competitive Analysis
Before we begin message testing, we may also conduct a competitive analysis to review the current messaging environment to better understand what key terms and phrases are frequently used in the competitive landscape. This type of research helps identify the best areas to focus on for an effective, yet original, communications and marketing strategy.
Let’s Start with an Example
Company X is looking to launch Product Z, a new product that they are excited about bringing to the market. After building a strategic plan around the launch, someone on their team realizes the messaging isn’t original and sounds similar to Company Y, their main competitor. Will their target audience be able to know the difference between their campaign and their competitors? Is their message easy to understand? To help answer these questions, they decided to pursue message testing before they launch Product Z as a way to improve their marketing strategy.
The key objectives they set out to achieve during message testing are:
- Uncover which messages resonate best with their target audience
- Adjust or change any messages that are unclear or that don’t tell the story they want to about Product Z and their company
- Create a measurable way to analyze messages in comparison to one another
Message testing can be incorporated into a broader market research project, or it can be a standalone study. Message testing technology has become advanced, allowing respondents to go as far as highlighting which parts of the message they like and don’t like. Messages can be shown to respondents as a part of a broader content marketing strategy as well as with imagery and graphics if needed. Respondents can also provide open-ended feedback so that the marketing team can review if a message is being interpreted as intended. Quantitative measurements for each message can help the marketing team decide which message to use on specific platforms or with specific audience segments, supporting the development of a strategic rollout plan.
When To Incorporate MaxDiff Analysis
If a brand needs an advanced quantitative analysis, they can work with researchers to incorporate a MaxDiff analysis. MaxDiff analysis is an advanced way to measure different messages or statements relative to each other. The results rank the messages in comparison to one another by having respondents pick the best option and worst option across different combinations of several statements or messages.
What’s Next?
Once the results are in, the organization can work with their market research experts to analyze the information and adjust their marketing and communications to ensure their campaign hits the right notes.
Let’s go back to our example. Company X decides to test five messages among the general population and uncovers that Message 2 resonates strongly with a younger demographic and Message 4 is more appealing to an older demographic. This information can now be used to target select demographics with advertising across different media channels. Message 3 is unclear, and they decide not to use it at all. Message 1 is a message that appeals to everyone. Message 5 is too similar to their competitors, and they decide to go back and refine the message. Reviewing Company X’s original objectives, we have met each one and the company can now utilize this information moving forward.
A strong PR and marketing plan incorporates market research at various steps in the process to test and verify hypotheses and to evaluate messages so improvements can be made. Strategic planning means building research continually into your communications and marketing strategy as a way to avoid missteps and to get a pulse from your target audience.
Research can be a powerful marketing tool, leveraged to elevate your brand strategy, pinpoint your brand identity, and ultimately spread greater brand awareness. Explore our arsenal of market research services and let’s chat.
