How Do Market Research Consultants Make Insights Actionable

I was speaking with a friend last week who was telling me about a B2B marketing conference she attended not to long ago. She commented that a lot of questions for the speakers had to do with how to make “insights actionable”.

The last couple of years, the field of business analytics has been ultra-focused on “consumer insights”; the art of understanding consumers at a level which reveals the underlying motivations behind purchasing decisions. A lot of products and services have come to market and report to deliver “insights”. However the process of applying these insights to real business problems is often no easier.

And that's the big problem, isn't it? How do market research consultants make insights actionable? Marketing professionals spend so much time, money, and effort to create a data flow, but so often don't know what to do with it. And, if you're asking these questions once the data has been gathered and reported, than you may be too late.

This article will explore how to measure marketing from the angle of making facts and insights actionable.

**The Market Research Consultants' Secret To Making Insights Actionable**

The secret to making insights actionable is to organize the data collection around this end. All business data can be grouped into two categories that together define any business strategy.

Ranking - or that which we're trying to impact or change (i.e., call volume, sales, coupon redemption, loyalty, revenue, widgets produced, etc.)

Diagnostics - or that which impacts the things we want to change (i.e., staffing, packaging, marketing, price, etc.)

So we have information that is “ranking” and information that is “diagnostic” by nature. If you were a statistician you'd call these dependent and independent variables. Another way to look at these are as cause (diagnostic) and affect (ranking).

When your information is organized in these two categories you'll find that you've laid the foundation for converting data into actionable insights.

**How To Approach Data Analysis**

Your goal once you have collected your ranking and diagnostic data is to organize that data in such a way as to make it actionable. (Note, this method also works well if you're working with data that was originally collected for another purpose but is being re-purposed for a new need.) Just organize the variables into the two groupings, “Ranking” and “Diagnostic.”

Nine times out of ten, your diagnostic data will be something you have control over. By “control” I mean those aspects of your business that you can change pretty much at will. When thinking about how to measure marketing performance you need to keep in mind the things that define performance. Take these four examples of diagnostic data:

*Staffing
*Packaging
*Marketing
*Price

As a business manager, you or someone in your company has control over these four items (and the hundreds more that define your business operations). For example, you can choose how heavily to staff the check-out counter, you decide the volume packaging segments, you know what type of TV buys or PPC online advertising you've bought, or when a discount is offered.

It would be fair to expect that each of these items will have some impact on your ranking measures. For example, you'd expect staffing price to impact sales volume.

The trick is to test these relationships (using the right statistical methods) to see at what levels in a diagnostic variable are associated with a meaningful change in a ranking variable. For example, let's say you measure a 10% increase in sales volume when you dropped the price by 10% in January. In fact, you see roughly the same change in sales every time you drop the price by 10%. Moving forward, you could therefore increase sales by 10% anytime you wanted to… just drop the price by 10%. This finding is therefore “actionable.”

This is an obvious example. It's common for sales volume to go up when price goes down. And for the most part, people don't tend to consider the obvious as “insightful”. However, there does exist a multitude of this same type of example in your business that is not so obvious. These might include things such as:

*The relationship between packaging and seasonal sales fluctuation.
*The color of your “add to cart” button and how many people opt-out of the shopping cart.
*The placement of your 800# and the related call volume to your call center.

The goal is to hunt around your data to find these relationships. And then to deliver them to the people who need to know in a way that they can then make positive business decisions.

**Case Studies - Marketing Measurement in Practice**

I once worked with a mobile tour team that visited four different locations a week and ran for 7 months. Their goal was to sell a telecommunications product at each location. After a few months of operation they wanted to plan the second half of the year in such a way as to maximize sales. The challenge was how to measure strategy when so many different locations were in play.

By using the methods outlined above, we were able to cross reference volume of foot traffic, receptivity to engage the event, qualification, and conversion with type of location to model those locations that would maximize future sales. As a result, cost per acquisition was down 40% compare to the first half of the year and overall program return on investment skyrocketed 123%.

The question of how to measure marketing performance may be daunting on the service but anytime you can measure the ranking and diagnostic variables over time you will have the basis for a predictive model that can be used to maximize future performance.

A major cell phone manufacturer wanted to understand the dynamics around sound quality for a new pre-market cell phone. Portland Marketing + Analytics organized a control/test beta trial among a representative consumer base to look at usage patterns and call quality. As a result, particular industrial sites were identified as containing materials that interrupted the quality of service (not the phone's architecture) thus clearing the product for general market release.

A credit card provider focused on fuel sales for small business fleets used this ranking and diagnostic positioning to understand the performance of their direct mail campaign. This laid the foundation for marketing modifications that improved the team's ability to reach decision makers.

An agency focused on the delivery of event based marketing organized their marketing execution around these ranking and diagnostic measures and was able to accurately project the performance of an experiential marketing program while the marketing was still in the planning stages. This allowed modifications to be made to the overall design that would maximize marketing performance.

Chris provides free 30 minute consultations on any matters related to measuring marketing and customer loyalty. For more information and to get your measurement and reporting problem solved today go to Market Research Consultants

<!–

Related posts:

1. Bharatbook.com: Market Forecast & Recent Quarter Review Of The Taiwanese WLAN Industry
2. New Business Market Research Identifies The #1 Problem Effecting Business
3. Use Sales Training Consultants to Mobilize Your Resources
4. Contracts Protect Management Consultants from Liability
5. How To Market For Home Parties Business: 7 Pillars Of Success For Your Home Party Business