Importance of advertising research for agencies

Advertising research is a detailed study on a particular subject, which leads to a successful and effective campaign. Advertising research also decides the success of an advertising campaign by measuring the impact over its audience. The purpose of advertising research is to either establish a brand image or to improve one. Research also helps in arriving at a creative idea. A creative advertisement is one that engages the target audience. And what helps in developing advertisement creative is the advertising research that takes place before its creation. Before entering the markets, the idea may go through many iterations and improvements until it’s ready for the market.

 

Why advertising research is important?

One should conduct a full- fledged advertising research as it helps in

• Developing creativity: when all the information is accessible, a well- formed strategy could be designed to develop the organization further.
• Improves your position in the field: Advertising research enables a company to find a suitable time and ways to launch their products.
• Rank your image: Advertising research enables comparisons between organizations. So it helps a company to know its place in the market compared to others.
• Predicts likely issues: Advertising research predicts forthcoming problems that an organization might face.
• Monitors progress: It analyzes your organization’s performance.
• Less chances of failures: There is reduced risk of failures if the advertising research is thorough.

 

Scope of advertising research

• Increases awareness: Advertising research increases the knowledge about the market, which helps in building a brand campaign.
• Analyzes changing market: Knowing your customer is very important for any business. A customer’s attitude is subject to change with the change in market conditions. Advertising research analyzes these changing attitudes of your customers.
• Public feedback: Advertising research records the feedback of your audience.
• Results: Final campaigns that are created are based on the results of the research.

 

Types of advertising research

Pre-testing advertising research is carried out to test the ads before the launch of the advertising campaign. Pre-testing research is an important part of the advertising research, as it decides the key points on which the brand will be built. It factors in preferences of the consumers, public surveys, and finding out the target audience’s reaction to the brand. The other is the post-testing advertising research, which is carried out after the launch of the advertising campaign. They get the feedback of the campaign that they have launched. This helps the company to know how effective the advertising campaign has been.

 

Pre-testing research

Every process begins with an idea. Turning an idea into reality is not an easy task. It involves a lot of risks. The more complex the idea, the more is the risk involved. 65% of the ideas and campaigns fail due to creative issues. You need to ensure that your idea must take a different route to reach the same destination, i.e. your target audience. The pre-test phase of the advertising research helps at this point. The pre-test phase includes a detailed study of your target audience and the brand. This phase will decide if the idea will be accepted or rejected. As the pre- test advertising research majorly focuses on the target audience, it will help the agency to figure out the tastes of the public and work accordingly. Pre-testing provides a final opportunity to check whether the original idea is still coming through, and whether that the ad does resonate with the intended audience. This helps the agency to optimize their campaigns before they go into the tedious process of production. As soon as things are approved, the campaign can be run on various platforms.

Pre-testing includes three test routes, which are:

Concept testing: This route is a major part of the creative plan. This covers effectiveness and the basic communication concept.
Theme testing: An advertising campaign is based on a subject, which may revolve around various themes.
Copy research: After a lot of brain storming, the ideas get noted down and are transformed into a crisp and precise copy.

 

Post-testing research

Communication is a two way process. A communication process gets completed only when the feedback is received. With the launch of the advertising campaign, one-way communication gets initiated. However, to complete the whole process, it is important to receive the feedback. And to gain the feedback, a post-study is followed after the launch of an advertisement. It will measure the output of the campaign that the agency has created. The effectiveness of the brand campaign is assessed in the post-testing research. A study is conducted to see if the advertisement has been successful in creating or increasing awareness about the brand or service of the client. Ultimately it will determine, if the advertisement has been able to influence customers or not. Post-testing advertising research helps to monitor the brand’s performance, including awareness, preference product usages and attitudes. Post- testing research involves a tracking process.

Tracking can be done in many ways, which are:

Inquiry & Coupon Response: These experiments are conducted in a field. The consumers are sent an inquiry form related to the brand, which they are asked to fill. The responses describe the effectiveness of the brand advertisements.
Split-run Tests: This enables comparison testing between two or more ads in the same position, and publication, with each ad reaching a comparable group of audience.
Recall Tests: The respondents are asked to answer what they have seen, heard or read about the brands, without allowing them to look at or listen to those ads while answering.
Sales Test Method: This is the direct method where the effectiveness of the brand can be specified. This is done by directly measuring the sales of the product or service once the campaign has been initiated.

 

Suppose you get up really early to travel to work. You are in a perfect sync with the day. You get ready, have breakfast, hop in your car, turn on the radio and start your journey. You are in a perfect flow but suddenly get stuck in a traffic jam. You spend one and a half hour stuck in a jam and finally reach your office another hour late. But your fellow member, who wakes up late, and starts late, has still managed to reach on time just because he managed to check the traffic on the way. Bad situation right! This happens when a research is not a part of your plan and this is how advertising research becomes important for an agency to launch a campaign.