Sales, marketing, branding and ROI drive much of today’s conversation about how to use social, content marketing and interactive. Yet it’s a missed opportunity when companies and nonprofits don’t use their sites to learn more about their stakeholders.
Surveying customers, harnessing data, and determining topical interests can help organizations better understand their customers, serve them with better information, and in turn, increase many desired marketing key performance indicators. Lower cost technologies make learning easier today, whether that’s using interstitial survey technologies, CRM tracking tools, or analytics.
I talked recently with Everyday Health VP of Market Research Carolina Petrini about how they are using Crowd Science to learn more about their stakeholders. They wanted to go beyond knowing that their readers were predominantly women to:
- Develop audience profiles
- Create better advertising targeting
- Understand topic trends
- When asked specifically with regards to the day of the week, more respondents were not in a great mood on Monday, Tuesday and Sunday as compared to other days of the week.
- However, respondents who took the survey on a Saturday, Thursday and Wednesday were not feeling as great as those who took it on other days of the week.
- 68% are concerned about the symptoms
- 65% have researched the condition (1/3 recently) predominantly via the web (Search/health Web sites.)
- 60% shared the information with the sufferer
- 60% encouraged the sufferer to discuss symptoms with a physician
- 18% even took the initiative to consult a physician directly
As a result of their in depth research, Everyday health was able to strengthen several of their offerings for their 24 web sites. Here are two case studies:
Depression
Surveys showed Everyday Health that day of week and time of day directly impacted when most people had depression symptoms kicked in. As a result, the company can create content and send newsletters during high profile time periods to readers and help them. Further, advertisers can respond to this highly targeted content initiative. Here are some of additional data points beyond the above chart:
Erectile Dysfunction
It’s Friday, why not? So most advertisements serving the ED market have targeted men, but because the Everyday Health audience is primarily women they weren’t receiving interest from the pharmaceutical companies serving this market.
As a result of its on site research, Everyday Health learned that women are very involved when it comes to sexual health and treatment of partner, and have direct influences on diagnosis. Some statistics about 100+ readers who took the ED/sexual health survey:
As a result, Everyday Health used the results to provide better information to women, which raised sales of ED drugs, in turn getting the attention of big pharma companies.
Everyday Health is now using Crowd Science now for all survey research. Petrini says the technology was easy, and gave them control over recruitment and prioritization of mini surveys. They find they are able to recruit respondents efficiently, and could even learn when to increase frequency of recruitment.
What I like about the Everyday Health case study is that shows how data can be used to better serve stakeholders, and fuel more ROI. Going beyond simply getting people to a web site and engaging in calls to action is important. A web site is increasingly the convening point, a place to activate brand loyalists, develop stronger ties with customers, all to generate better outcomes. Learning more about customers can dramatically drive these actions.
What do you think?
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