What is new product development?

Put simply, new product development, sometimes called NPD, is the process businesses go through to bring a new or updated product or feature to market. The most successful product launches are the ones that incorporate the needs of customers from the start. 

In this article, we will cover the basics of new product development—why it’s important and how to achieve it. And we’ll detail the different, although not competing, methods that people have researched to determine what separates the market leaders from the average companies.

We often talk about the 9-step NPD process—this breaks down the complex process into manageable sections that you and your teams can work through.

Here’s our rundown of that process to whet your appetite for NPD:

Why new product development is important

New Product Development (NPD) productivity in the top performing company is five times what it is the the average company. The top performer gets five times as much new product output for the same investment according to the Innovation Excellence Study 2005 conducted by Arthur D. Little.

Robert G. Cooper, in his essay The Formula for Success

The top companies make new product development seem effortless. They constantly spin out new products.

Think, for example, of Apple: between the Apple Watch, the iPad, iPhone, Macs… Apple have managed to produce several new products a year for a while. On top of this, they continually add new services to ingrain themselves in the lives of consumers worldwide: things like Apple TV, and iCloud are making the company sticky and an essential part of our daily lives.

We need to acknowledge the cause and effect cycle of Cooper’s statement: are top companies in their position of power because they were able to adapt and undertake new product development quickly and effectively? Or, did becoming top companies enable them to undertake new product development, due to more capital, resources, and revenue for research and development?

The answer is: probably a bit of both.

Apple is the market leader because they undertook new product development in an effective manner, and then Apple had more market share, more data, more capital to continue new product development effectively. And so the cycle continues.

New product development is important because:

1. It helps you to increase market share.
2. It engages customers, and builds brand loyalty.
3. It allows a company to stay in touch with the market, and consumers.

How you should approach new product development

New product development is important, but of equal importance is the way in which you do it.

Cooper acknowledges the divide between a ‘top’ company and an average company’s new product development, and in his study he breaks down the processes of the ‘top companies’, and seeks the common denominators—what they all do that makes them able to undertake new product development effectively.

The seven key principles of new product development

1) Customer focused

Solving customer problems is key. If you can offer a real ‘value proposition’ to the customer, you are on your way to effective new product development.

This highlights the need for a certain “wow” factor. Offering boring modifications, small updates, and new products with no competitive advantage is a problem.

A great methodology for getting to the bottom of what consumers really want is via Jobs to Be Done research.

2) Front-end loading

This, in essence, is about good due-diligence. Thorough market, technical and business assessments are critical at the front-end, or the early stage. That research early on will make your decision making much easier, much more effective and in line with the reality of your circumstances.

It’s the ‘measure twice, cut once’ principle, which can be incredibly important (and cost effective) if you’re looking at a multi-million pound product development cycle.

This is where a consumer intelligence platform like Attest can pay for itself 1000x over by honing your idea first, helping you eliminate bad or unwanted new product ideas so you can focus in on the winners early on.

3) Spiral or agile development

Smart teams “create the first version of a product (perhaps a virtual one) and test it with the customer, seeking feedback. Then they use that feedback to produce the next, more complete version—maybe a working model or a protocept.”

This comes down to:

“build, test, obtain feedback, and revise”

The alternative is the outdated, linear approach (sometimes known as ‘Waterfall’) that starts at the top with an executive having a brainwave (see the dangers of Survivorship Bias) and then focusing on getting it perfect before it’s released to consumers.

Too often, a product is thought up, and then the processes are put in place, and then you get around to making it. By the time it comes to market, it either does not suit the consumer, or a competitor’s product has come out, or the market has simply moved on.

4) Be comprehensive

Cross functional teams are key. They need to be involved from start to finish, and provide an outlet for the agile development mentioned above. For example, you shouldn’t invent the product in the lab, and only pass it onto marketing a few weeks before launch.

Having a sound marketing and communications plan from the outset is essential. All teams should work hand-in-hand.

Added to this is the necessity of team accountability. This is essential for good communication, but also for people to know where their roles reside.

5) Define your key metrics

You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Peter Drucker

Measuring how your new products perform is key to understanding and evaluating your processes.

This must start at a team level, and be built up to the company at large. But only by measuring teams can we enforce that much needed accountability we mentioned above.

What does a new product launch have to do in years 1, 2 and 3 in order to be crowned a ‘success’? What numbers would be so bad that it would necessitate you pull the plug on it? It’s best to agree these up front than after your product has already gone to market.

6) Focused and effective portfolio management

Here is the biggie, and a word of warning to all those seeking to maximise their new product development.

Most companies simply have far too many ‘development projects’ on the go at the same time. Resources are spread, and their portfolio is out of balance – not only are there too many projects, but they are the wrong mix.

Cooper’s suggestion to alleviate this problem is to develop a funnel mechanism. Start with lots of ideas, and put them through the paces. Set up gates and tests to see which ones are going to add most to the company.

7) A lean, scalable and adaptable process

The overarching theme of these points is agility. Anything that involves too much bureaucracy, time wasting, and the dreaded ‘make work’ activities, needs to be changed.

Cooper’s rule: if your new product development process is over three years old, it probably needs to be changed.

The stage-gate process

This is the foundation of Cooper’s new product development process that has gathered plenty of traction over the years.

Stage 0

Discovery: explore new opportunities and ideas.

Stage 1

Scoping: assessment of the possible benefits of the project.

Stage 2

Build business case: a crucial part of the due diligence we mentioned earlier—this is about evaluating the business feasibility, leading to product and project definition, project justification and project plan.

Stage 3

Development: design and development is carried out, operations are defined, the market launch is established, and testing is outlined.

Stage 4

Testing and validation: this is the key difference between the ‘top’ companies and the average ones. This stage validates the product, the market, the development, and it keeps the company in touch with market developments.

Stage 5

Launch: commercialisation of the product.

Kick off your new product development

Learn more about how tapping into the opinions and behaviors of consumers is an essential part of new product development

Learn more

And here are some more pointers and approaches for you to think about to make sure your new product development hits the mark.

Self-organising project teams

A group possesses a self-organizing capability when it exhibits three conditions: autonomy, self-transcendence, and cross-fertilization.

Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, The New New Product Development Game

In other words, when a team is given free-reign, with ‘zero-information’ (i.e. prior knowledge is discounted), they can work freely, effectively, and offer appropriate solutions.

Within the right framework, “the project team begins to operate like a startup company – it takes initiatives and risks, and develops an independent agenda.”

Overlapping development phases

Teams work on different time scales.

For instance, image that R&D takes a lot of time, and Product teams take less. They must work together to synchronize their timelines to meets deadlines. The benefit is that “each member soon begins to share knowledge about the marketplace and the technical community”.

This is a development of what we talked about earlier—cross-functional teams are essential to effective new product development.

“Multi-learning”

This is simply about staying in touch with a host of different outside sources of information to keep the project up to date.

Subtle control

Subtle control is the culmination of “self-control,” “control through peer pressure,” and “control by love.”

In essence, it is about having a management system in place that keeps an eye on proceedings, to “prevent instability, ambiguity, and tension from turning into chaos,” while also having management that “avoids the kind of rigid control that impairs creativity and spontaneity.”

Organisational transfer of learning

This is more than simply keeping everyone in touch. It’s about the “transfer of learning to subsequent new product development projects”. That is something that is often missed.

We talk so much about keeping everyone in touch during a project, and give no consideration as to what to do between projects; this is about inter-project sharing of knowledge, as opposed to intra-project.

Conclusion

All these steps are important, and well worth considering. However, every single step seems to come back to two key points.

Firstly, being lean (remove waste and inefficiency from the process), scalable (push for as much autonomy as possible), and adaptable (test and learn as you go along) is key.

Secondly, building the new product development around consumers is vital.

Yes, getting your new product development process right is important, but if you’re not engaging with, or listening to your target consumers, there’s no point in even worrying about the processes, because the product won’t be satisfying their needs. That’s a recipe for failure before you’ve even begun.

Learn more about the NPD process and how to get set up with our 8 simple steps to new product development.

Get insights for your NPD

Understanding what your target customers think about your upcoming products is absolutely essential to giving them experiences they value (and will pay for!)

See how to launch your products successfully

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Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of how likely a customer is to recommend a company’s products or services. Because Net Promoter Score (or NPS), is a measure of business performance linked directly to growth and long-term success. It’s a metric that senior leaders care deeply about.

Customers are asked: On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend Company A’s product or service to a friend or a colleague?

The responses are then pooled into 3 sections:

0-6 = Detractors – unlikely to purchase the product again, and may actually damage the brand’s reputation.

7-8 = Passives – not so dissatisfied as to bad-mouth the brand, but not satisfied enough to actually recommend it.

9-10 = Promoters – brand evangelists who repeatedly buy the product or service, and are extremely likely to recommend it to people.

So, how do you get an NPS out of this? Simple – you just subtract the detractors from the promoters. Passives are left out.

You’ll then have your NPS: a number ranging from -100 to 100 that measures consumer sentiment towards your brand.

You’ll note that with only 9 and 10s considered ‘Promoters’, it’s a high bar to get a high NPS – so brands that manage it should bask in the glow of a great score.

Why is Net Promoter Score important?

There are three major reasons why businesses around the world focus on and track NPS:

1. Net Promoter Score is a trusted metric

The first thing to note is that NPS is a trusted metric that’s used across a wide range of industries – it’s recognisable, standardised, and people tend to know what it means.

NPS has its roots in a rigorous study by Fred Reicheld, with the assistance of Satmetrix – a company that develops software to collect and analyse real-time customer feedback – and global consultancy Bain & Co.

In the study, they asked 20 questions to customers from 6 industries. They found the most effective question on their tests to be what we now deem the cornerstone of NPS:

“How likely is it that you would recommend [company X] to a friend or colleague?”

2. Higher Net Promoter Score often means higher brand loyalty

As the Temkin Insight Group demonstrate through their research on the Economics of NPS, there is a strong correlation between NPS and brand loyalty.

In their research, which spans 20 industries, they found that 67% of Promoters would be ‘very likely to forgive the company if it makes a mistake’, and 92% of Promoters are ‘very likely to repurchase from company’.

Take, for example, Rackspace – a cloud computing company. Their CEO, Lanham Napier, says that what distinguishes the company is the ‘fanatical support’ they get from their customers. The way they manage and measure this? Net Promoter Score. Napier says:

‘Promoters recommend Rackspace to their friends, becoming an extension of our salesforce. Customers who are promoters are also more profitable, staying with us longer and buying more of our services…. The creation of loyal promoters not only reduces customer acquisition costs, it improves retention rates and inspires Rackers [employees]. We have witnessed these results first hand.‘

3. High Net Promoter Score is key to growth

As the title of the inaugural article on NPS would suggest (The One Number You Need To Grow), NPS is key to growth.

The research team plotted NPS against growth rate.

‘In airlines, for example, a strong correlation existed between net-promoter figures and a company’s average growth rate over the three-year period from 1999 to 2002. Remarkably, this one simple statistic seemed to explain the relative growth rates across the entire industry; that is, no airline has found a way to increase growth without improving its ratio of promoters to detractors.’

This was reflected in ‘almost every industry’ examined.

How to Measure and Track Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Asking the question is one thing, but making sure you ask it at the right time, and follow it up with the right questions, is essential.

As Shep Hyken, best selling-author and customer service and experience expert, writes in Forbes:

‘It’s not about the most recent experience. It’s about the overall experience. Use the NPS question in the right place, at the right time and for the right reason.’

So, if your brand has had some bad press recently, maybe don’t ask people how likely they’d be to recommend you – unless what you want is a measure of the damage caused by the incident.

The Net Promoter Score is important, but understanding why people have given a certain score is more important. It is essential to ask follow up questions, such as:

‘Why did you choose this score?’ And ‘What could we do better?’

Only with that information can you begin to understand what your brand is doing well, and how you can improve. Focusing on the positives is important, as Bruce Temkin says:

‘By focusing on what causes promoters, you will get the opportunity to engage the organization in uplifting discussions – instead of just beating the drum about what’s broken.’

What to do with the NPS results

Closing The Feedback Loop

Rob Markey and Fred Reichheld stress the importance of ‘closing the loop’.

In other words, the feedback must be responded to productively – that can happen when the relevant team in your company is notified and given responsibility to act.

A survey could reveal that customer service is a big problem. Sitting on that information is useless, and it’s essential to create a dialogue with the customer service team, with a follow-up scheduled to see what actions have been taken to solve the issue.

The Four Loops

Temkin says that there are in fact four loops that need to be created:

• Immediate Response. Reach out to the customer.
• Corrective Action. Get the manager or employee to help fix the immediate problem.
• Continuous Improvement. Create new process to avoid the mistake happening
• Strategic Change. Change the way the company operates to eliminate the chance of the fault reoccurring.

Such movements can create an employee-centric company. Starting with the employee will feed better customer service, as Markey and Reicheld say:

‘Energized, motivated people are more likely to put in the extra discretionary effort that can raise productivity and create superior experiences for customers […] Employees need to see the fundamental connection between the work they do every day and its impact on customers.’

Closing the loop is how this begins – it creates customer involvement, and breads motivation.

Trends in Net Promoter Score

The real power of NPS as a business metric comes from tracking it over time.

As touched on earlier, if you happen to take NPS just once a year or even once a quarter, there are too many variables around the timing of the survey that may impact results, which are not necessarily reflective of your true business performance.

Instead, you should track it on a monthly basis, and then see how it trends up or down over time. This will provide a truer reflection of your customers’ sentiment towards your brand.

It also helps provide earlier warning signs. For example if you’r trending down three months in a row, you can spot that pretty quickly and start to take corrective measures. If you only track NPS quarterly, it will be 3 quarters – 3x longer! – until you spot the trend, by which time your competitors may already be making inroads into your market share and stealing customers.

Tracking Your Competition’s Net Promoter Score

Tracking your own NPS has become a standard ‘best practice’ for businesses.

However what’s often missed is the tracking of competitors’ NPS. Why?

Because it isn’t as easy. You can measure your own NPS by emailing a survey to a selection of your database each month; how can you do the same for your competitors without their data?

This is where a platform like Attest can really help you go above and beyond, by letting you reach consumers of competitor brands.

This way you’ll start to see interesting trends emerge that you can use to your strategic advantage. For example, is their NPS declining month-on-month? And why, what is it that consumers are no longer as happy about? This presents the perfect opportunity to step in and do a better job.

Alternatively you may notice a new market entrant’s NPS continue to rise (along with their brand awareness), which indicates a clear market threat. Again, you’ll be able to understand why consumers are so happy with this new competitor…so you can take reactive measures before it’s too late.

NPS In The Boardroom

We started off by looking at the importance of measuring Net Promoter Score, and we’ve looked at several reasons why it’s become such a prominent business metric.

What you may not be aware of, is that it’s also the language of shareholders, boardrooms and c-level executives.

Just skim through a listed company’s annual investor report, and you’ll see that they track and report on NPS as a way of tracking their customer experience; celebrating when NPS has increased, while explaining how they will mitigate the threat of eroding brand confidence if NPS has declined.

If you want to align your focus with that of shareholders and your most senior stakeholders, then you too should be tracking your Net Promoter Score, and learning what the drivers are behind any changes to it, so you know how to improve it.

If you’re interesting in tracking and measuring your NPS, grab your free copy of our Complete Guide to Brand Tracking – it’s full of expert advice, insights, and tips and tricks for tracking your brand health.

The Experts’ Guide to Brand Tracking

How to look at the impact of things like audience reach, panel diversity, and survey design to help you decide whether your current brand tracker is up to scratch.

Get your copy now!

The post Net Promoter Score (NPS): The Complete Guide appeared first on Attest.

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? Similarly, if a new product is launched, but the brand doesn’t resonate with consumers, does anybody notice it?

Put simply, no.

A brand is measured, mainly, on its success in speaking to, and subsequently winning over, consumers. If the brand strategy is failing then the product it promotes will also fail to reach its targets.

In crowded markets, a company can succeed or fail on the strength of brand alone, especially when there are competitors offering similar products and the main differentiation is the messaging and style of your brand.

So brand is clearly important, but why do we at Attest think tracking your brand is one of the most important consumer intelligence projects you can undertake? In this short guide we’ll explain…

Get started with a brand tracking template

Measure the health of your brand with this brand tracker survey template

Start your survey

Why is tracking your brand important?

A successful brand both attracts new, and retains existing, customers.

Though quantitative metrics such as days to close and volume of repeat custom are important KPIs for your team, it’s also vital to understand the customer motivations driving these metrics. That way you can take control of the data (the ‘Why’ behind the ‘What’.) And the only way to understand these motivations is to ask consumers directly.

It can be disarming to receive real feedback that is contrary to your internal perception of the brand, and a hard thing to get used to. But it’s only by understanding consumer attitudes that you will have the insight required to influence them.

By understanding the consumer attitudes towards your brand (and competitor brands—yes you can track their brand health too!), you can create strategies that place real-life insight in the driving seat.

Understanding consumer attitudes should inform you as to the health of your brand, whether the messaging received is that which you intended, and whether it’s resonating with consumers.

But these metrics can’t be viewed in isolation. In order to be fully informed as to the fluid relationship between your brand and the opinions of consumers, and to understand your role in this relationship, you should track the adjustments you make over time.

The healthiest brands operate on a tight full feedback loop, where consumer insights drive change within the brand, which in turn influence consumer opinions, repeating over and over again.

Consumer priorities can be fickle, changing constantly, but a feedback loop, informed by regular brand tracking, allows you to stay on top of those changes, and benefit from it rather than losing out to those who are informed.

How do you run a brand tracker?

Now you know that running a brand tracker is a great idea, where should you start?

Running a full brand audit can have huge benefits, including ensuring your branding efforts are directed appropriately to increase ROI by resonating with customers. But this ambitious task can be daunting—especially if you’re aiming to recreate this once, twice, four or even more times a year.

Thankfully, at Attest we’ve created a brand tracker survey template, which you only need to add a few simple details to in order to run surveys that gather truly valuable insights about the health of your brand.

The brand metrics recorded within the brand tracker survey include:

• Unprompted and prompted brand recognisability compared to other brands in your sector
• Current market share
• The impact of recent media content on your brand health
• Purchase intent and key purchase drivers
• Level of consumer understanding around your key messaging
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This comprehensive report allows you to identify the weaknesses within your brand health as a whole, while also allowing you to toggle key demographics on and off to see where your brand is healthy and where work is needed.

You can also gather these metrics about your key competitors. That’s right—brand tracking doesn’t have to be limited to tracking your own brand! It’s super useful to understand what your target consumers think about the other brands in your market.

Other considerations

A brand tracker survey works as a leading indicator for the health of your brand based on your recent marketing efforts, and the impact of any media attention (positive or negative).

In addition, there is a wealth of intelligence that you can collect from building bespoke brand trackers aimed at pre-testing a new strategy, campaign or creatives.

You can use bespoke surveys to test, predict and alter the impact of a new campaign, as well as using your quarterly or monthly brand tracker to provide consistent baseline data on the actual results.

Using Attest you can also exclude those who’ve answered a previous brand tracker for your company from answering any future ones. This feature makes sure that you’re speaking to fresh respondents each time you run a brand tracking survey—meaning they’re not influenced by a previous survey.

Learn more about your brand with the extended brand tracker

Use this template to add even more depth to your brand tracking

Launch the template

Example brand tracker template questions

Here’s a handy list of example questions you could include in your brand tracker survey. We’ve added some of these questions to this real-life brand tracker survey—take a look and see the kind of insights you could get from your brand tracker.

1. Which of the following, if any, have you purchased in the past 12 months?
2. When did you last use [e.g. makeup] products?
3. What are the most important factors deciding which [makeup] brand you buy? Please rank the below with 1 being most important and 6 being least important.
4. Thinking about [makeup], what brands, if any, are you aware of? Please type in all the brands you can think of.
5. Which of these brands, if any, are you aware of?
6. Which of these brands, if any, have you ever purchased?
7. Which of these brands, if any, would you consider purchasing from in the next 12 months?
8. Which of the following statements, if any, do you associate with each brand?
9. When, if ever, have you purchased [Brand] products?
10. How likely would you be to recommend [Brand] to a friend, family member or colleague?
11. Why did you give that score? Please include as much detail as possible.
12. In the last month, have you seen/heard about [Brand] in any of the following ways?
13. When, if ever, have you purchased [other Brand] products?
14. How likely would you be to recommend [other Brand] to a friend, family member or colleague?
15. Why did you give that score? Please include as much detail as possible.
16. In the last month, have you seen/heard about [other Brand] in any of the following ways?

How to use the Brand Tracker template

The Attest brand tracker survey template requires just a few simple details from you, which you then add to our pre-written survey.

Our in-house team of research experts have crafted this template to give you high quality, actionable data from respondents and gather the brand health metrics you’re looking for.

And our template will automatically design your survey to produce engaged, high quality responses.

We created a comprehensive guide to walk you through your next consumer intelligence project – download the full checklist here to be well on your way to tracking your brand, understanding consumer attitudes and having the tools you need to make beneficial changes to your business strategy.

Learn more about the Attest Brand Tracker survey template by getting in touch with us or signing up to Attest and trying our template today.

Learn more about tracking your brand with Attest

Measure the ROI of your brand building work by tracking consumer opinion of your brand (and your competitors!)

Find out how to track your brand

The Experts’ Guide to Brand Tracking

How to look at the impact of things like audience reach, panel diversity, and survey design to help you decide whether your current brand tracker is up to scratch.

Get your copy now!

The post Free brand tracker survey template (+ example questionnaire) appeared first on Attest.

There are tons of brand health metrics to choose from. For some brands, advocacy and net promoter scores (NPS) are their north star, while for others, brand awareness is critical to know. For others still, purchase intent might be their main KPI. Whichever brand health metrics matter most to you, a bespoke brand tracker can regularly monitor those key measures. This keeps you informed about which brand marketing activities are working, and where your focus needs to be to win in the market. 

Attest is your ally in building and understanding your bespoke brand trackers. In this Product spotlight, Kat Skitch – one of our Attest customer expertise team members – talks through the in-platform functionality and brand new features which make brand tracking in multiple markets and across time easy with Attest. 

Get started with brand tracking on us!

Run a free, 3-question brand awareness survey to see how recognisable your brand is and how your brand ranks among your competitors.

Send your free survey now

What’s key to building and interpreting a bespoke brand tracker with Attest?

1. When it comes to building the brand tracker itself, Attest avoids the off-the-shelf approach in favour of a totally bespoke experience. Each brand is unique, and what matters to your brand and in your sector might not matter to others. As such, you can build your brand tracking survey from the ground up using our intuitive survey builder. Ask questions about your sector, your brand, your product, your competitors and their products, or anything else that you need a steer from your target consumers on. The flexibility continues after the first dip, too, as you can add, remove or edit questions in future surveys to stay ahead of new competitors, or ask about specific marketing activities. We know your needs change over time, so your brand tracker can too.
   
2. To make the survey building process as easy as possible, you can use our Net promoter score question type to really easily gather advocacy scores for your brand and your competitors. Using this question type automatically calculates NPS in the results dashboard. Then you can use the answer and demographic filters to segment the results by your promoters or detractors, and find the demographic profile of those segments, for a more rounded understanding of the scores.
   
3. A brand tracker needs to recur over time for you to understand how your brand activities are positively impacting the metrics, and to spot downward trends early enough to prevent them becoming a problem. There are two ways you can set your survey to recur:
   
   1. You can make use of the recurring surveys feature, by selecting one of the popular timelines from the drop down menu in the review tab of the survey editor. Choose from 1, 3 or 6 month intervals, and the next survey will automatically be populated as a draft in your dashboard, which you can edit before it automatically launches at the chosen interval. 
   2. Alternatively, if you need a different timeline for your brand tracker, or you don’t want to send it at a regular interval, you can easily Duplicate & edit your survey, and schedule it to launch in the future. Once your survey is scheduled it can’t be edited, though, so the easiest way to set a recurring survey with the flexibility to edit the content, is to use the recurring surveys feature.
      
4. Check out the automated insights report in your results dashboard for machine-learning generated insights that help you understand the most important results at a single glance and before you dig further into the data. One particularly important insight in your brand tracker is the brand analysis, which codifies open text answers and gives you instant results from your unprompted brand awareness question. And secondly the driver analysis, which shows the attributes which drive brand activity in your category, and highlights whether those attributes are strengths or weaknesses for each of the brands included in your survey.
   
5. Join the private beta programme which offers our new results comparison dashboards to merge multiple brand tracking dips from a single market, and generate charts to see changes over time. We’d love for those running brand trackers with Attest to join the beta programme, and give feedback on how we can continue to improve the experience of comparing results from multiple brand tracking dips!
   
6. And finally, our in-house research experts, the Attest customer expertise team, have built a customisable template to help you get started with your own brand tracker. For inspiration on how to structure your brand tracker, or to customise the template for your own brand and sector, you can add the template to your dashboard via the templates page on our website.

However you decide to get started with brand tracking at Attest, whether you opt to use and edit our brand tracking survey template, or start from scratch yourself, our team is here to help so don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The beginners’ guide to brand tracking

Get started with your own bespoke brand tracker, by following our beginners’ guide which covers everything you need to know to begin monitoring your key brand health metrics!

Download the guide now!

The Experts’ Guide to Brand Tracking

How to look at the impact of things like audience reach, panel diversity, and survey design to help you decide whether your current brand tracker is up to scratch.

Get your copy now!

The post Product spotlight: bespoke brand tracking appeared first on Attest.

Sometimes diving into the world of market research surveys can feel a little overwhelming, but the ultimate goal is the same – you don’t just want data, you want quality data. So how do you make sure the data you’re collecting is accurate and isn’t just telling you what you want to hear? We’ve put together a list of top tips and things to avoid when you’re building a survey. 

Want to be an expert in surveys? Of course you do. Get your free copy of our Complete Guide to Survey Creation: 

The Complete Guide to Survey Creation

Creating surveys that deliver quality, actionable insights doesn’t have to be so hard. Here’s how you can do it.

Get Your Free Copy

What causes bad quality survey data?

There are lots of things that can cause survey data to lose quality. Here are a few biases and mistakes that can result in bad quality data: 

Selection Bias

If you send a survey out to your target audience, can you be sure that the responses you get back are a representative sample of that whole audience? Selection bias can happen when the group of respondents you get doesn’t reflect an accurate representation of the audience you’re trying to survey. 

It’s important to remember that though the size of your audience needs to be big enough to be representative, sample source is more important than sample size. Make sure all subgroups of a population are represented in your survey data.

Question Bias

It’s possible that the way you ask your questions will bias the results. This is called question bias, and it happens when questions are leading, or angled towards a particular outcome – usually without the researcher realising. Often an emotional connection to the subject matter of the survey can cause the person writing it to accidentally frame them in a way that biases the survey respondents towards the answer they expect or want them to choose. It’s important to make sure that whoever creates the survey has a limited emotional connection to the subject matter.

Question bias can also occur more with certain question types, like ranking questions or questions with lots of answer options. Often, if a respondent feels overwhelmed by the information, they’ll go for the middle, ‘neutral’ option in a ranking question, or the top or bottom answer in a question with lots of answer options. In these cases, it’s essential to randomise the answer order to negate this bias.

Irrelevant Questions

Some questions won’t be relevant to every respondent. Say if you ask how often someone drives, and they answer ‘never’, and the very next question is about how much they enjoy driving, that question is irrelevant to them and will produce an answer that is inaccurate.

Online survey platforms like Attest offer routing to avoid this. This way, you can send groups of respondents down different routes based on their answers. This stops them having to answer irrelevant questions – for example, if someone said they never drive, you can route them away from the question that asks how much they enjoy driving, and even ask something specific to why they don’t drive.

Duplicate Responses

If the survey you create offers incentives for respondents, there’s a risk that those respondents will attempt to take the survey more than once to double up on the rewards. There are simple ways to avoid this, such as vote protection. 

9 Top Tips for Building a Survey with Optimum Data Quality

Now we know some of the root causes of bad quality survey data, let’s look at some of the simple ways you can make sure your survey has the best possible data quality: 

1. Avoid questions that ask respondents to ‘select all that apply’

Information overload is real. When you present respondents with lots of information and ask them to choose all that apply to them, they’re likely to overclaim. Instead, try limiting these multiple-choice questions to ‘choose your top 3’ – that way, respondents will prioritise and you’ll get the most accurate answers. 

2. Don’t give too many answer options

Similarly to tip number one, this is all about reducing information overload and streamlining your survey. When building out your survey, you’ll need to prioritise the information you’d like to include – for example when asking which brands people have heard of in a certain category, you can’t include every brand that exists in that category. You’ll need to prioritise the ones that matter most to you. When building an Attest survey, you’ll get 10 answer options, so you’ll never need to worry about whether you’ve overloaded your respondents.

3. Randomise answer options

One of the best ways to avoid question bias is to randomise the order of your answer options. That way, the answer that was first on the list for one respondent won’t be first on the list for another, cancelling out that propensity for picking the answer that appears first. With Attest, randomising answer options is as simple as clicking a button. 

4. Make sure your questions are detailed

I know, I know, we just said not to overload your respondents with information – but there’s a difference between providing too many options and making sure your question is clear. If you make your question too vague, you’ll compromise your data quality. For example, asking ‘have you driven very far recently?’ will yield far poorer results than asking ‘in the last 3 months, have you driven a distance of over 100 miles in a single journey?’. Consider things like time frames when writing your questions, and make sure your questions can’t be interpreted in lots of different ways.

5. Include ‘none’ and ‘other’ as answer options

In case your respondent comes across a question that’s irrelevant to them, they need to have an option that specifies that – otherwise they’ll be forced to pick an answer that doesn’t accurately reflect what they really think, and your data quality will suffer.

6. Add red herrings

Throw in a red herring answer to one of your questions – something that is obviously incorrect or fake – that will alert you to any respondents who aren’t fully comprehending the meaning of the question. If anyone chooses the answer that is clearly false, you can screen them out of the survey. 

7. Never ask yes or no questions

Avoid asking questions that have only two answer options – ‘yes’ and ‘no’. These are not only too simplistic, but can cause a kind of question bias; respondents will often bias towards answering ‘yes’ because they feel it’s what you want to hear.

8. Use qualifying questions

Using a survey platform like Attest, you can target audiences based on demographics, such as age, profession, or even pet ownership. To get even more specific (and make sure you’re speaking to exactly the people you want to be), add a qualifying question at the beginning of your survey. You can select which answers will qualify respondents in or out – if they’re qualified in they can continue with the survey, and if they’re qualified out they’ll be removed.

9. Avoid leading questions

The best way to avoid accidentally leading your respondents in one direction or another is to make sure whoever is writing the survey has little to no emotional connection to the subject, or doesn’t have a preference for which answer is chosen. After all, we run surveys to get accurate answers to our questions – and those aren’t always the answers we necessarily want to hear. 

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Ready to dive into survey creation, but unsure where to start? You don’t have to be a market research expert to start collecting quality market data. At Attest, we want to make it easy – you can start getting results in minutes with our intuitive survey platform. Book a demo with our team and we’ll be happy to show you around. 

Want all of the survey knowledge with none of the human interaction? We’ve got you covered. Grab your free copy of our Complete Guide to Survey Creation and start buffing up on online research: 

The Complete Guide to Survey Creation

Creating surveys that deliver quality, actionable insights doesn’t have to be so hard. Here’s how you can do it.

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Marketing has moved on from being an ad in the local newspaper and flyers tucked under windscreen wipers. Now, we’ve got the power of data to take us to dizzying new heights – we can deliver our messages and showcase our products to hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom we know will be at least a little bit interested in what we have to say. 

But the truth is, there’s so much data out there that it can sometimes be difficult to know where to start. From lead scoring to content analytics, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of numbers that don’t really mean anything. In other words, you’re missing the insight – the ‘ah ha!’ moment that makes data-driven marketing such a stand-out success.

Why use consumer data for data-driven marketing?

At Attest, we know that the best place to look for those crucial insights that can make or break a brand is in consumer data. When you think about it, it’s really simple – if you want to know what’s working, and what will work, with your target audience, you need to go right to the source. We’re not talking about just your customers – we know there’s a big difference between customer and consumer data – but the world at large. 

So how can you use consumer data to create more effective marketing strategies, more compelling creatives, and more happy customers? We’ve compiled 26 ways to use consumer data in your data-driven marketing strategies: 

Data-driven marketing: brand tracking

Monitoring brand awareness across time

Want to understand if you have a healthy brand? One of the key brand health metrics you should be keeping an eye on is brand awareness – i.e. the number of people in a given population who don’t just recognize your brand, but are acutely aware of what it does. Using consumer data, you can measure both Prompted and Unprompted Brand Recall (e.g. “Have you heard of X brand?”, or, “Name a brand that comes to mind when you think of X category”). 

Monitoring this awareness over time is crucial to understanding the health of your brand and the success of your marketing efforts – if you run a huge, expensive awareness campaign, and brand awareness doesn’t increase in the weeks and months after it, you can be pretty sure that campaign wasn’t quite up to scratch, or your distribution strategy needs tweaking. Bringing these learnings into future planning is the key to a data-driven marketing campaign.

Keeping tabs on brand sentiment

Much like brand awareness, brand sentiment is a metric you should always keep a close eye on when it comes to understanding the health of your brand. Using consumer data and metrics like NPS and free text questions, you can get to grips with not just whether people know your brand exists, but also how they feel about it. 

Benchmarking against competitors

A big part of brand tracking is seeing how you stack up against competitors in your category. Brand tracking surveys don’t just give you insight into how your brand is doing, but also your competition. For example, if your competitor has higher brand awareness than your brand, but lower brand sentiment (i.e. people know the brand but don’t particularly like it), then you know exactly where to swoop in – boost your brand awareness and play up your key differentiators. If your competitors have super positive brand sentiment, then take some learnings from them and see where you can improve. That’s the power of data-driven marketing.

How’s your brand’s awareness?

Find out how many people know about your brand and what they think about it with our audience of 150+ million people in 59 countries

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Data-driven marketing: creative testing

Validating concepts

Say you’ve got a winning idea for a new ad campaign. How do you prove that it has legs? How do you show key decision-makers that it really is a winning idea and isn’t going to fall flat? This is a perfect example of where consumer data is crucial – by validating your concepts and ideas before you invest the money and time from your creative team, you can make sure all of your concepts are winners.

Refining a winning idea

You’ve got the idea – now let’s get specific. Present multiple versions of campaign creative to your target consumers and let them help you narrow down to the very best one(s). By using consumer data to refine your creative, you’ll quickly learn what resonates with your desired audience and what doesn’t. 

Comparing creative reception across demographics and psychographics

Not everyone will respond to your creative in the same way, and that’s very much the case when it comes to different demographics. Use consumer data-driven marketing to refine your ideas for each group of the population, so you can communicate exactly what matters to them. 

It’s also useful to fold in a psychographic question or two when testing creative. Consider your personas – there are likely a number of defining psychographic elements that make them useful. If you have the ability to compare and contrast reception of your creative against key psychographic persona markers, you’ll be able to more easily optimise for success.

Testing moving across mediums

Not every ad or piece of creative will resonate the same way across mediums. De- risk moving across channels or mediums by incorporating consumer data into the plan, so when you move from TV to audio, or audio to print, or whichever way your creatives take you, you’ll know how it translates in a completely new medium. 

Spotting ad fatigue early

Sadly, one piece of creative or a cleverly-crafted ad campaign isn’t going to last you forever. Eventually, you’re going to need something new – but when? Use consumer data to spot when an ad is beginning to fatigue by contrasting it with something new – that way you can make the switch at the right time and prevent media spend that doesn’t translate into sales.

Gauging the reception of personalisation

Personalisation is generally seen as pretty helpful – or is it? It’s actually received very differently across demographics – our report found that the trend for personalisation in adverts is found ‘helpful’ by 77.3% of Gen Z, while 44.3% of baby boomers find that same technology ‘creepy’. Using consumer data is a great way to ensure you’re crafting the right campaigns for your target audience. 

Testing out packaging designs

Packaging serves an important purpose in marketing – it serves to attract attention to the product, and then to help sell it. Plenty of brands don’t make the most of their packaging design space, and some even get it disastrously wrong – and the best way to avoid that is to be data-driven from the very beginning. Test packaging designs with consumers before you send them into mass production to see which ones catch the eye best, and which would be most convincing on the shelf. 

The complete guide to creative Testing

Want to be a creative testing whizz? Check out our free Complete Guide to Creative Testing and discover how easy it is to start testing your creative assets before you release them into the wild.

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Data-driven marketing: Expanding into new markets

Understanding which markets you should be in

Which markets will your brand be most successful in? If you don’t know, you should – and the easiest way to understand this is by checking in with consumers. In today’s digital economy, being able to successfully expand into new markets is crucial to brand growth – using market research tools, you can quickly assess which markets are right for you.

Altering messaging and creative across different markets

Not all markets will respond in the same way to the same messaging or creative. To make sure things translate, it’s essential to have an in-depth understanding of your target markets, and test your creatives with those exact consumers before you go live. 

Optimising spend and ROI

Apply learnings from consumer data to understand what works, uncover what’s missing, and maximise the effectiveness of new launches. That way, you’ll be able to easily attribute ROI to the right things and optimise spend on the things that work.

A marketer’s guide to international expansion

Most of the biggest brands in the world operate globally, so international expansion is on the cards for a lot of growing brands, including yours. The differences between markets shouldn’t be underestimated, and you will need to do lots of research to optimise for success.

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Data-driven marketing: campaign planning

Finding creative inspiration for ad campaigns

When you start incorporating consumer data into your campaign planning, you quickly uncover insights that conjure up new creative inspiration. Look for patterns, understand niche audiences, and use data-driven creativity to go above and beyond in your campaign planning exercises. 

Testing campaign creatives before they go live

Using consumer data to construct campaign strategies means you can be far more confident that they’ll land with your target audience. Test your design mockups, try out variations of messaging, and be certain that your campaign creatives will hit the right note. 

Optimising media spend

Get more data-driven with your media spend. Use consumer data to figure out the best ways to reach your target audience – which channels do they use? Which social media platforms are most trustworthy for them? What time of day do they consume the most media? All of this information is essential for data-driven media planning. You can also be incredibly reactive with spend these days, given how quickly you can get a read on which programmes and publications your audience is consuming.

Improving the performance of live campaigns

Once a campaign is live, how can you keep optimising it? You don’t need to wait until after a campaign has finished running to start measuring how well it did – why not start checking in with consumers a week or so into the campaign? That way you can see who’s been exposed to your campaign, how well they remember it, and whether you’re hitting the right demographics. Use that data to adjust campaigns as-you-go.

Using data to optimise future performance

There’s no reason why the performance of one campaign can’t influence your next one. In fact, you should always take your learnings from past campaigns into the creation of new ones – that way, you’ll always be optimising your performance. Use consumer data from one to feed into optimising the next.

How to use consumer data for smarter campaign planning

If you’re not using consumer survey data as part of your campaign planning, you’re missing out on the opportunity to optimise your marketing. Find out how to use data to ideate creative concepts, test them with target audiences, plan your media spend, and measure the effectiveness of your campaign.

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Data-driven marketing: PR and content 

Creating data-driven stories that capture attention

Want to create some press for your brand (and gather valuable backlinks in the process)? Create data-driven content using consumer data – media outlets are huge fans of content with primary data and you have a much better chance of getting picked up for a PR spot with a unique, data-backed point of view.

Producing content that drives results

Consumer data doesn’t just make for interesting, valuable content – it can also help create it. By asking your target audience what content they’d like to see, or identifying knowledge gaps or emerging trends, you can incorporate that data into your content marketing strategy and start producing content that you know will be useful and relevant.

The PR professional’s guide to data-driven storytelling

Want to create high-impact campaigns for your clients? Learn how to use data to inspire stories journalists will love.

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Data-driven marketing: consumer profiling

Understanding who your target audience is

Want to know if the people you’re targeting are really the right audience for your offering? Get to grips with your target audience, and then understand them even better by using consumer profiling surveys. Once you understand your audience, you’ll know where best to reach them, the kinds of creative that will resonate best with them, and, most importantly, why they’d be interested in what your brand has to offer.

Creating jobs to be done

What are your consumers’ pain points, and how can you help them fix them? With a jobs to be done survey, you can get to the heart of your consumers’ needs and the gap that you fill. 

Data-driven marketing: New Product Development

Building products that people actually want

The trick to being truly data-driven is to incorporate consumer data as early as possible in the process. When it comes to NPD, you should be reaching out to consumers before you’ve even come up with a product idea. Make sure you’re building products that people actually want – and the rest will be easy.

Optimising new product launches

Launching a new product is no small feat. Plenty of different things go into a successful launch, from the npd process of the product itself, to packaging design, to marketing to the right people. All of these intricate, interconnected stages can be optimised and bolstered through a great understanding of your target audience.

Attributing ROI to innovation

Attributing ROI is a notoriously difficult task, but if you can prove the efficacy of innovation, you’ll be able to innovate with confidence in the future. 

Going to market quicker than the rest

When it comes to innovation, speed is a gamechanger. Losing out on market share because you didn’t get there first can be a disaster for emerging brands, even if your product is significantly better than the one that took first place. Using consumer data, you can have more confidence in your decisions throughout the process, meaning you can get your product to market quicker than anyone else.

The beginner’s guide to data-driven new product development

We’ve teamed up with innovation experts Andrew Shanley, Senior UX Designer at Amazon and Braeden Watts, Senior Lead Service Designer at IDEAN to show you how to use consumer data to transform the NPD process.

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Want to get started with using consumer data-driven marketing? Then we have some great news for you: 

With Attest, you can do all 26 of these things – and we make it easy.

Book an intro with one of our experts who’ll walk you through exactly how you can use Attest’s innovative research platform, and find out how brands like Gymshark, Klarna, and WorldRemit use us to supercharge their marketing efforts.

The Experts’ Guide to Brand Tracking

How to look at the impact of things like audience reach, panel diversity, and survey design to help you decide whether your current brand tracker is up to scratch.

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There’s plenty you can do, though, as a survey creator to reduce overclaiming behaviour from your respondents with some simple tweaks to your survey design. It’s a give and take relationship with your survey sample; by making some simple adjustments to your next survey, you can encourage the best quality, most truthful answers from respondents. Rather than littering your survey with “trap” questions, treat your respondents with respect and they will reward you with honest answers in return.

In this article we talk through five simple ways to write a survey that encourages honest, thoughtful answers. Attest Customer Research Team member, Nikos, recently implemented these practices in a client’s survey and saw overclaiming behaviours drop by almost 30%.

Avoid leading titles

Survey respondents want to take your survey, to get the rewards on offer and to share their opinion with you. By naming the survey after your brand, your products or even referencing the topic of the survey, respondents are naturally going to gear their responses to fit. They don’t want to be qualified out when they feel they have value to share with you. Whether consciously or not, they may tailor their responses to what they believe you want to hear, and the name of your survey can give a big clue as to what you want to hear! 

Make sure your survey is named something interesting but, crucially, nothing that leads or biases respondents. Avoid including your brand name, naming your sector or the consumers you want to hear from. For instance: “Laithwaites”, “Wine & alcoholic drinks survey” and “Wine-drinkers research” are all biasing names for your survey. In that case “Your drinking habits” would be a much less biasing title – and avoids the added negative of deterring non-wine-drinkers who you may be interested in hearing from too! Use the internal title of your survey, which isn’t visible to respondents, to name the survey in a recognisable way for your team, instead.

Talk to your respondents, don’t grill them

Opening your survey with a text card can set good expectations, give necessary context and take the pressure off the respondent to answer in an expected way. 

Fundamentally, your survey should be a two way conversation between your brand and your consumers. You want answers to your questions, but no one likes to feel grilled. Speaking to your respondents as a human, and encouraging them to see you in the same light can have a marked impact on engagement levels and promote honest answers. 

Text cards also help break up longer surveys and give respondents a brief respite from questions, which can help them stay engaged for questions asked later in the survey. Make sure to use them to signpost how far through the survey your respondent is, and thank them for their honest answers. 

Remove agreement bias

A really easy way to bias your respondents into giving a certain answer is to ask a question with “Yes” and “No” answers. We’re hardwired to agree when presented with these types of questions, it’s human nature. Agreement bias (also known as acquiescence bias) has such a noticeable impact on survey answers that the Attest platform will flag to you when you’ve asked a question that is likely to suffer from agreement bias. 

It’s easy to rephrase any single or multiple choice question to avoid agreement bias. Simply make the subject of the question into an answer option, and ask a broader question;

Which of these items do you own?

A car / Your home / A motorbike / A boat 

In combination with the other tips listed, this shift can encourage greater consideration and honesty from your survey respondents. For instance, when you change this question, make sure your survey title doesn’t give away that you’re interested in car ownership!

Give respondents a way to say no

If you remove your respondents’ option to tell you that the question doesn’t apply to them, they don’t understand what is being asked or they would rather not answer, you’re forcing them to give you a poor quality answer. Every question has additional answer options you can choose to toggle on or off, including “None”, “N/A” and “Other”. Use these options to give your respondent a chance to answer honestly. 

Every respondent also has the option to skip the question, in case you decide to toggle the additional answer options off. In many cases, bad data is more dangerous than no data, so you cannot turn off the skip functionality on your survey. We will, however, remove respondents that skip too many questions. 

Think twice before trapping respondents

It’s not always the respondent who is at fault when overclaiming occurs; they want to impress you and complete your survey, so think about what you can do to get the best out of them. Trapping respondents with fake brands or incorrect answer options shows little respect for them, and where the incorrect answers are obvious, they can erode trust in the relationship you have with them, removing the incentive for honesty throughout the rest of the survey. 

And in many cases, memory isn’t infallible. If the respondents have been encouraged to answer honestly using the methods above, they’re more likely to stop and reconsider whether they have or haven’t heard of the fake brand you’re presenting them with. But without the methods used above, respondents are likely to fall into your ‘traps’. 

Next steps

Our Attest centre of excellence team can help you write elegant surveys that encourage honest, thoughtful responses from your respondents…and avoid the pitfalls we outlined above. You’ll get more accurate data as a result, and draw out more meaningful insights. 

Don’t hesitate to get in touch for personal help from the Customer Research Team. You can also check out our Complete guide to survey creation for even more advice from the Customer Research Team on writing surveys to avoid bias, keep engagement high, and promote data quality.

The complete guide to survey creation

For help getting started, and tips for every point of the journey, this guide makes sure you’re on track to gathering actionable results from your consumer research!

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The post Five common survey mistakes that lead to overclaiming appeared first on Attest.

This is where Attest’s audience reach can help. With access to 150+ million consumers in 59 countries around the world, you can target your growth consumers (or find out who they are!) with a survey or two. 

In this product spotlight, Attest Customer Research Team data analyst, Kat, gives us the lowdown on how the Attest audience works, and explains how easy it is to target the consumers that matter to your brand. 

Here are just some of our audience capabilities:

1. Attest acts as the central tool for anyone in your team to run research. With 59 countries available to target, your global team can remain connected, with consumer data and insights all in one place. Plus our translation partners can help, so language need never be a barrier to getting insights from your consumers.
2. Our mixed-methodology approach means our sample is diverse, representative and better quality by nature than the owned panels many other consumer insights tools connect up to. We use a mix of recruitment methods and rewards, and send each survey to multiple sample sources, to make sure we can reach consumers wherever they’re hanging out online.
3. Data quality doesn’t end with the panels we plug into. We have an automated check for every response we receive so that we can automatically flag and remove responses that are given too quickly, are gibberish or demonstrate that the respondent was unengaged. Checks at both the panel and respondent level mean you can rely on every answer you receive.
4. With more than 15 demographic profiles available to target in-platform, you can choose exactly who you want to share your survey with. We even tell you how many respondents we can access that match the profiles you select, so you can inform your sample size. These profiles are updated regularly, and our product team just added two new profiles in the US; ethnicity and Hispanic origin.
5. Once you’ve chosen the profiles you want to target, you can shape the make-up of your survey sample by applying custom quotas. You can use quotas to achieve a representative sample, or weight your sample to suit your research. 
6. If you’re looking to speak to consumers who behave or think a certain way, which aren’t correlated with their demographics, you can qualify respondents into your survey based on their answers to your single- or multiple-choice questions. Layer qualifying questions on top of your chosen demographic profiles – but be aware that niche targeting will affect the time it takes to fill the survey.

Attest’s audience capabilities are constantly evolving and improving as we add new demographic profiles and reach new markets. All of this allows you to explore new markets and identify your next strategic play. Whether you’re ready to hone in, or are keeping your targeting wide to find the right consumers for you, our mixed-methodology and data quality measures make sure you can rely on every response you get. 

For more information about our audience capabilities, or to find out if we can reach your target consumers, get in touch.

Get in touch to find out more!

We can help you cut the noise out of your data by targeting the consumers that matter most to your brand!

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12 Marketing mistakes and what you can learn from them

Mistakes. We all make ’em. We asked 11 marketers from a range of different industries to tell us the biggest marketing mistake they ever made, and we’ve compiled them all here so you can learn from them (without having to make them yourself).

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What is a T-shaped marketer?

A T-shaped marketer is someone who has basic knowledge of many different marketing disciplines, like social media marketing, email marketing, and paid search, and has deeper knowledge of one or two disciplines that they specialise in. 

If you’re a T-shaped content marketer, for example, you’ll have a lot of in-depth knowledge around content strategy, segmentation, and building out content campaigns. You’ll also have more surface-level knowledge of other, overlapping channels – like SEO, UX, and Paid Social – because marketing channels and disciplines don’t exist in siloes. 

Why should I be a T-shaped marketer?

The all-important question is why being a T-shaped marketer is valuable. There are lots of reasons why expert marketers, and organisations with killer marketing teams, value a T-shaped approach to marketing – and we’ve summed them up into two main benefits: 

T-shaped marketers are better at cohesive strategies

Creating an awesome SEO strategy to drive conversions is great, but what works even better is lots of interlinking strategies that are cohesive from the very start of the customer journey, to the very end.

When marketers are intensely specialised, they bring valuable knowledge and insight in their specific niche – but if that specific niche operates in silo, it’s not going to bring in the best possible results or, most importantly, the best overall experience for potential customers. 

Take SEO for example. Building out and implementing an SEO strategy that delivers is no small feat, and requires specialist, technical knowledge. What it also requires, though, is a surface-level knowledge of Paid Search – if you’re already performing well organically for some keywords but also paying for them, that could be an unnecessary expenditure. 

The very best T-shaped marketers use their expertise and their broader, holistic knowledge of marketing to deliver a winning strategy across the board.

T-shaped marketers help marketing align with other teams

In some organisations, marketing can end up operating on its own – few people know what the team does, and interactions with other teams are limited. T-shaped marketers help to make sure that isn’t the case.

T-shaped marketers are experts at thinking outside of the box that is their area of expertise. Having a broad skill set (and understanding of attribution) means you’re able to work closely with other teams and help to inform their objectives and strategies. Say you’re a SaaS company and you’ve got a product team who are prioritising which new features to release – a T-shaped marketer can dive in with valuable insights to help inform that exercise. 

Whether it’s upskilling the technical team on search marketing or helping the design team keep assets cohesive with the overall brand vision, T-shaped marketers put the functional in cross-functional work. 

How do I become a T-shaped marketer?

So how do you go about becoming a T-shaped marketer, rather than one who is too generalist or too specialist? Good news! It’s a simple process: 

Increase your general marketing knowledge (and keep it up to date)

Take beginner’s courses, subscribe to emails from marketing thought leaders (such as Neil Patel, HubSpot, or Attest – hint hint), and keep that knowledge up-to-date. The world of marketing, especially digital marketing, is constantly shifting – what works now won’t be what works as soon as next year. Thanks to the magic of the internet, there are tons of ways to upskill in all areas of marketing.

Identify your area(s) of expertise, or what you’d like to specialise in 

What area of marketing do you specialise in? Maybe for you it’s both Paid Search and Paid Social; maybe it’s emails and nurture flows; maybe it’s PR. Knowing where you specialise is an essential part of becoming a T-shaped marketer. 

If you don’t already have an area of expertise, think about what you’d like it to be. Which disciplines interest you most? What are you best at? Use your strengths, and aim to upskill in your weaknesses.

Look for opportunities to be less siloed 

If you see an opportunity to contribute using your general knowledge of marketing and your specialisms, do it. Notice your PR campaigns aren’t matching up with what you’re promoting on social? Make them more aligned. Notice your sales team is sending outdated content to prospects? Get involved. Help your specific function to be less siloed within your team, and your team to be less siloed within your organisation. 

Being too specialised is a common mistake even the most senior marketers make. How can you avoid making more? Check out our report on 12 marketing mistakes and how you can avoid them, featuring contributions from leading marketers across a range of industries, and start upskilling today: 

12 Marketing mistakes and what you can learn from them

Mistakes. We all make ’em. We asked 11 marketers from a range of different industries to tell us the biggest marketing mistake they ever made, and we’ve compiled them all here so you can learn from them (without having to make them yourself).

Get your free copy

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At Attest we talk a lot about the mixed-recruitment and mixed-reward methodology we apply to our research sample. It’s because we’re proud of it. We believe it enhances the quality of the data each one of our clients gathers through our platform. And that’s our ultimate goal; we want our clients to collect consumer insights they can hang their hats (and biggest business decisions) on. To do that, they need to be sure that the sampling method we use reaches the consumers they care about, and that those respondents are incentivised to give honest answers that they can trust. 

So what makes our sampling methodology such good quality, and better than the techniques other research tools use? In this article we break down our approach to sampling, and explain why the methodology itself, plus some extra checks we sprinkle on top, ensure the best data quality. 

What is a mixed-methodology research sample?

The sample you reach through the Attest platform comes from our partnership with panel aggregators. Each panel aggregator has access to hundreds of communities of consumers, all around the world. And each of those panels chooses how to recruit new consumers and how to reward those that successfully complete surveys. This means that while one panel can focus on attracting males aged 18-24 with their recruitment method, another is busy recruiting and rewarding women aged 55-65 with theirs. Each panel has its own specialism based on what sort of consumer is attracted to the recruitment and rewards on offer; different people will be drawn to fan clubs than to loyalty schemes (just two of the many types of sources of panels!), and equally, different people will want to earn money rather than vouchers or loyalty points for completing surveys.

Our mixed-methodology means that when you launch a survey on Attest, people from multiple panels will respond (all of whom will match your targeted demographic profiles!). Mixed-methodology makes for a greater mix of consumers than you could access using a single panel.

What makes a mixed-methodology sample such great quality?

Using panel aggregators is far from the only way to reach consumers. Even when you look within the online consumer research space – and discount in-person and telephone research methods – there are loads of different methodologies. Lots of consumer insight providers in the market today have their own panel that they manage, and their clients tap into this panel through their platforms. 

Growing and maintaining a panel takes considerable time, though, and clients who run regular research can soon fatigue a panel. A panel aggregator allows for a constant stream of fresh respondents by combining the recruitment efforts of hundreds of individual panels. This future-proofs your surveys; you know you can run trackers month after month without exhausting the sample.

Even if the single-source panel used by other research providers is big enough for the clients’ needs, the recruitment and reward methods they use will exclude certain consumers who aren’t attracted to those incentives. This means from day one the panel isn’t as diverse as a mixed-methodology approach, so it can’t properly represent the whole population, and the targeting available is instantly narrowed. 

A mixed-methodology also means that, through Attest, you can use a single tool to reach diverse consumers all around the world, whatever demographic segments you’re looking to target. This means global teams like Microsoft, WorldRemit and Walgreens Boots Alliance have a centralised tool that they can use for their research in every market they’re in. Our panel-aggregators give us access to 100m consumers in 46 markets, and this is growing all the time, with 17 baked-in demographic filters for easy and accurate targeting and profiling. 

One of the features we like most about Attest is that it can stretch across multiple geographies, as we increasingly locate brands in Europe, the US and South America.

Jamie Swango – Partner, The Craftory

How we’re optimising Attest’s mixed-methodology approach to set a new standard for data quality in online research

The very nature of a mixed-recruitment, mixed-incentive sample is already more diverse, more representative and less fatigued than a single panel. But there are a host of other ways we ensure data quality in every response, layered on top of the data quality checks run by both the sample provider and the panel aggregator. Three layers of quality assurance means three times the confidence in the data. 

All Attest surveys are device agnostic, meaning the respondent experience (which we put front and centre here at Attest, because an engaged respondent is an honest one!) is just as good if they’re on their mobile, laptop or desktop. We’re aware, though, that more and more consumers conduct their everyday lives on their phones, so every new design we add is mobile-first, to make sure they work perfectly on even the smallest screens. 

Our team of in-house research experts – the Customer Research Team – also work with clients on a daily basis to design surveys that optimise for respondent engagement, because sourcing the sample is just half the job; then you need to encourage them to answer honestly.

There’s also no chance of duplication. Even though you can access respondents through multiple panels, each respondent can only access your survey once thanks to IP and unique respondent ID checks. These checks block respondents from answering on behalf of multiple panels, meaning each response you see in the results dashboard is always unique.

What next?

Our mixed-method of sampling means our respondent pool is constantly growing, refreshing and evolving. This keeps the quality of the data we gather high, and avoids any sample fatigue. We keep up with this growing sample with regular updates to the demographics you can reach through Attest, and a live number of respondents available to see in-platform. 

If you’ve got any questions about our sampling technique, our data quality measures or getting started using Attest yourself, don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Learn more about consumer insights from Attest

Convinced that a mixed methodology sample is the best route to quality responses? Our team of research experts can help you get started and reach the consumers that matter most to your brand.

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