What's the best way to research advertising?

1 Online tools

Researching advertising can be made easier and more accessible through the use of online tools. Google Trends is a popular tool that allows you to track the popularity of certain keywords, topics, or brands over time and across regions. This can be used to identify seasonal trends, emerging interests, or niche markets. The Facebook Audience Network provides insights from Facebook's expansive user and publisher network, helping you learn more about potential customers, their interests, and where they spend their time online. SEMrush is another useful tool that helps monitor and compare your competitors' online presence and performance. Through this tool, you can uncover their keywords, traffic sources, ad strategies, and content quality.

2 Offline techniques

While online tools are very helpful, they are not enough to give you a comprehensive view of your advertising environment. To supplement these, you should also use offline techniques that can help you collect and interpret qualitative data. Surveys are a great way to ask your customers or potential customers about their opinions, preferences, needs, and behaviours. Interviews provide a more personal conversation with customers or stakeholders, allowing you to explore their motivations, emotions, challenges, and expectations. Additionally, focus groups bring together a small group of people related to your advertising topic and allow you to observe their interactions, reactions, and feedback.

3 Secondary research

Researching advertising can be done through secondary research, which involves using data that has already been collected and published by someone else. This can be an efficient and cost-effective method, but caution should be taken to ensure the quality and relevance of the data. Some of the most reliable sources of secondary research are industry reports, academic journals, and trade publications. Industry reports provide comprehensive and updated information about a specific industry or market, while academic journals contain original and peer-reviewed research papers on various topics and disciplines. Trade publications are magazines or newsletters that cater to a specific profession or sector, providing news, events, best practices, and opinions in a particular industry or niche.

4 SWOT analysis

Once you have gathered enough data from online tools, offline techniques, and secondary research, you need to organize and evaluate it. A SWOT analysis is a simple and effective way to do this. It's a framework that helps you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your advertising situation. By using a SWOT analysis, you can assess your current position and performance in relation to your goals and objectives, identify competitive advantages and disadvantages in relation to your competitors and customers, discover new areas for improvement, innovation, or expansion in relation to your market and environment, as well as anticipate potential risks, challenges, or changes in relation to your strategy and tactics.

5 SMART goals

After completing a SWOT analysis, it is important to turn findings into actionable and measurable goals. A popular and practical way to do this is to use SMART goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This helps define what you want to achieve, measure progress and success, ensure that goals are realistic and attainable, align goals with mission, vision, and values, and set deadlines and milestones. Researching advertising is an ongoing process that requires monitoring and adjustment. By using the best ways to research advertising discussed in this article, you can enhance your knowledge, skills, and results in creating successful campaigns.