CallRail has analyzed more than 100 million phone calls and consumer communication trends, and they’re ready to share their findings with you.
On November 1, I moderated a webinar with Jason Tatum, CallRail’s VP of Product. Tatum covered the past and future state of phone calls and how you can use AI to gain valuable insights that will transform your business.
Here’s a summary of the webinar. To access the entire presentation, complete the form.
What We Uncovered
Consumers prefer to call businesses for many types of transactions — particularly high-stakes purchases such as in healthcare or insurance, where two-thirds of consumers prefer calling over any other type of contact.
100M Phone Call Insights: Your Key To Data-Driven Marketing Strategies [Slides]
Here’s the presentation:
Join Us For Our Next Webinar!
The Evolution Of Search & SERPs 2024
In this roundtable discussion with Shelley Walsh, Ben Steele, and Matt Southern, you’ll get expert insights into the evolution of search to give you a competitive advantage in 2024.
Driving interest in your brand to enable growth is a challenge – one that is becoming even more apparent, as budgets have become tighter and buyer scrutiny is at an all-time high.
In this competitive environment, companies have capitalized on trends and messaging to drive lead interest in their offerings, mostly through a memorable brand experience.
This is a positive approach for lead nurturing. However, executing this strategy is more complex than it seems.
In this article, I present what I and fellow demand strategists have leveraged to improve lead nurturing efforts for B2B – starting with the essential step of collecting demand intelligence to drive demand for your services.
Next, I share tips on perfecting and futureproofing your lead nurturing to ensure that your strategies will be as effective in the years to come as they are now.
Collect And Analyze Demand Intelligence
The foundation for lead nurturing is intelligence.
Intelligence in this context means data on your leads’ behavior, their demographic/firmographic/technographic attributes, and your industry to drive effective demand strategies.
Below, I detail the demand intelligence process we follow at INFUSE to engage Ideal Client Profile (ICP) leads – aligned with your buyer personas – and how to collect data to enable lead nurturing processes:
Collect And Integrate Data
Firstly, you must establish avenues for generating lead nurturing data while also compiling the data you already have. This means analyzing your current tech stack, starting with your client relationship management (CRM) system.
Gather data on the leads in your pipeline from a lead nurturing perspective (i.e., the touchpoints they engage with and the pain points/challenges they relate to).
This will help you form an overview of the evolving challenges of your leads across the sales cycle and what content engages them the most.
Once you have finalized this process, you can then proceed to the next step.
Keep in mind, however, that at this point, you only have a hypothesis of what generates demand for your organization, which must be tested to inform future lead nurturing strategies.
Launch A Test Campaign Based On Your First Demand Intelligence Dataset
With your first demand intelligence dataset ready, you must create a test campaign to evaluate if you have gleaned the correct insights on the evolving pain points of your leads (and the right ways to address them).
Therefore, develop a test campaign for a specific ICP (or buyer persona) and determine a timeline (preferably quarterly) to track engagement, conversions, and your return on investment (ROI).
This is when you can test different assets, messaging, and channels to measure performance to inform your next lead nurturing campaigns.
Glean Insights And Develop Best Practices For Future Campaigns
Once your trial campaign has been finalized, create a demand intelligence report, which details:
The touchpoints leads engaged with the most – their themes, assets, and messaging.
When prospective clients entered, got “stuck” in the sales funnel (disengaged with your brand), or dropped out of the funnel entirely (unsubscribed, shared their disinterest to a salesperson, etc.).
KPIs to measure performance, particularly conversion rates, cost per lead (CPL), lead qualification (marketing or sales qualified – MQL/MQA, SQL/SQA), and sales bookings.
It is best at this phase to share this demand intelligence information with stakeholders across marketing, sales, and client success.
This alignment will help you glean further insights from each department at your organization for refining your demand intelligence and enabling better lead nurturing flows in the future.
Once you have gained a clear understanding of your leads and how to nurture them, you can then move to the next phase of establishing personalized nurturing flows for better engagement.
Establish Multiple, Personalized Lead Nurturing Flows Based On Demand Intelligence
With your demand intelligence from your first test, move forward with planning sophisticated and personalized nurturing flows for your ICPs.
How To Plan Your Lead Nurturing Flows
Most likely, you focused on engaging one ICP with your test campaign.
Now you can develop multiple personalized nurturing flows for other ICPs or fine-tune your nurturing for your primary buyer persona to create separate tracks per pain point or other market segmentation criteria (such as industry size or technographics).
Another option, if you are pursuing account-based marketing (ABM), is to adopt an account-based experience (ABX) approach, which enriches account-focused outreach and lead nurturing with user and client experience (UX and CX) best practices.
No matter which route you pursue, below are three steps to plan your lead nurturing flows for success:
Map evolving pain points per ICP (or buyer persona) and develop multiple touchpoints to engage them.
Determine who is accountable for tracking lead nurturing engagement and ensuring continuous brand interest (such as pivoting messaging if required to address different lead demands).
Enrich lead nurturing with UX and CX best practices for a user-friendly and seamless brand experience (including, if beneficial, ABX).
How To Analyze Lead Nurturing Performance
With your lead nurturing flows in action, it becomes paramount to track performance to ensure you are truly engaging your prospective clients to drive the results you expect. After all, lead nurturing requires a substantial team effort and resources from your organization.
Below are three ways to measure the performance of your lead nurturing flows:
Establish Cross-departmental KPIs And Accountability
Determine a set of KPIs that are comprehensive enough to track engagement and ROI of your lead nurturing flows yet not cumbersome to the point of overcomplicating your reporting processes.
I recommend selecting five KPIs and finessing them as you pivot future lead nurturing campaigns as needed.
Example KPIs: CPL, conversion rate (per touchpoint), marketing-influenced revenue, sales bookings, and client lifetime value (CLTV).
Collect Sales Feedback
Your salespeople are interacting with nurtured leads and can share valuable insight on the effectiveness of marketing materials in piquing their interest and driving sales conversations.
Meeting with sales midway through the campaign is beneficial for considering a pivot if needed or what to do for more success in the next campaign.
Implement Lead Scoring And Lead Qualification Processes
Scoring leads during lead nurturing flows is essential to determine if the process is generating qualified leads, as well as help sales and marketing teams prioritize prospects in their outreach.
This should be paired with qualification methods (such as determining criteria for leads to be marketing, MQL, or sales qualified, SQL) to help track the number of leads being nurtured into qualified prospects for the organization.
How To Optimize And Pivot Lead Nurturing Flows
Recognizing the optimal timeframe to adjust your lead nurturing processes is crucial for conserving both time and resources. This entails enhancing your nurturing approach to better cater to your target audience.
Ideally, it is best to wait for the end of a cycle (such as a quarter) to consider optimizations or lead nurturing campaign pivots.
However, if the budget is an issue, consider pivoting an ongoing program to ensure the best ROI and avoid wasting marketing dollars.
The key is to identify the signs of nurturing success/failure early on.
Since lead nurturing is a collaborative effort, all optimizations and pivots must be actioned across teams in the organization to ensure their implementation and effectiveness.
Signs that warrant optimizations or pivots include:
Most touchpoints are ignored.
Prospective clients mention different pain points than those explored in your nurturing flows.
Leads disengage when contacted by a salesperson.
There are other potential signs – however, these are core indicators that your lead nurturing flows are most likely targeting the wrong leads, or require more aligned messaging with their demands.
In some cases, you can simply action a “quick fix” optimization to your nurture, such as updating the messaging of your touchpoints.
However, depending on the response from your leads, it is best to action a pivot for a brand-new lead nurturing strategy.
Five steps to pivot your lead nurturing:
Prioritize a lead nurturing flow and pause it. Analyze engagement, then relaunch when all issues have been resolved. Continue until all underperforming nurtures have been addressed.
Track performance closely for the initial three touchpoints to evaluate if engagement has improved.
Continue if engagement has improved. If not, revisit your initial touchpoints and update their messaging and which pain points they address.
Update remaining touchpoints accordingly if the performance of the initial three touches is satisfactory.
Monitor your pivoted campaign and glean insights from sales of their conversations with leads to optimize future campaigns.
Futureproof Your Lead Nurturing
To ensure that your lead nurturing strategy is futureproofed, you must regularly collect demand intelligence, analyze campaign performance, and keep track of evolving trends in the market and changing buyer behavior.
Lead nurturing is about building relationships through relevance, and keeping an eye on changes in your industry is the best way to position your brand as timely and valuable.
Inspire Yourself With Thought Leadership To Anticipate Evolving Demands
Following key voices in your space can help you anticipate evolving demands from your buyers, as well as themes to explore in your lead nurturing assets and touchpoints.
Leveraging social listening tools, tracking hashtags, as well as following notable C-Suite leaders at competitors and major enterprises in your niche is a way to discover key information for futureproofing your lead nurturing efforts.
If possible, make sure your marketing and sales team members also follow these online conversations.
Leverage Intent Data For Timely Insights On Lead Behavior
When utilized correctly (and contextually), intent data can track evolving buyer needs and their interest in resolving challenges (which can subsequently be related to your brand and its offerings).
That being said, sadly, intent data is often misinterpreted as “ready-to-buy” signals, which they are not.
Intent data signals interest, which means prospective buyers who demonstrate intent should be nurtured more closely with touchpoints that further increase their interest in your offerings.
If anything, consider intent data as a way to prioritize lead nurturing efforts on leads who, if engaged correctly, could move on quicker to a sales conversation compared to the rest.
Utilize Surveys And Deep Knowledge Of Your Buyers
Surveying your audience is a way to gain knowledge of future problems they will face as buyers and collect data on their current challenges.
Surveys are important to inform marketing and sales efforts.
When it comes to relevance to lead nurturing, questions on media consumption preferences, future goals, and industry challenges can inform themes for touchpoints as well as the vocabulary to use in your messaging.
Key Takeaways
When crafting your lead nurturing strategy, keep these takeaways in mind to ensure you are on the right path:
Collect And Leverage Demand Intelligence
Make sure that your lead nurturing strategy is supported by comprehensive demand intelligence, as well as insights from intent data and sales outreach that will enable successful campaigns in the future.
Personalize At Scale With Unique Nurturing Flows Per ICP
Leverage user experience best practices (such as UX, CX, and ABX) to enrich lead nurturing flows per ICP (or buyer persona). Engage your buyers with touchpoints that stand out and encourage active engagement.
Futureproof Your Lead Nurturing With Methods That Will Inform Your Demand Intelligence
Follow thought leaders in your space and leverage social listening to track the evolving needs of your leads to inform future lead nurturing efforts.
How do you know what to change on your website or landing page to make it more effective?
Are the tweaks and tests you made to your site really successful? Or do they just look successful?
Could the best practices you’ve been following for years actually be what’s holding you back from achieving your goals and KPIs?
If you’ve ever asked yourself these questions or ones like it, it’s time to run your own website experiment.
Learn a step-by-step process for conducting website experiments to help you get the data you need to make good decisions.
We’ll show you how to set up and design experiments to collect data that will have the most value and impact for you and your audience.
You’ll learn:
When to run an experiment: Learn how and when to run your experiments to get the most informative and accurate data.
How to avoid data disasters: Learn how to prevent other factors from influencing your results and what to do if things do go as expected.
Experiment design: Tips for working with low-traffic sites, reducing costs caused by testing, and other challenges you’ll face when testing and running experiments.
Join our very own Angie Nikoleychuk, Content Marketing Manager, and learn the key factors to focus on when running website experiments, how to manage your data collection, and how to learn about the things that matter to your audience.
PLUS: You’ll get an exclusive walk-through of our new ad experiment, where we examined how ad types and layouts affect user behavior on our website. You’ll never guess what we found. We sure didn’t!
Don’t miss out on this opportunity!
View the slides below, download your copy of the resources, and watch on demand to learn how to run easy experiments on your site.
Join Us For Our Next Webinar!
How To Boost 2024 SEO Performance With Pillar Pages & Topic Clusters
Join SEO experts and Conductor’s Customer Success Managers, Alex Carchietta and Zack Kadish, to learn how effective pillar pages and clustered content improve site structure, internal linking, and on-page SEO.
When you’re reaching out to a mass email list with your business offering, the last thing you want is to see that your last email blast didn’t make it to the full audience you aimed for.
These email bounces waste time and money. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
A bounce rate higher than 2% can shatter your entire email marketing strategy by sabotaging your email deliverability.
In fact, according to marketing standards, you want your bounce rate to be as close to 0% as possible and never more than 2%.
The good news? You can take steps to avoid this common problem for good and calibrate your campaigns for better email deliverability.
Read on to find out how bounces hurt your business and what you can do today to boost your email marketing success.
What Is A Bounce Rate?
Your bounce rate is the percentage of emails you send that bounce or do not make it to a recipient’s inbox.
There are two types of bounces – hard bounces and soft bounces – and each has a different effect on your email marketing campaign.
In both cases, however, your message won’t make it to the intended recipient.
What Is A Hard Bounce?
A hard bounce indicates a permanent issue with the email address.
It’s invalid or possibly never existed.
There’s no hope of your email getting through with that address, so make sure to remove it from your email list.
What Is A Soft Bounce?
A soft bounce happens when a temporary issue causes your email to not be delivered.
The mailbox was full, your email was too large, or the domain was down. Your email provider will keep trying to deliver your message, but it may end up permanently bouncing.
Make sure to remove permanent bounces from your database.
What’s Wrong With Getting Email Bounces?
Getting bounces is antithetical to email marketing because you’re sending your emails because you want a real person to open and read them.
It’s frustrating and demoralizing when that doesn’t happen.
Bounces waste money. Email services charge based on the number of email addresses on your list, as well as how many emails you send. If you’re getting bounces, you’re pouring dollars down the drain.
Bounces waste time. Why would you put all of this work into your emails only to have them result in a pile of bounces?
Bounces affect your email deliverability. They send notice to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that you’re likely a spammer and should be treated as such. Fewer people will see your emails because they’re now going to the junk folder.
Is It Possible To Have A 0% Bounce Rate?
Perfection is unattainable, but it is an ideal to strive for.
You may want to achieve a 0% bounce rate. However, there are many factors out of your control:
A Full Mailbox: Your customer may have a valid email address, but their mailbox is full. This will result in a soft bounce.
Issues With Email Providers: The contacts on your list rely on other email providers, so you can’t dictate what happens on their end.
Glitches: You’ve likely witnessed an email that bounced for no discernible reason. Sometimes an unexplained phenomenon or glitch is to blame.
The concept of “aim small, miss small” applies. If you shoot for 0%, you may get close.
If you try to hit the benchmark, you may veer into the danger zone.
How To Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Now that you know the risks of a high bounce rate, let’s explore the most reliable ways to keep bounces at bay and help your emails reach the inbox.
Image courtesy of ZeroBounce.Net, October 2023
Step 1: Validate Your Email List
You can remove invalid email addresses from your list once they bounce, but the damage is already done.
To keep your email deliverability high, you want to avoid bounces in the first place – and the most effective way to do it is by using an email validator.
An email validation service checks your email list for invalid email addresses so you can remove them before they cause harm.
The process is easy and fast – on average, you can verify 100,000 contacts in less than an hour.
Email databases decay at an average rate of 23% a year, so remember to validate your contacts at least once a quarter.
Image courtesy of ZeroBounce.net, October 2023
Step 2: Set Up An Email Validation API
After you verify your entire email list, you can go a step further and prevent it from acquiring bad data with an email validation API.
The API is your second layer of defense against bounces, working in real-time to protect the health of your email list.
Once you connect the API to your sign-up and registration forms, it blocks invalid emails right at the point of capture.
For instance, if someone mistypes an email, it prompts them with a message asking them to enter the right address. Aside from that, a trustworthy email validation API blocks bots and fake sign-ups, thus protecting your email deliverability.
Step 3: Remove Unengaged Subscribers From Your Email List
Building an email list takes effort, so many companies want to hold on to the email contacts they gather.
The bigger your list, the higher the ROI is the common mindset.
How To Transform Your Social Media Strategy With This Winning Formula For Success
In order to elevate your social media strategy with the perfect mix of user-generated content, improved content quality, and generative AI, you should:
Insight 3: AI Delegation – Pick The Right Social Media Tasks To Give To Generative AI
Knowing how to safely give tasks to AI is the key to reducing your social media manager’s timespend and freeing up their day to execute these expert social media insights.
“With AI, content creation will be accomplished with impressive speed and efficiency. Its benefits are genuinely inspiring.”
Generative AI cannot physically create the human touch required for social media campaigns that truly resonate with your potential customers. AI needs humans, and humans can benefit from AI’s speed.
How Do I Improve My Workflow With AI?
“AI tools can be gamechangers for marketers. They can expedite the brainstorming process with data-driven suggestions, optimize content for specific channels, and help automate content repurposing across various platforms.”
– Lindsey Gamble, Associate Director of Influencer Innovation, Mavrck
You can utilize AI tools to:
Automate routine tasks such as scheduling posts and monitoring social media metrics.
Generate copy for your social media content more quickly and efficiently.
Analyze user behavior and preferences to deliver personalized content to your audience and record their activity.
Even though AI can enhance your social media strategy, make sure to regularly review and adapt your social media strategy based on the insights generated by AI, combined with the expertise and intuition of your human marketing team.
Insight 4: TikTok & LinkedIn Will Be The Top-Performing Social Media Platforms Of 2024
Thanks to their high engagement capacity and evolving abilities, TikTok and LinkedIn should become your priority platforms.
“TikTok is still developing exciting new features and tools for creators, advertisers, and regular users. It will likely focus on ecommerce, generative AI, and search in 2024. It also remains the king of short video engagement.”
– Matt Navarra, Social Media Consultant & Industry Analyst
LinkedIn’s user base has grown to millions of professionals from diverse sectors, making it an invaluable resource for establishing and nurturing B2B relationships.
How To Use TikTok, LinkedIn, Meta’s Facebook & Threads, & X (Formerly Twitter) In 2024
This year’s trends in social media and their platform efficacy implore you to:
Establish new relationships with TikTok’s content creators.
Activate your LinkedIn profile.
Start conversations: Get your strategy ready for Threads.
Explore Instagram’s latest tools.
Be cautious about X investments.
Insight 5: Shift Your Social Media KPI Focus Toward Engagement + Shares To Monitor Authenticity
Engagement is currently a global trend in social media content.
True social media engagement, such as comments and conversations on shares, can’t be bought. This is a great marker for social media success.
For all you multi-hat-wearing marketers, think of it as link building and authority. The more shares and engagement on those shares you have, the better the content must be – according to updated algorithm logic.
“Qualitative metrics – more focused on people who book meetings based on content rather than just clicks or views.”
–Mandy McEwen, CEO and Founder at Mod Girl Marketing
Be sure to focus your social media management on creating content that inspires discussions and promotes comments and these five key types of social media engagement.
Insight 6: Reshape Your Social Media Strategy – Become A Visionary
So far, we’ve seen five great insights that can be incorporated into your next strategy.
But, what does that strategy look like? You can get the full strategy checklist in our ebook, but here is our high-level outline:
Insights 7 – 20: Want To Explore All Expert Social Media Tips For 2024?
To get the full details of each insight above, as well as 13 additional expert tips, download the full guide below.
The insights provided by our Visionaries, a diverse team of top voices in Social Media that have made this report possible, are everything you need to create a social media marketing strategy that dominates your competition and expands your social media presence.
Building a successful business is no easy feat, especially in a world where consumers have more options – and distractions – than ever before.
That’s why market research is essential to any business marketing plan and marketing strategy.
Market research lets you learn more about our target consumers and their behavior, spot emerging trends, uncover important data, and make informed business decisions.
But with so many target consumers out there and so many places and methods to reach them, where should you start?
In this article, we’ll cover some of the best market research tools available to you across a variety of tactics and approaches.
Let’s get started.
1. SurveyMonkey
Screenshot from SurveyMonkey, September 2023
One of the more well-known survey tools, SurveyMonkey offers a broad list of features and capabilities for creating audience surveys.
Whether you want to create your own survey or choose from one of its 250+ expert-created templates, SurveyMonkey offers a user-friendly interface that enables you to customize your surveys to your needs.
It also offers a suite of helpful features, including AI-powered knowledge to help you pose the right questions, as well as built-in reporting and analytics.
Pricing:
SurveyMonkey offers a free Basic tier with unlimited surveys featuring up to 10 questions and 10 responses per survey.
Individual plans start at $39/month with unlimited surveys and questions, and up to 15,000 responses per year.
Team plans start at $25/user/month, starting at three users. This level also gives you unlimited surveys and questions, but offers 50,000 responses per year.
2. Typeform
Screenshot from Typeform, September 2023
Typeform is an easy-to-use tool focused on helping users create intuitive and engaging forms, surveys, quizzes, polls, and more. Its selling point is the ability to create truly conversational, beautiful forms.
With Typeform, you can create slick surveys with customizable interactive elements, such as images and videos, that encourage your audience to take action. Its focus on interactivity makes it an appealing tool for market research.
Typeform offers plenty of useful features – from conditional logic to creating dynamic surveys – that adapt based on answers to real-time data analytics and integrations with tons of popular tools, from Slack to Google Analytics.
The company even offers a standalone video tool, VideoAsk, where users can create “video forms” to prompt responses.
Pricing:
Typeform offers a Free plan with unlimited typeforms and 10 responses per month.
Paid plans start at $25/month billed annually for Basic, $50/month billed annually for Plus, and $83/month billed annually for Business.
The company also offers an Enterprise plan.
3. BuzzSumo
Screenshot from Buzzsumo, September 2023
BuzzSumo is a content research and analysis tool that can help you gather some powerful market insights.
Regarding market research, BuzzSumo can help you understand the content landscape in your industry (and beyond), find out what’s resonating with your target consumers, identify influencers in your niche, and track how your content is performing vs. your competitors’.
The BuzzSumo tool analyzes articles (over 5 billion!) and social media posts across the internet to identify top-performing content. It allows you to comb through five years of data so that you can discover the right content ideas for your audience.
Pricing:
30-day free trial (no credit card required).
Membership tiers start at $159/month billed yearly for Content Creation (individual) plan, $239/month billed yearly for PR & Comms plan, $399/month billed yearly for the Suite plan, and $999/month billed yearly for the Enterprise plan.
4. Qualaroo
Screenshot from Quaraloo, September 2023
Want to capture user feedback and deepen your understanding of market trends? Qualaroo might be the tool for you.
Qualaroo is a customer and user feedback tool that claims to be “10X more valuable than email surveys.” Using Qualaroo, you can add a survey to a page on your website or integrate it into your product.
The tool uses behavioral triggering to show surveys or feedback prompts in response to specific user behavior, so you know you’re targeting the right people with the most relevant questions.
Qualaroo also offers visual customization so you can get the branding right, automatic language translation, a library of survey templates, audience targeting, and IBM Watson Sentiment Analysis to help you organize your results.
Pricing:
15-day free trial (no credit card required).
Plans start at $69/month billed annually for Essentials, $149/month billed annually for Premium, and $299+/month billed annually for Business tier.
5. SpyFu
Screenshot from SpyFu, September 2023
SpyFu is a great choice if you’re looking to conduct competitive analysis as part of your market research efforts.
It allows you to effectively “spy” on your competitors by viewing their marketing strategies, advertising history, what keywords they’ve bought on Google Ads, and more – which can help you find gaps in the market and optimize your own approach.
You can feed the SpyFu tool a URL, and it will instantly show you its results for SEO topics like organic keywords, top pages, backlink analysis, total traffic, competition, and more.
Not only can SpyFu help you gain an understanding of the SEO landscape for your industry and gain a competitive advantage, but it can also tell you how hard it might be to dominate a specific niche.
Pricing:
SpyFu offers paid plans starting at $16/month for Basic, $36/month for Professional, and $149/month for Team (billed annually).
6. Ahrefs
Screenshot from Ahrefs, September 2023
Another great tool for SEO and competitive analysis, Ahrefs is a popular choice of many marketers for good reason.
Using Ahrefs, you can learn more about the search landscape of your market, discover what keywords your customers are searching for, track your competitors, and analyze content in your industry to inform your own strategies.
With its keyword and content capabilities, Ahrefs will help you find gaps and opportunities in the market so that you can improve your content, your site, and your search visibility.
Pricing:
Website owners can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free limited access to its Site Explorer and Site Audit tools.
Paid plans start at $83/month for Lite, $166/month for Standard, $333/month for Advanced, and $833/month for Enterprise (billed annually).
7. Delve AI
Screenshot from Delve AI, September 2023
User personas are a crucial facet of an effective marketing strategy – and as such, developing them is a common step in any market research process.
Thanks to tools like Delve AI, it’s easier than ever to build user personas.
Delve AI offers a suite of persona-building tools based on your needs and the data available to you. Depending on what stage your business is in, you can generate:
Competitor personas using Delve AI’s data.
Social personas based on your social audience.
Customer personas using your customer information.
Live personas for your website based on Google Analytics data.
Beyond its multi-channel capabilities, Delve AI uses AI algorithms for accuracy in personas, offers behavioral insights, real-time updates to your personas, and more.
Pricing:
The company offers a free Lite plan.
Business plans start at $71/month for Standard, $159/month for the Growth tier, and $439/month for Pro (billed annually).
Agency plans start at $167/month for Standard, $343/month for Growth, and $687/month for the Pro tier (billed annually).
8. Sprout Social
Screenshot from Sprout Social, September 2023
We don’t need to tell you about the importance of social media when it comes to connecting with your audience and driving business success. It can also play a major role where market research is concerned.
Sprout Social offers a robust suite of social media management features. Perhaps the most useful for market research are social listening features – which allow you to track market trends, industry keywords, and social conversations – and its competitor analysis capabilities.
It also provides insights into audience demographics, behavior, and interests, which you can use to inform your marketing approach.
Pricing:
Free 30-day trial.
Plans start at $249/month for Standard, $399/month for Professional, and $499/month for Advanced.
Sprout Social also offers an Enterprise tier plan.
9. Google Trends
Screenshot from Google Trends, September 2023
How can you supercharge your market research efforts? Look to search data.
Google Trends is an incredible tool that enables you to analyze real-time and historical search data to discover market trends, up-to-date consumer insights, and more.
By using this tool to access the latest information on how people search on Google, you can spot emerging interests and opportunity areas, and keep an eye on what consumers are most interested in.
It also offers location filtering so that you can see what’s trending in any given market.
Pricing:
10. Statista
Screenshot from Statista, September 2023
If you’re looking for data and statistics on pretty much anything in the world of business and marketing, you might want to check out Statista.
It’s a business intelligence platform that provides “statistics, reports, and insights on over 80,000 topics from 22,500 sources in 170 industries.” This means that if you’re looking for specific market research insights, Statista most likely has something to fit your needs.
From in-depth reports to data visualizations and industry forecasts, Statista can give you reliable insights into what’s happening in markets around the world, and highlight market and consumer trends.
Pricing:
Free Basic account available.
Paid accounts start at $149/month for Starter and $490/month for Personal (billed annually), with more options available.
11. Qualtrics
Screenshot from Qualtrics, September 2023
If you’re looking for something extremely robust, Qualtrics’ market research platform is an all-in-one, AI-powered solution for your market research needs.
It offers a suite of features and capabilities, including:
Panel Management: Enables you to create research panels from email lists, site visitors, social followers, and more.
On-Demand Respondents: Companies can pay for access to survey respondents that match their target demographic.
Product Development: Get access to early feedback on your new products and services from customers.
Purchase Behavior: Explore data on what is fueling purchase decisions among your target customers.
And more.
While it requires a more dedicated investment, Qualtrics’ software is scalable and powerful. It comes with automation and integration with many other tools, and customers have access to a support team.
Pricing:
Qualtrics offers a free survey maker tool with up to 500 responses.
For pricing details, reach out to the Qualtrics team.
12. Temper
Screenshot from Temper, September 2023
It’s important to stay on top of how your customers feel about your business, services, and products – and Temper provides a super simple way to do just that.
The concept is simple: Come up with a simple question you want to ask your question, and your customers can respond by clicking a smiley face that corresponds to how they feel.
You might want to ask your customers, “How do you feel about our new product?” or “Please rate your experience with our customer support team.” With just a little bit of code, you can place a Temper widget on your webpage, in a blog post, or in an email footer and get quick feedback on audience sentiment.
Pricing:
Plans start at $12/month for Hobby tier, $49/month for Pro, $89/month for Business, and $199/month for White Label.
Temper offers a 60-day risk-free, money-back guarantee.
13. Quora
You’ve likely heard of the question-and-answer site Quora, but have you considered its potential as a market research tool?
Quora is an online community where real people can go to ask questions about anything they’d like, and share their experiences and opinions with others via answers.
It offers a unique opportunity for brands to conduct market research within their specific industry or area by connecting with Quora’s diverse community of consumers, professionals, and others.
Try searching Quora for topics related to your business or niche, and look at what types of conversations are trending. Or, you could ask a question yourself!
Quora is free to use, though it also offers separate business solutions.
14. Crunchbase
Screenshot from Crunchbase, September 2023
Crunchbase is a handy tool for getting a good picture of your industry landscape and how your competitors are faring.
It’s a database of companies that includes information like funding round data, investors, and financial information for each business. It also includes information such as employee headcount, leadership data, and more.
You can search Crunchbase by region or industry, allowing you to see how other companies in your niche are growing, and who is deciding to fund them. This can help you identify investment opportunities and market gaps, or even just gauge the overall health of your industry.
Pricing:
Crunchbase offers a Free plan where you can preview profile pages at no cost.
Paid options start at $29/month for Starter and $49/month for Pro (billed annually).
An Enterprise option is also available with custom billing.
15. Google Market Finder
Screenshot from Google Market Finder, September 2023
Another excellent market research tool from Google is Market Finder. This free, interactive tool is focused mostly on researching target markets – so you can use it to discover which markets might have the most potential for your company, monitor demand for your products or services, and more.
There are two primary features within Market Finder:
Test your export readiness. By providing your company’s URL and completing a short quiz, the tool will grade your “readiness” to expand into new markets abroad.
Dive into new markets. You can take another short quiz that will suggest new market recommendations based on the information you provide, as well as external data like search volume and Google Ads.
Market Finder can also integrate with your Google Analytics data for more accurate information.
Pricing:
16. Semrush
Screenshot from Market Explorer, September 2023
Semrush is a one-stop marketing tool that can be leveraged to gain incredibly useful market research insights.
The company offers features dedicated to this type of research, such as its Market Explorer tool, which enables you to get quick information on your specific industry, conduct an analysis of market share, and benchmark your business against your competitors. You can also use the tool to analyze the potential of a new niche or market region for your business.
You might also find Semrush’s traffic analytics tool useful, as it allows you to go deeper with competitive analysis and target consumer demographics.
Pricing:
Semrush offers a free account with limited capabilities.
Paid accounts start at $108.33/month for Pro, $208.33/month for Guru, and $416.66/month for Business (billed annually).
17. Pew Research Center
Screenshot from Pew Research Center, September 2023
While not a traditional marketing tool, the Pew Research Center is a widely known and respected resource that can be super effective when it comes to market research.
The site hosts a robust catalog of reports, surveys, and research covering everything from tech and digital media to politics, cultural trends, and more. The data is unbiased and credible, offering a unique perspective into what today’s consumers think and feel on various topics.
You can use the Pew Research Center as a tool to further hone your market research efforts, providing you with insights into the attitudes and behaviors of your target consumer, as well as the various factors that are impacting their desires and purchasing decisions.
Pricing:
18. Exploding Topics
Screenshot from Exploding Topics, September 2023
We all know the saying, “I liked it before it was popular” – well, with Exploding Topics, your business can be the one to say this.
Exploding Topics helps you spot trends before they become super popular by analyzing searches, mentions, and conversations across the web to identify products, topics, and industries that are on the rise.
You can use Exploding Topics as a resource to help you predict shifts in the market and consumer interests, which can inform everything from your product design and strategy to your marketing approach.
It’s a lot like Google Trends, with some key differences; it pulls in data from a variety of sources and is focused on highlighting emerging trends before they take off.
Pricing:
Exploding Topics offers a free version of its Trend Database.
Paid tiers begin at $39/month for Entrepreneur, $99/month for Investor, and $249/month for Business (billed annually).
19. Loop11
Screenshot from Loop11, September 2023
In today’s day and age, you can’t build a successful business without an effective website. But how can you know whether your website will resonate with your target consumer?
You can use Loop11, a usability testing platform that helps facilitate user testing of your products.
Loop11 makes it simple to create a usability test and secure participants.
It enables you to view the user’s experience through video, audio, and screen recordings. Then, it presents you with in-depth insights and UX metrics to help you understand what’s working with your website, app, or product and what’s preventing people from converting.
Pricing:
Free 14-day trial with full capabilities.
Paid plans start at $179/month for Rapid Insights, $358/month for Pro, and $533/month for Enterprise (billed annually).
In Summary
Market research is key to any business plan, no matter what industry you’re in, what stage of growth your business is at, or what customers you’re serving.
From competitive analysis to keyword research, user feedback, and more, focusing on your market research efforts will pay dividends to your business in the long run.
And while there are plenty of different ways to approach market research, these represent some of the best tools available to you – and can be a great jumping-off point for you to get started.
How do you turn the conversations happening over the phone into invaluable data that drives success?
From understanding customer behavior to identifying conversion opportunities, your phone calls are full of hidden gems and untapped insights.
Humans may not have the capacity to analyze data from hundreds of calls or transcripts manually – but with CallRail’s AI-powered technology, it’s possible.
In fact, the process has been kickstarted, and there is data ready for you!
So, if you’re ready to start mining the golden sales opportunities within your business phone calls, our upcoming webinar is one you won’t want to miss.
Join us on November 1, as Jason Tatum, CallRail’s VP of Product, shares proprietary insights from more than 100 million phone calls, as well as how to harness them to supercharge your sales strategies.
You’ll discover consumer communication trends that help small-to-medium businesses and agency marketers increase conversions and boost results.
We’ll also be covering the past and future state of phone calls, and how you can use AI technology to gather useful data from them and transform your business.
In this live session, you’ll learn:
How to use your conversations to unlock a goldmine of untapped insights. By analyzing customer calls, you can gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points.
How you can use AI to mine gold from conversations. CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence technology allows you to transcribe conversations with near-human accuracy, surface key terms and phrases from conversations, and quickly summarize call details.
Ways that AI-mined gold from calls can transform your business. You can use insights from customer calls to further refine your SEO and keyword bidding strategies and respond to customer sentiment appropriately.
This webinar is your chance to learn how to develop data-driven marketing strategies that deliver real results.
Don’t miss this opportunity to uncover the wealth of data hidden within your phone calls and drive your marketing and sales strategies to success.
Secure your spot now and start mastering data-driven marketing today.
Tip 2: Use AI Call Data To Inform Your SEO Strategy & Maximize Your Potential
You can use AI to pull important data from your clients’ phone conversations more efficiently and apply these insights to your marketing strategies with CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence®.
Rather than getting bogged down with tedious manual tasks, let AI do the heavy lifting for you and spend more time on the things that really move the needle.
AI-powered tools such as CallRailʼs Conversation Intelligence can assist with sales or customer service conversations in real time.
If an agent is unsure how they should follow up on a call, for example, a generative AI model could analyze the call, compare it against the wealth of other calls it has already analyzed, and make a data-based recommendation on the next steps.
Conversational Intelligence is also a great tool for automating call summaries and aggregate trends.
It allows you to coach your clients on lead follow-up with time-saving call summaries. Plus, through call sentiment analysis, you are able to pinpoint the calls that require your clients’ immediate attention, enabling them to respond at a faster rate.
You can even utilize this technology to help you find new keywords to run campaigns against or adjust your strategy for keywords you’re already targeting.
An AI-powered tool could also recommend changes or update bids automatically, by analyzing the calls that came from these campaigns and determining whether the lead converted.
Want to learn more about making data-based recommendations with generative AI, as well as empowering the other tools in your marketing stack? Download CallRail’s new ebook.
Tip 3: Humanize Your Business & Strengthen Client Connections
By adding AI to your clients’ inbound phone calls, you can form more meaningful connections.
The data you’re able to access with this technology reveals a whole new layer to target consumers, digging deeper into their strongest needs and desires.
And by adjusting your campaign strategy to meet users where they are, you create a lasting impression that will keep them wanting more.
By tapping into AI’s ability to optimize your clients’ marketing and sales conversations, you can help them connect better with more customers.
AI exposes the quality of your clients’ connections and helps you make them more robust, satisfying, and human, rather than making them more robotic.
For marketing agencies specifically, conversational AI makes it possible to act on data you wouldn’t have otherwise had access to while automating tasks like:
Call transcription.
Summaries.
Keyword spotting.
Trend analysis.
Although the traditional phone call might appear to be teetering on the brink of obsolescence, conversations remain relevant, thanks to AI’s newfound ability to tap into their invaluable wealth of user data.
Get your free copy of CallRail’s new ebook to find out more about how these rare insights can help you explore new marketing opportunities and take your agency to the next level.
Unleashing The Power Of Conversational AI
Embracing modern tools has the power to transform the challenges associated with phone calls into opportunities.
Call tracking makes it not just possible but easy to connect incoming calls to marketing campaigns and lead records.
But more remarkably, conversational AI can unlock those rich, qualitative insights hidden inside the raw audio data of the call.
This technology helps you tap into how potential users might want to interact with your client’s product and the questions that they may have – you can then use conversational AI tools to help route them to relevant information.
With the following tips, you’ll learn how to start using this advanced form of AI to supercharge your clients’ phone conversations and boost user experience.
Leverage Your Conversation Data With CallRail & Build A Winning Marketing Strategy
Enhanced by the power of AI technology, the phone call is steadily reclaiming its relevance as a potent medium for consumer engagement.
It’s time to embrace the conversational revolution and recognize calls for what they are: a gold mine of intelligence waiting to be tapped.
So, if you’re ready to start mining gold from phone conversations, CallRailʼs Conversation Intelligence is the leading AI tool for uncovering the hidden gems of data concealed within every interaction.
Start your 14-day free trial to access the key insights that not only illuminate consumer preferences and behavior, but also pave the way for growth.
Plus, download CallRail’s new ebook to learn more about leveraging phone calls to improve your marketing strategies and unlock new opportunities.
Google’s algorithm is always changing. And along with new AI integrations, it’s crucial to know how your, or your clients’, websites could be affected.
Are you taking advantage of these changes to keep your SEO game strong?
On September 6, I moderated a webinar with Cynthia Sener and Morrissey Balsamides of Chatmeter. They discussed updates to Google’s algorithm and five AI changes you need to know, the strategic advantages of AI (and what we can expect next), and how to best support your multi-location customers.
What agencies can do to become better partners to their multi-location clients.
How you can ensure your pages, or your clients, show up on page one of SERPs.
How to communicate these updates to clients or stakeholders to streamline and maximize online reputation.
Sener and Balsamides dive into the positive effect of AI on multi-location reputation management – where it stands today and where it may go in the future.
Boomers, millennials, Gen Z – with so many generational terms flying around, it can be difficult to know who’s who in the zoo.
Well, baby boomers are easy enough.
While technically, the term refers to those born between 1946 and 1964, today, the word ‘boomer’ is used to dismiss outdated and stereotypical attitudes: “Okay, boomer!”
But millennials and Gen Z are a little different.
While both millennials and Gen Z are young adults born in the digital age, they aren’t the same. And yet many marketers make the mistake of running one campaign aimed at both.
Marketing to Gen Z is becoming more widespread, but how exactly should we be marketing to millennials? Let’s take a look.
Because most millennials came of age around the year 2000. In fact, today, older millennials are 42 years old, while the youngest are 27.
As the largest generation group in the US (as of 2022), American millennials make up an estimated 72.24 million of the population – which shows just how important they are to the global economy.
Millennials have a direct buying power of an estimated $1 trillion.
This means you’re missing out if you don’t have a specific marketing strategy for millennials.
The Key Traits Of Millennial Consumers
So what is it most important to know about millennials when creating marketing campaigns for them?
They don’t allow themselves to be swayed by clever advertising. Instead, they rely on recommendations from friends and family, online reviews, and social media platforms.
They like sharing their opinions, and they look for the opinions of others too.
So if your brand doesn’t have enough word of mouth visibility, that’s something to consider.
They Prioritize Experiences
There’s more to life than just buying stuff, right?
At least that’s what millennials think, with 57% reporting ‘traveling the world’ as a higher priority than things like earning a high salary, buying a home, or having children.
This is proof that millennials value experiences far more highly than things.
If there’s a way for you to add an experiential element to your marketing campaigns, it’ll create a point of connection with your millennial audience.
They’re Digital Natives
According to data from the Pew Research Center, almost 100% of millennials use the internet, and 9 out of 10 own a smartphone.
This means easy, consistent access to the web, very often via mobile devices.
So if you can use technology and digital platforms to market your brand, you have a much better chance of reaching a millennial consumer.
They Value Authenticity
Generation Y (as millennials are also known) look for more from their brands than just a token message.
Instead, they want brands to understand them, to connect with them, and to build a relationship of meaning and value.
It’s all about authenticity – something that can’t be faked.
This means you must be honest and transparent with your target audience. You’ll also need to have a purpose and be willing to share it.
The more you can involve millennials on a human level, the more rewarding your relationship with them will be.
Creating A Marketing Strategy For Millennial Customers
They also represent the smallest percentage of magazine and newspaper readers.
So how do you market to them?
Be Authentic
There’s that word again.
So let’s talk numbers. 26% of millennials are “digital socialites” – people who engage frequently online.
23% are dynamic media junkies, meaning they engage with video content and streaming services.
And then you have the 15% who are the digital elite – highly influential across social and online platforms.
This means that if you want to reach millennials in a way that they’ll connect with, it needs to be online.
And it needs to be real and authentic enough to reach them through the hundreds of other brand messages they receive daily.
That’s because millennials aren’t just mindlessly browsing, liking, and sharing. They’re interacting with brands and people they’re inspired by and whose interests they share.
And your own brand needs to become one of them.
If you can speak to millennials in a way they can connect with and trust, you’ll be able to build a relevant, authentic, and long-lasting relationship.
Look Past Stereotypes
Millennials are sometimes considered superficial and obsessed with social media and self-validation.
But they hold certain core values close to their hearts, from animal rights and anti-racism to environmental sustainability, feminism, and more.
And when it comes to supporting a cause, 37% of millennials are willing to back products and services with a purpose, even if it means paying extra.
So forget about millennial stereotypes and start embracing millennial values instead. If you can show support for what they believe in, they’ll show you the same support right back.
Leverage Social Media Marketing
It’s important to remember that you need to curate your social media campaigns to fit the platform.
Instagram audiences are different from TikTok and Facebook audiences, so it’s no use running the same campaign across these and other social platforms.
Instead, you’ll need to target your messaging to reach each audience while bearing commonalities like these in mind:
Go mobile: Millennials spend about 211 minutes a day on their smartphones, making mobile marketing a must.
Create visual content: Don’t rely solely on text. Marketing content can include videos, photos, and other media too, helping you connect even more effectively.
Harness user-generated content: Millennials trust the opinions of others, so use testimonials, reviews, and photos your brand has been tagged in as part of your social media strategy. It’ll help boost your credibility and awareness while saving you money at the same time.
Think About Influencer Marketing
If there’s one thing that online influencers have, it’s reach.
This is why working with them can help you broadcast your message to a wider millennial audience.
We already know that millennials are an age group that values authentic opinions and unique experiences.
So why not combine these into one with influencer marketing?
You’ll be able to grow your following and boost your engagement, all with the help of an authentic, trusted voice.
Just make sure you choose the right influencer for your brand, and you’ll have another channel with which to communicate your messaging and personality.
Building Trust With Millennial Consumers
Brand loyalty is all about building trust.
So how do you go about establishing it with your target audience?
Aside from creating an authentic connection with them, consider these tips:
1. Be Transparent
Don’t hold anything back.
Be open about your brand and prioritize environmental sustainability and responsibility.
If you collect your customers’ data, let them know how and when you plan to use it.
And always, always tell the truth.
2. Get Personal
Social media is an important millennial marketing tool, but it’s not the only one out there.
In fact, 56% of millennials would switch brands in favor of another brand that customizes to their needs.
So if you can offer this level of flexibility and personalization, you’ll position yourself for success.
3. Find A Way To Improve Their Lives
Don’t sell them any old garbage; millennials are far more savvy than that.
Instead, they look at what brands can offer, wondering, “What’s in it for me?”
If you approach your marketing with this in mind, it’ll deliver the message you want it to.
Successfully Marketing To Millennials
Generation Y is a market that’s been largely misunderstood – until now.
While some may harbor stereotypical misconceptions about millennials, they are integral to our global economy.
Not only do they make up a quarter of the population, but they hold significant buying power too.
And it’s being able to harness this that will give you the edge.
Learn how to market successfully to millennials; you’ll have customers and brand loyalty for life.
Screenshot by CallRail, Nov 2023
