What is New in Digital Marketing?

The essence of marketing is all about forming emotional bond between your audience and your brand. Traditionally, this is the kind of visualization that both marketers and agencies have been trying to always visualize.

Surveys, focus groups, research, etc. all had a go at it. However, it is seen that people are not willing to divulge their intrinsic beliefs when asked in the street or prompted over the phone.

With the arrival of social media, people started overtly expressing their sentiments through these pages about brands. This resulted in revival of dormant products and reenergizing of old brands. People virtually crushed others to death.

But what if your interest is in consumer's emotions that are more deeply engrained in their minds?

·      Think outside the (search) box.

The reason for this digression is that one can find consumer insights everywhere. One needs to be a little creative in their approach. The Bing Ads Intelligence tool is a great discovery in this respect. This search marketing tool helps search marketers make knowledgeable choices when building a marketing campaign. For any specific keyword, the tool makes use of the Bing search queries for historical and forecasted data to provide you traffic volumes, geographical and demographic information about the searchers, all for free. One needs to download it to use.

This freeware is a great option for marketers, especially those in smaller businesses. The current economic climate, considering costs that are a major consideration, makes it unaffordable to many to do research on the actual demographic profile of audience and do regular research for auditing the awareness of your brand awareness against the audience.

·      Search engines are for finding.

The search engines are often called as the database of intents. This is well established by Bing that offers you sample of intentions that are statistically relevant. Hence the use of Bing Ads Intelligence for your own research provides you with access to actual logs that let you use them as substitute for the intents of the consumer. It will help you to find the number of potential customers who have searched for your brand in the previous month and the number who are your competitors. This helps you to know your brand awareness. Did the consumers search from a mobile device or on a PC? Have the number of queries seen an increase after the broadcast of the latest local TV campaign? How efficient was your regional billboard campaign? From which locations are your visitors?

·      Two tools to make your data click.

Bing Ads Intelligence is the first click in which on entering a word (it could be a brand name), and selecting what is needed to know about it, like device usage, demographics, etc., you can turn the data in Excel into a compelling visualization.

The second click is yet another Excel free tool, called Powermap. It is a 3D visualization add-in for Excel and is used for exploring, mapping and interacting with geographical and temporal data, thus helping people to discover new insights and share with others. The search data could be displayed in chart to see the location of customers making the search, where the prospects are congregating etc.

Although, the tools are no replacement for an extensive monitoring application or full professional research, but these are extremely useful for a superior desk research.