Take your own medicine, two surveys for research leaders

An opportunity to take your own medicine, as a leader, is nearly always helpful.

Whilst sending out GDPR communications, to my clients & contacts, a number have praised seeing someone “take their own medicine“.

Similarly, we have previously recommended that analytics & database marketing teams visit customer touch-points, or observe the impact of their leads.

So, during this month focusing on research, here is some ‘own medicine’ for research leaders: A quick post, recommending a couple of surveys.

It can be helpful for research leaders to complete other surveys for a few reasons:

• Seeing the approach to survey design taken by others (good & bad practice)
• Experiencing the effort needed to complete research surveys
• Learning from the results of others surveys, as well as your own

For that reason, for this short post, I’ve selected two surveys on a couple of topics. Subjects that I believe research leaders will find interesting.

Here they are…

How are you spending your Marketing Budget and Benchmarking the ROI impact?

The first survey that I recommend you complete this week, is this one from guest blogger Ben Salmon. Ben is co-founder of the agency Crank, and has previously written for us on the topics of digital marketing best practice & avoiding common mistakes.

In this survey, Ben is interested in looking at today’s marketing spend, ROI and benchmarking. You will be asked to disclose how your marketing budget is allocated, measured, resourced & your level of maturity in your market. The deadline, for participating, is 15 April 2018 (so act soon).

It will be interesting to see how the results compare with the best practice laid out in textbooks like “Marketing Payback“:

Marketing Spend and Benchmarking Survey – PA

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Once Crank have the results, I’ll invite Ben back to our blog, to share his results with us all.

How are you spending your Research Budget & using which tools?

The second survey, that I am recommending is the semi-annual GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT). You may recall that I shared H2 2017 GRIT results in a recent post on implicit research methods.

Anyway, GRIT is perhaps the leading global regular survey of trends in the market research profession and industry. Capturing the actual use of research by both clients-side leaders, and commissioned from agencies. Its provides a great opportunity to learn about how others are allocating research spend, resourcing this work & using which methods.

It also provides an excellent opportunity to highlight (and thus learn about) innovative research agencies. So, well worth participating to benchmark your experience against others, globally.

The latest GRIT survey also closes this week, so participate prior to 14th April 2018:

Survey is closed

Thank you for choosing to participate, but the survey has completed and is now closed.

I’m sure there will again be useful learning from that latest report, to share in future blog posts.

What have you learned by taking your own medicine?

Hope you find participating in both surveys to be enjoyable and useful, especially when you get the results.

Do you plan to participating in a number of surveys or other research methods each year? What have you learned from doing that?

It would be great to share more personal examples of lessons you’ve learned from taking your own medicine, as a research leader.