What are you thinking?

 

Customers aren’t commodities. Understanding what in the world customers are thinking requires the ability to turn actionable insights into strategic impact.

 

Learn how research projects I conducted led to informed decision making, inspiration and innovation.

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Featured Selections

Website Usability Research: MarketingPower.com

Conducted website usability research to assess general design quality of the site, identify potential user experience opportunities and understand user feelings and attitudes about the site, including ideas for desired features and functionality.

Project Scope:

• Heuristic evaluation
• In-person lab interviews
• Remote interviews
• Mind mapping
• Recommendations

Results:

Insights served as basis for planning of redesign of new site including new features and functionality, redesigned navigation and content organization, and definition of business requirements.  In addition, internal business teams utilized insights to refine website content to drive increases in traffic and engagement.

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Content Needs Assessment and Content Mapping

Conducted study to assess the content needs and interests of marketing professionals in order to tailor content for MarketingPower.com as well as other information delivery channels. Specific research objectives included: determining preferences among marketing topics and sub-topics, identifying current and preferred sources for marketing-related content, discovering currently used and preferred delivery channels for marketing-related content by topic and measuring how often, and determining for what purposes respondents seek out marketing content.

Project Scope:

• Developed survey instrument using MaxDiff methodology
• Surveyed more than 1,800 marketing professionals
• Identified insights and drafted recommendations

Results:

The research insights served as a basic for the development of a content map for the organization’s new website.  Primary navigation of the new design is organized around 9 fundamental topics identified by topics.  Additionally, the organization’s content development strategy was refined to incorporate user preferences for content channels and sources.

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Social Media Usage Research

The Social Media Research project was conducted to assess the interest of marketing professionals in social media tools and identify their social networking behavior.  A broad marketing audience was surveyed on their current usage patterns of social media tools such as forums, groupos, blogs and wikis as well as popular online social networking platforms.

Project Scope:

• Creation  of a survey instrument distributed to 4,800 North American and international marketing professionals.
• Analysis of results based on marketer role and industry
• Development of recommendations and action plan for the AMA’s organization-wide social media strategy

Results:

Respondents overwhelmingly indicated they actively participate in social networks in order to form business connections and achieve key business objectives such as understanding customer insights and pursuing new growth areas.  Forums, message boards groups, online communities and blogs were identified as the most valuable social media tools. Participants also cited lack of time to learn or explore social media options as a primary barrier to increased social media adoption.

The research insights resulted in the planning, development and implementation of a branded online  social network platform called AMAConnect (http://amaconnect.marketingpower.com)