Edition 41, Marketing

Digital Intelligence Applied to the Company

By: Agustín Castañeda and  Edmundo Ramírez

Googling, engagement, profiles, followers, “like” and hashtag have become everyday expressions among 40 millions active cybernauts in Mexico, which means they are elements of contemporary life that company directors should know how to manage.

The use of smartphones brought of global revolution in the way we consume the content of social networks and the time we spend using them. In Mexico, according to the Mexican Internet Association (AMIPCI), 68% of people who connected the Internet use PCs, 67% from laptops and nearly a quarter of them connect through smartphones. On average, the executive segment alone spent three and a half hours a day browsing the Internet in 2010.

A study conducted by Master Research for CICOM in 2011, called “The Value of marketing investment in Mexico,” found that the ways to reach consumers have changed, for example:

  • Investment in Internet advertising has risen 38%
  • Investment in market research has grown 8.4%
  • General investment marketing has risen 13.7%.

Edmundo Ramirez, director of the market research agency Master Research, proposes the following: “Companies should be 100% aware of what happens in the social networks regarding their brand and their competitors. With this in mind, we designed the Digital Intelligence methodology.”

Figure 1. Digital Intelligence

Agustin Castañeda, director of the Digital Intelligence area for Master Research, shares his view of the issue: “The Digital Intelligence service we offer is based on competitive intelligence applied to the online environment, and encompasses the brand, the customer, the competition and the network environment.”

This type of research provides companies that are active on the web with tools for making assertive investment decisions, and for assessing their online content in the following areas:

  • Knowing the current climate and the main players
  • Knowing the brand customers (real potential behavior)
  • Evaluating online content and the total conversations about the brand and the competition
  • Assessing the company’s efficacy
  • Tracing the browsing path (origin page, destination page after visiting the companies website)
  • Analyzing actions by the competition

Besides helping to effectively direct online advertising investment, another benefit is that we can find out how much time visitors spend on the company’s webpage, how many of them are there and how frequently they visit, based on age and sex of the cybernauts.

Agustín Castañeda remarks: “Digital Intelligence has helped our clients to increase their online effectiveness in order to counter actions by the competition, improve the design of their website, facilitate the online experience and improve their online advertising. All of these elements lead our clients’ customers to express greater engagement and an increase in ROI.”

Digital Intelligence step-by-step

The Customer Panel is one of the main techniques of Digital Intelligence. It is used to explore, identify, analyze and interpret users’ interaction with online media and with the brands and other offerings that may find in the digital environment (competitive benchmarking).

Master Research has developed Digital Intelligence methodologies, which Edmundo Ramirez explains as follows: “We analyze the performance of sites linked to a corporate website and distinguish between the type of connection (public and private). For example, in the financial industry we can not only analyze and generate metrics on the website of the Financial Group (which is often the central site) but we could also separately analyze the sites that converge in it, for example its insurance company, bank and even sites or micro-sites for specific products or segments. One of the main distinguishing features of free analysis sites is that they allow us to analyze and contrast the virtual gaps in the webpages and sites of their competitors, examine the origin of incoming and outgoing traffic, and audience habits, which means we can enable our clients to focus their commercial and communication strategies on effectively directing promotional efforts and optimizing their investment.”

Figure 2.

The analysis would not be complete without historic indicators that show trends in the sites and enable us to study the effectiveness of competitors’ digital strategy in terms of number of visitors. With these indicators, the people in charge of digital strategy activities can take more targeted action.

Table 1. Site traffic.

Table 2. Hits por competitor.

Castañeda tells us that when we take this methodology and add monitoring and value analysis of content and trending topics in social networks, we can identify additional consumer issues with regard to their product or service, with the Internet and with other customers, and measure their impact. One of the critical factors is the time and capacity to respond to occasional crises that can negatively affect brands and products.

Figure 3. Classification of mentions.

When we conduct an exhaustive analysis of verbatim mentions, the digital channel performance and audience behavior, we can design successful commercial strategies from a perspective that integrates an analysis of the internet with analysis of opinions and statements made by the institution’s target market in social networks.

Figure 4. Analysis of mentions

To conclude, by applying these tools, companies can fine-tune their online advertising budgets and complement them with activations and traditional advertising material, which combine to create better positioning and impact in the target market.?

Note:

Master Research is a company known for the loyalty of its clients, who have worked with the company continuously for almost two decades.

Since 2004, Master Research has been defined as a highly reliable company because its expertise and involvement in its clients’ businesses, through research processes conducted under the quality and ethical standards of the Mexican Association of Market Research and Public Opinion Agencies (AMAI), which in 2005 awarded it ESIMM 2.0 certification (Service Standard for Market Research in Mexico).

The firm is also known for having pioneered the development of the competitive benchmarking method in Mexico.

Master Research is can be found on Twitter @MasterResearch and Facebook/MasterResearch, where it provides useful information for its followers.

Contact:

Susana San Román Oñate

Tel. 04455 3047 9499

rp@masterresearch.com.mx

susanna.sanroman@gmail.com

Twitter @suxsan

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