Data science, analytics, marketing science, tracking, etc. all describe the same thing - the desire to learn about audiences in order to make better decisions.
Unfortunately, “Research” is often being put in its own bracket - low-tech, unchanged in 50+ years, relying heavily on questionnaires and individual interviews.
And while questionnaires and interviews can be amazing, they’re not the ONLY way to finding things out!
Here are the three pillars to our digital research:
We leverage 30+ first-party digital information sources, from key forums and social media, to traffic and backlink trackers or language corpora.
We use whatever the most relevant tools are for YOUR case, rather than working with just a few select providers.
We specialize in taking enormous amounts of data, and distilling that into a few clear, actionable insights.
We’ve been using NLP for a decade, and now with addition of LLMs, we can distill a bulk of online discussion or thousands of open-ended survey answers into cohesive advice.
Lastly, we base all our work in a strong foundation of methodological and statistical knowledge.
We’re making sure that all of our findings have high likelihood of being both true and applicable to general populations.
This sets us apart from topical online insights, which are only true for tiny subcommunities.
We combine these 3 to deliver actionable knowledge to our clients, at a fraction of time and cost of most agencies or consultants.
Here are a few examples of what we do to find things out:
We work with influencers or prominent accounts to create “provocative” digital content - i.e. asking for advice, voicing false opinions, etc.
Then, we’re able to analyze all the comments to find out key trends in that particular corner of the internet.
Similarly, we leverage ads to test business ideas, target market sizes or competitive landscapes. We work with clients to create simple ads, product websites, Kickstarter campaigns and “fake” launches to see which version of the product has most penetrative power in a market.
We leverage search data across mainstream platforms to understand recent trends, key audience uncertainties, and problems they’re trying to solve. We’re going down into subqueries, autofill, and comparative search volumes to understand what the audience is missing. We usually leverage that for content development.
We leverage online corporas (collections of billions of words from all online text) to understand meaning of words across cultures and subcultures (semiotics). We also leverage this when looking for naming opportunities.