“We are surrounded by data, but starved for insights.”

– Jay Baer, business strategist & author

Insights serve as the fuel for smart marketing campaigns, effective internal communications, and important product and organizational changes. Listening directly to your most important audiences is the best way to gain meaningful insights.

Focus groups are a staple of qualitative market research – and are one of the most effective ways to listen.

Most focus groups involve about 8-12 participants, who are screened to ensure they meet the characteristics of your key audience(s). Participants are paid for their time, often with a cash incentive. During the focus group, a trained moderator guides the participants through questions and conversations, facilitating the discussion to encourage honest exploration and probing of ideas and perspectives.

There are numerous market research goals that focus groups can help achieve:

1.Gain Valuable Consumer Insights

Invite current or potential customers to a focus group to get opinions on a new or existing product or service, messages or creative concepts, or even your organization overall.

2. Gain Valuable Insights about Competitors

Find out what your customers think about your competition. Do they prefer their product, service or messaging? How could your offering or organization be differentiated from theirs?

3. Enhance, Change, or Create a New Product or Service

Focus groups are a great way to obtain detailed opinions about a product or service. Insights can guide plans, validate/invalidate assumptions, and introduce completely new perspectives.

4. Improve Employee Experience

Focus groups are useful to look inside your organization as well. They are a powerful way to make employees feel heard, and to gauge how well leaders are engaging and inspiring the team.

5. Elaborate on Quantitative Research Methodologies

Quantitative research – surveys and questionnaires that result in data that can be generalized across broader audiences – often don’t provide detailed insights into why consumers or employees hold specific beliefs or exhibit certain behaviors. Focus groups can explore questions that data present.

Interested in learning more? Reach out to Tipping Point’s market research experts for more about Focus Groups.

Olivia Rotondo is a research and public relations coordinator for Tipping Point Communications. Contact her at (716) 374-0411, and at orotondo@tippingpointcomm.com

We Have an Exciting Announcement!

At Tipping Point Communications, we strive for the best-in-show, different, fresh, catchy and compelling executions that drive results. We also realized that our knowledge of these tactics should be shared with our clients and partners, for the best, collaborative results.

Our teaching- and listening-focused marketing communications programs make learning easy and help facilitate strategic discussions that lead to tangible outcomes. With high demand from clients, we’ve officially rolled out our new educational trainings and workshops program – The Tipping Point Academy, an expert educational resource for you and your business.

Here’s a quick overview of how you can benefit:

Workshops: Our workshops serve as discovery sessions, where our team and yours come together to develop understanding and new knowledge. Academy experts lead engaging and productive Q&A and brainstorming sessions that turn ideas into action.

Outcomes include tightening the alignment between your marketing communications strategies and business objectives and ensuring your audiences see, feel and experience your brand exactly how you want them to.

Through our tailored immersive discovery sessions, we’ll elevate your team’s thinking, leverage their knowledge of your organization and industry, and develop actionable strategic plans that will take your marketing to the next level. Our Workshop lineup currently includes:

Crisis Communications Workshop

Communications Planning Workshop

Messaging Workshop

Social Media Workshop

Trainings: Looking for a quick and efficient way to get your team aligned and thinking strategically about important marcom tactics? Training a new hire on appropriate execution, but don’t have the capacity to do so in-house? Our built-to-suit training programs are a great way to develop the knowledge, tools and resources needed to get the job done.

Tipping Point Academy experts will show your team how to effectively engage with your audiences in a variety of marketing communications subject areas. These “done-in-a-day” sessions import actionable knowledge that can be implemented immediately.

Our Training Lineup currently includes:

 Social Media 101 Training

Publicity 101 Training

Media Training

Our suite of trainings and workshops were designed to leverage the in-depth marketing communications knowledge of our subject-matter experts to help our clients achieve their business goals.

For more detailed information on The Tipping Point Academy, our newest educational resource, please visit our trainings and workshops page.

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A pixel is a piece of code generated from a third-party advertising platform and placed within the code of a website. Pixels record important information that is vital to the success of a digital marketing campaign. Here’s a rundown of some of the benefits:

• Conversion Tracking – A conversion is a specific action that a visitor takes on your website that has value to your business. By placing pixels on your site, we can track successful conversions.
• Retargeting – This is a powerful branding and conversion optimization tool that shows ads to individuals who have already visited a website or were otherwise touched by a campaign. Retargeting focuses your advertising spend on people who are already familiar with your brand and have recently demonstrated interest.The graphic below illustrates the retargeting process.
• Audience Data – Pixels collect data on website visitors and their actions so we can identify and understand what interests them and drives them to action.

If you have questions about placing pixels on your website, contact your account manager.

Special thanks & mention to Ana Roca Castro & Jeffrey Hayzlett.