--- title: "Marketing Automation: How Human is Your Research" description: Market research is an important aspect of any brand's marketing strategy. Learn how to effectively incorporate online market research tools into your strategy, to drive success throughout your brand. image: https://blog.flexmr.net/hubfs/19.%20Marketing%20Automation%20-%20How%20Human%20is%20Your%20Research.png --- close ## Ready to level up your insights? Get ready to streamline, scale and supercharge your research. Fill out this form to request a demo of the InsightHub platform and discover the difference insights empowerment can make. A member of our team will reach out within two working days. close ## Cost effective insights that scale Quality insight doesn't need to cost the earth. Our flexible approach helps you make the most of research budgets and build an agile solution that works for you. Fill out this form to request a call back from our team to explore our pricing options. 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[Listen Now](https://resources.flexmr.net/mrx-lab-podcast) - ### Featured Stories - [Specsavers Informs Key Marketing Decisions with InsightHub](https://resources.flexmr.net/specsavers) - [The Coventry Panel Helps Maintain Award Winning CX](https://resources.flexmr.net/coventry-building-society) - [Isagenix Customer Community Steers New Product Launch](https://resources.flexmr.net/isa-insights) - [Curo Engage Residents with InsightHub Community](https://resources.flexmr.net/curo) - [Tech & Trends](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/tech-trends) / - [Strategic Thinking](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/strategic-thinking) / 5 MIN READ ## Marketing Automation: How Human is Your Research #### Maria Twigge # [Workshops and Beacons: A Guide to Building Custome...](https://blog.flexmr.net/workshops-beacons-customer-salience) Most organisations are not short of data, insight or decks.Their biggest challenge is not whether cu... [Read more](https://blog.flexmr.net/workshops-beacons-customer-salience) 9 MIN READ #### Ed Hill - [Events (1)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/events) - [Insights Empowerment (38)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/insights-empowerment) - [Practical Application (178)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/practical-application) - [Research Methods (285)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/research-methods) - [Strategic Thinking (232)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/strategic-thinking) - [Survey Templates (7)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/survey-templates) - [Tech & Trends (397)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/tech-trends) Delivering insights that have impact, resonance and clarity is always paramount for a researcher who needs to demonstrate the value of data analysis and running research studies. Many, many times there has been a lot of excitement in the room when a new piece of technology comes along that advances on that analytical capabilities and perhaps even speeds it up. But whilst big data relies on big analysis, and anything that is repeated certainly should be automised for efficiency. Insight teams don’t actually tend to answer the same questions over and over again. Insight teams tend to tackle a new problem, a new challenge, a new development and a new idea with every insight produced. So what kind of tech is there out there to help support this whole range of insight activity? Research, marketing and insight teams are highly technological, and apply technology in order to speed up the production of insight, particularly in areas where the same analysis is ran periodically to make interpretation easier, but those quick visual summaries, whilst useful do not provide us with the full insight report. So what you’ll need is a combination of the below to get to what you are looking for… ### Creating Visual Impact As part of creating impact, researchers have also learned to be designers and produce highly visual and graphical summaries of data sets and key insights. A great image and graphic that summarises your point is very powerful, particularly when you can’t be there in person to deliver it to every member of the business who can benefit from it. But the kind of great visuals that have that impact, are in no way, shape or form automatically generated. Here are some inspiring examples I’ve seen, and I’m giving just as much credit, if not more to the people who produced them as well as the tech: [Combining Stats. Summaries & Iconography: A Tale of the IoT](http://www.futuritymedia.com/case-studies/m2m-infographic/) [An Infographic on Infographics: Why Visual Communication is Great](http://neomam.com/interactive/13reasons/) You’ll notice very effective use of iconography, statistics and story and a top timesaving tip would be to have a set of well used icons made up that you and the team can use regularly that help speed up the understanding of your data. ### Integrating Data Secondly a top concern for an insight team is combining multiple data sources for the most value and impact. There is a nice early checklist to go through when you are about to decide where you need to plug the gaps in knowledge around the business problem here from [NewMR](http://newmr.org/blog/six-tips-for-creating-integrated-insight-from-the-no-nonsense-tour/). But whilst deciding which data has value for the question is important, bringing it all together to demonstrate how it supports the insight is a real craft. Each bit of technology that we work with every day is very good at doing what we tell it to do, but if we only do that once then it doesn’t need to be a programmable feature of the technology, it needs to be a feature of your brain, your team or an agency you trust. Depending on the types of dataset you would like to combine, there are some great tools out there to support the transformation of data into insight including advanced word clouds like [Tagxedo](http://www.tagxedo.com/). What is also really helpful is the use of good a strong template or framework around what you are looking to discover, arranging a good information architecture also helps when you want to look back and mine the data for other purposes. Having said all of this, us researchers a very meticulous souls and sometimes we should accept that the data is good enough, the speed and timing is much more important, the best decisions are about when they are made as much as why. ### Data Interrogation If you want to produce some really useful and powerful insight, then you really need to go beyond the obvious data to pull together evidence. Whilst you may have undertaken a ‘mammoth’ piece of research to get to it, you need to pick out just the right pieces to present your case. Take a look at OMD’s Christmas myths for some great examples of interrogating data about [consumer trends before Christmas](http://www.omdukblog.com/future-of-britain/myth-10-christmas-is-all-about-the-right-product-at-the-right-time/). ### Interpretation & Meaning Finally interpretation, that most human characteristic of all – is there a great bit of kit that can help automate and analyse data in such a way that it is interpreted into meaningful insights? Not one that I have found, but there are some great and inspirational examples of what you can achieve when you do get there, so take this advice… *“Stop acting so small you are the universe in ecstatic motion.” - Rumi* #### About FlexMR We are The Insights Empowerment Company. We help research, product and marketing teams drive informed decisions with efficient, scalable & impactful insight. #### About Maria Twigge As Research Director, Maria has spent 10+ years guiding FlexMR service development and building strategic client partnerships. #### Stay up to date ## You might also like... ![Blog Featured Image Header](https://blog.flexmr.net/hubfs/Marketing_Files/Blogs/Headers/retaining_human_touch_customer_salience_cx_ai.png) ### [Retaining a Human Touch with Custom...](https://blog.flexmr.net/customer-salience-cx-ai) In recent years, companies have embraced artificial intelligence (AI) at pace, swept up in a technological momentum that promises efficiency and cost savings. However, in their rush to pursue quickly ... [Continue reading](https://blog.flexmr.net/customer-salience-cx-ai) 5 MIN READ ![Blog Featured Image Header](https://blog.flexmr.net/hubfs/Marketing_Files/Blogs/Headers/casual_conversation_iosetta_santini.png) ### [A Casual Conversation... with Ioset...](https://blog.flexmr.net/casual-conversation-iosetta-santini) Most research projects still currently end with a powerpoint report and a debrief. This has become deeply entrenched as the industry standard, and it is what stakeholders have come to expect when they... [Continue reading](https://blog.flexmr.net/casual-conversation-iosetta-santini) 4 MIN READ ![Blog Featured Image Header](https://blog.flexmr.net/hubfs/Marketing_Files/Blogs/Headers/synthetic_data_richer_market_insights.png) ### [Synthetic Data: The Key to Richer M...](https://blog.flexmr.net/synthetic-data-richer-market-insights) In the dynamic world of market research, the need for robust and accurate data is critical. Whilst the increased prevalence of generative AI has provided a range of benefits to market research process... 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