How can you use market research to determine the best time of day to advertise?

Before you start researching on time of day, you should ask yourself if that is the differentiator that matters for your category/product. Maybe it is channel, maybe it is simply reach, or target audience.

Don't treat time-of-day as a standalone variable. Think of your consumer's context and mission. The same person may be driving to work at 9am on a Tuesday but working from home chilling on Instagram before a 9:30am call on a Wednesday and reading the news on his tablet on the train on the way to work on Thursday. Consumer activity gives you better clues on their receptiveness to your ads -- more than time of day.

By actively leveraging market research to understand your audience's online behavior and preferences, you can optimize your ad scheduling and maximize the impact of your campaign. For this, it takes trials and errors. There no one-size-fits-all solution for the best timing. While some general trends exist, the specific answer lies in understanding your specific audience and using your market research to tailor your ad timing accordingly.

Market research to define time of day for advertising is reductive of what should be a multi-layered strategy. For many response clients, certain times will see better conversion, not because of advertising, but because of the way people naturally behave. Drawing the conclusion that this therefore is the best time of day to advertise is something akin to last click attribution, it is overly simplistic. There will be ways to increase your product's relevancy and time of day might be helpful, but you need to prioritise consistency and brand building to see significant growth. Nobody goes out at 6am to buy Nutella for their toast, even through that's when they decide they want it. They buy it when they're at the shop.

Too many rush to deploy tactics without defining strategy. Spend more time on strategic planning before moving to tactical deployment.

Pinpointing your target market is pivotal. Best to run a psychographic segmentation as it empowers you to connect with your audience on a deeper level. By understanding their values, lifestyles, interests, and personalities, you can create tailored marketing strategies that truly resonate. Remember, it's not just about selling a product; it's about forging genuine connections with your customers.

In my experience, leveraging market research to pinpoint the best time for advertising is a game-changer. One real example stands out – when working on a campaign for a fitness brand, we discovered through research that their target audience was most active on social media during early evenings. Start by identifying your audience's habits and preferences. Look at online behavior, social media patterns, and even industry-specific trends. For instance, if your target market is night owls, late-night ads might be a winner. Don't forget to analyze data continuously; platforms often provide insights into when your audience is most engaged. Stay flexible, test different times, and adjust based on what the research unveils

Content Matters - even in research Of course we have to look at channels, target groups and markets. Of course we need to define our goals and key objectives. But please let's not forget that all research work serves to communicate with people. Far too often I miss the translation of all the technical perfection into realy good content. Content that touches, interests and picks up the people it addresses, that creates value and is inspiring.

Try crafting detailed buyer personas, focusing on needs, behaviors, and demographics. Make sure to analyze media consumption patterns within each segment to tailor your approach.

First and foremost you need to identify your target audience and look at them across demographic, psychographic, geographic, and lifestage dimensions. Get ready for a lot of testing to see how to pinpoint who responds and when they respond. . As you gather more insights on your target market, you will end up with a pretty clear customer persona, and some solid research to back your strategy. Market research isn't a one time thing - it should be ever present in your strategy so that you are continuously gathering intel as your customers' preferences change in the market.

Having a clear perspective of your competition's marketing competency is critical before analyzing what they're doing. A strong competitor with a seasoned CMO offers far more insight than a new challenger in your space with someone newer to the game at the helm. There's also a risk in small sample size theater- I'd strongly advise considering the size of your data set before setting adjustments to your strategy in stone.

Competitive awareness is important, but if you're aiming for stand-out, it's far more important to be aware of the human at the heart of your communications. The development of a comms plan for the period should consider as many relevant inputs as possible, dont just analyse the competitors and industry trends, but find data that proves (or disproves) what your audience are thinking/feeling/experiencing during the proposed activity? whats the weather forecast to be, what's happening from a fixed perspective in culture, what are your best estimations of what could happen? Plot all those observations and start to identify where you can turbo-charge your comms plan and generate disproportionate outcomes for your brand.

Competitive benchmarking and market share analysis for a comparative perspective is key. Try to stay informed with trade publications, industry reports, and online forums for the latest trends.

This is mission critical to inform your GTM and marketing strategy, but be careful to not be overly reactive. Whether we are taking pricing strategy, event sponsorship or your GTM marketing plan - be thoughtful and proactive, not reactive. Set your North Star. Make tactical adjustments, but your strategy should be aligned and always heading in the direction of your North Star.

A first step before understanding your competitor's strategies is to define your category and your source of growth. Remember, it might be wider than you initially think. Pepsi competes with Coke, but also with water, beer any maybe sometimes chocolate. It's the human need and behavior that drives the category definition, not your product content. Follow Sorin Patilinet - The Marketing Engineer, for fresh marketing ideas, books to dive into, and effectiveness insights.

Experimenting with different times and platforms is crucial for optimizing advertising impact. Try to: - Utilize A/B testing, split testing, and multivariate testing to gauge ad performance. - Experiment with various days, hours, and seasons across selected channels. - Focus on key metrics: reach, impressions, clicks, conversions, and ROI. This strategy enables you to pinpoint the most effective time and platform combinations, maximizing your advertising efficacy.

I don't think you need to spend your budget on testing this. Why? Because: 1) If you run your ads all day, most platforms will provide data on what TIME and DAY you got most conversions. You can check this on google ads, thanks to their reports, you can check it on Meta as well, in the events manager section, and on TikTok (same place). 2) Even if they are off by an hour or so, if you look at the data of the last month, you'll have a good idea what time of the day you get most of your sales. Don't overcomplicate your marketing by going and testing 10 things every month. Most of the data you will get can also be found in the general campaign setup. Just take the time to dive deep and evaluate.

I have utilized time data to schedule my paid search advertising, allowing an increase of impression share and conversions based on when consumers were more likely to click on an ad and convert.

I'm always much more interested in time of year (seasonality)vs. time of day. If you're not there for your prospect/customers/etc. when they are ready to convert no matter the time of day, you're not doing your job as a marketer.

Most platforms use machine learning to determine the best time of day to be advertising. In my opinion, you shouldn’t be doing anything like this manually anymore. The tools exist and if you’re not using them, you could be wasting a ton of time doing the work manually and not even getting the best performance out of it. Work smarter, not harder.

Unless your business is reliant on Call to Action sales conversions- time of day is less important. Advertising should bolster your position in consumers' minds, even during periods when they are not actively seeking products or services. Mental Availability Tracking is the best way to measure advertising effectiveness and brand health. As it enables you to understand the space your brand holds in consumers minds based on your brand's specific category entry points, while being benchmarked against competitors. Helping you identify white spaces in the market, optimize your advertising budget and effectiveness, which ultimately lead to an increase in sales and profits.

Campaigns should be tracked for daily, weekly, and monthly results, etc. Make sure to rank your KPIs by importance, or level of seniority (ex: Lifetime Return on Ad Spend is more important than Cost per Click), and know your numbers. Also, you shouldn't have to do this reporting manually for more than a month. You can build out reporting dashboards, APIs, and automations with tools like Zapier or Supermetrics to bring data into your spreadsheets. Enterprise clients will take this to a more professional level, with business intelligence and analysis dashboards created with tools like Microsoft's Power BI, and other similar ones.

Vale ressaltar que nem sempre as campanhas possuem como métrica a venda em si, podendo ter objetivos como awareness e construção de imagem de marca. Nesses casos, pesquisas como recall de campanha e monitoramento de como está o desempenho da marca em funil de marca e imagem de marca são fundamentais para avaliar a efetividade da campanha e defender (ou não) futuros investimentos.

Monitoring and evaluating the results of your advertising efforts is crucial for optimization. However, taking a unique and holistic approach to data analysis and feedback integration can provide more insights. It is important to embrace both quantitative and qualitative insights, connect data to business goals, use advanced analytics techniques, foster a culture of continuous learning, incorporate customer feedback loops, and consider the broader context. By doing all of these, you will be able to effectively monitor and evaluate your advertising results, go beyond surface-level metrics, and gain actionable insights to optimize your advertising strategies.

La phase de surveillance et d'évaluation des résultats est cruciale. En utilisant des outils de CRM ainsi que des méthodes comme des enquêtes et des entretiens, vous pouvez collecter des données quantitatives et qualitatives. Cette approche holistique offre une compréhension approfondie de la performance de vos publicités à différents moments et sur diverses plates-formes. En combinant ces informations, vous pouvez ajuster stratégiquement le moment optimal de la journée pour la publicité, en alignant vos objectifs, votre marché cible et les tendances de l'industrie. Cela contribue à maximiser votre budget publicitaire, votre portée, et ultimement, à augmenter vos ventes et vos bénéfices.

I always try to leave a little budget to try a new tactic or experiment. The world of advertising and marketing is constantly change, and I think we can learn valuable lessons of what works with a small budget to test and experiment.

If you're using digital marketing, in my experience using behavioral-based targeting is more powerful than time of day. For example, if you have ads that are set to trigger anytime someone is looking at your product category, then you're still reaching your right customer. I view time-of-day and dayparting similar to how I view demographic targeting...these targeting methods are not as powerful as behavioral targeting and can quickly eliminate a lot of your potential audience if you get too narrow with your targeting.

Based on the data I’ve seen, you should serve ads to in market shoppers, time of day is irrelevant. The important thing is serving up relevant content to the right consumer and make our easy for them to do business with you.

Pinpointing the optimal advertising time may work for only a few categories- like ready to eat or fast food. Apart from analysing customer behavior data to identify peak usage periods it is important to leverage data-driven attribution models to understand the effectiveness of different time slots along with the top contributing channels / touch points. Test and refine your strategy based on this insight, ensuring your ads reach the audience when they're most receptive and through the right medium, ultimately maximizing marketing ROI.

One starting point can be to identify times of day or days of the week we organically feel an uptick in business. Many times team members that actually interact with customers have incredible insights into these rhythms.