Academy / Digital Marketing Foundations
Customer & market research · 14 min
Observe before you opine
In this lesson
- Label claims as observed, inferred, or unknown
Junior marketers fill slides with opinions. Professionals collect signals. A signal is something you can point to: a search query, a competitor landing page, a review theme, a form field people abandon.
Three labels, no third vibe
Observed: you can reopen it (a query in Search Console, a review dated last Tuesday, the competitor’s homepage headline, a form field you clicked yourself). Inferred: you are connecting two observed things (“reviews mention Saturday hours, so Saturday may be a booking moment”). Unknown: you do not have it yet — and you write the question instead of a fake number. “Used-car demand is exploding in Frederick” is unknown until a source exists. Your 8-row table for the assignment must use these labels. Invented volume is a fail here and in the SEO course; do not practice the bad habit now.
Exercise
Three signals
List 3 signals you would collect for Northfield this week, and how you would collect each one without inventing numbers.
Deliverable: A 3-row table.
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