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4/8/2015
How to Do Market Research­­The Basics
MARKETING
How to Do Market
Research--The Basics
Is your business a product in search of a
customer? Use these tips to create a
product or service customers will clamor
for.
Lesley Spencer Pyle
SEPTEMBER 23, 2010
Marketing research can give a
Related articles
business a picture of what
Researching Your
kinds of new products and
Market
services may bring a profit. For
Primary Market
products and services already
Research
available, marketing research
Market Surveys
can tell companies whether
Conducting
they are meeting their
Surveys and Focus
customers' needs and
Groups
expectations. By researching
Market and Price
the answers to specific
questions, small-business owners can learn whether
they need to change their package design or tweak
their delivery methods--and even whether they should
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consider offering additional services.
"Failure to do market research before you begin a
business venture or during its operation is like driving a
car from Texas to New York without a map or street
signs," says William Bill of Wealth Design Group LLC in
Houston. "You have know which direction to travel and
how fast to go. A good market research plan indicates
where and who your customers are. It will also tell you
when they are most likely and willing to purchase your
goods or use your services."
When you conduct marketing research, you can use the
results either to create a business and marketing plan
or to measure the success of your current plan. That's
why it's important to ask the right questions, in the right
way, of the right people. Research, done poorly, can
steer a business in the wrong direction. Here are some
market-research basics that can help get you started
and some mistakes to avoid. Types of Market Research
Primary Research: The goal of primary research is to
gather data from analyzing current sales and the
effectiveness of current practices. Primary research also
takes competitors' plans into account, giving you
information about your competition.
Collecting primary research can include:
Interviews (either by telephone or face-to-face)
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Surveys (online or by mail)
Questionnaires (online or by mail)
Focus groups gathering a sampling of potential
clients or customers and getting their direct
feedback
Some important questions might include:
What factors do you consider when purchasing this
product or service?
What do you like or dislike about current products
or services currently on the market?
What areas would you suggest for improvement?
What is the appropriate price for a product or
service?
Secondary Research: The goal of secondary research
is to analyze data that has already been published. With
secondary data, you can identify competitors, establish
benchmarks and identify target segments. Your
segments are the people who fall into your targeted
demographic--people who live a certain lifestyle, exhibit
particular behavioral patterns or fall into a
predetermined age group.
Collecting Data
No small business can succeed without understanding
its customers, its products and services, and the market
in general. Competition is often fierce, and operating
without conducting research may give your competitors
an advantage over you.
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There are two categories of data collection: quantitative
and qualitative. Quantitative methods employ
mathematical analysis and require a large sample size.
The results of this data shed light on statistically
significant differences. One place to find quantitative
results if you have a website is in your web analytics
(available in Google's suite of tools). This information
can help you determine many things, such as where
your leads are coming from, how long visitors are
staying on your site and from which page they are
exiting.
Qualitative methods help you develop and fine-tune
your quantitative research methods. They can help
business owners define problems and often use
interview methods to learn about customers' opinions,
values and beliefs. With qualitative research, the sample
size is usually small.
Many new business owners, often strapped for time and
money, may take shortcuts that can later backfire. Here
are three pitfalls to avoid.
Common Marketing Mistakes
1. Using only secondary research. Relying on the
published work of others doesn't give you the
full picture. It can be a great place to start, of
course, but the information you get from
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secondary research can be outdated. You can
miss out on other factors relevant to your
business.
2. Using only web resources. When you use
common search engines to gather information,
you get only data that are available to everyone
and it may not be fully accurate. To perform
deeper searches while staying within your
budget, use the resources at your local library,
college campus or small-business center.
3. Surveying only the people you know. Smallbusiness owners sometimes interview only
family members and close colleagues when
conducting research, but friends and family are
often not the best survey subjects. To get the
most useful and accurate information, you need
to talk to real customers about their needs,
wants and expectations.
LINKEDIN
How to Use LinkedIn
Analytics to Boost Your
Marketing Efforts
Ted Prodromou
Contributor
Author And Internet Business Consultant
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APRIL 07, 2015
In his book Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business, search
engine optimization and online marketing expert consultant
Ted Prodromou explains how you can use LinkedIn to quickly
engage with ideal customers, partners, and employees,
showcase your company and attract new opportunities. In this
edited excerpt, the author discusses the analytics tools that
are available on LinkedIn and how you can use them to
improve your marketing efforts.
LinkedIn has a collection of powerful analytics tools that let
you measure your effectiveness on the site. Some of these
tools are included with your free LinkedIn account while
others are offered only to Premium account holders. These
tools give you the ability to see how many people view, like,
comment, and share your status updates and published
content. You can also see detailed demographics of who
views your profile so you can see what kind of people your
profile is attracting.
Let’s dig deeper into who’s been viewing your LinkedIn profile
and how you can use this to your advantage.
To see the detailed information, click on the link in the righthand column of your LinkedIn home page that tells you how
many people have viewed your profile in the past day. The
next screen will show a graph with the total number of profile
views in the past 90 days, the number of viewers from specific
industries, the number of viewers from various regions, and
the number of viewers found by the People Similar to You
sidebar widget on LinkedIn.
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This is why the way you fill out your profile is so important.
The LinkedIn algorithm takes into account your industry, your
region, your education, and the keywords you use in your
profile, including your professional headline, job titles,
keywords in your summary, and the rest of your profile.
Knowing how people found you on LinkedIn helps you
customize your profile so you attract the right profile viewers.
Below the graph, you'll see profiles of the people who viewed
your profile. If you're not connected to that person on
LinkedIn, you can click the Connect button so you can quickly
connect with them if they're right for your network. I like to
view profiles to see if they're a match for my professional
network before inviting them to connect with me. I consider a
person who viewed my profile as a “warm” lead because
something compelled them to view my profile. I find that at
least 80 percent of the people who viewed my profile will
connect with me if I reach out to them.
Let’s dig even deeper into the data provided by the graph.
When you hover over the dots in the graph, you can see how
many profile views you drew each week. When you click on
the dot, you'll see the people who viewed your profile that
particular week.
Now the fun begins. Click on Viewers from [your industry
name], and you’ll see the people from that industry who
viewed your profile, plus all the industries that attracted your
profile viewers. When you click on each industry, you’ll see
exactly who viewed your profile from each industry.
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On the right side of the graph, you'll see the job titles of the
people who viewed your profile. If you're trying to attract Clevel executives and most of your profile views come from
lower-level management, you need to update your profile and
start distributing your content to a different audience on
LinkedIn. This alone is worth the small investment in a
Premium LinkedIn account.
As you explore all the tabs in the chart, more data categories
will appear, which will help you target your ideal clients on
LinkedIn. You can see what’s working and what’s not in your
daily LinkedIn activity.
One interesting area is the Viewers Found You from People
Similar to You tab. In this area, LinkedIn tells you how people
found your LinkedIn profile and which keywords they used to
find you. This data shows you if they found you on the
LinkedIn homepage, LinkedIn Groups, from LinkedIn InMail
you sent them, and even if they found you from a Google
search. This helps you fine-tune your profile so you include
the right keywords in the right sections of your LinkedIn
profile.
Below the first row of people who viewed your profile,
LinkedIn shows you some groups, LinkedIn Influencers, and
people you may want to connect with to increase your profile
views. Again, these recommendations are based on the
LinkedIn algorithm so your profile views will probably increase
if you follow LinkedIn’s advice.
The tab next to Who’s Viewed Your Profile is the How You
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Rank for Profile Views. This lets you compare your profile
views with professionals similar to you and to your network. I
find the more active I am on LinkedIn, the more profile views I
receive, and I can move up (or down) in the rankings quickly.
LinkedIn also provides tips to help you improve your ranking,
such as suggesting that you update your summary to increase
profile views.
Who’s viewed your updates
With LinkedIn's analytics, you can see how many people
Viewed, Liked, Shared and Commented on your updates. I
love this feature because it lets me know exactly what content
my network is interested in.
To use it, hover over each purple dot on your Who's Viewed
Your Updates screen to see who viewed each update. The
green dots show you who liked the update. I often reach out
to people who like my updates and personally thank them for
liking my update, which they always appreciate.
There are three circles in the diagram on this screen. The
circle closest to your profile picture is your first-degree
network. The next circle is your second-degree network, and
the largest circle will be your third-degree network. Your goal
is to create status updates that go viral and are shared to
every level of your network. Monitor the statistics of every
status update to see which messages and headlines resonate
with your audience. Treat status updates like ads with the
intent of enticing people to click on your update, like it, share
it, and comment on it. Be sure to look at status updates from
your network to see which messages receive the most likes,
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shares, and comments. This will help you identify the content
which engages your networks.
ANALYTICS
The Results-Driven
Approach to Blogging
Image credit: Lig Ynnek | Flickr
Brian Honigman
From BrianHonigman.Com
Marketing Consultant, Writer & Speaker
APRIL 07, 2015
This story originally appeared on BrianHonigman.com
Baseball legend Yogi Berra once famously remarked:
“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t
know where you are going, because you
might not get there.”
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All snarkiness aside, Berra was on to something. One of the
keys to success is first understanding what success looks like.
This advice can apply to all areas of life and blogging is no
exception.
Blogging can be an incredibly effective marketing tool, but
you can’t simply start a blog and expect it to drive success. In
fact, a lot of people who go about blogging have no real plan
beyond just writing the posts and seeing what happens.
There’s more to effective planning than simply mapping out a
robust content strategy and editorial calendar. One of the
most important parts of starting a successful blog that many
fail to consider is hammering out core objectives from the
start.
Regardless of whether you plan on having your blog serve as
a lead generation tool, the centerpiece of your content
strategy or just as a way to put your company’s thoughts out
in public from a branding perspective, there is always a way of
quantifying these results and tracking them.
Related: 8 Ways to Better Market Yourself on LinkedIn
This is the core of a results-driven approach to blogging,
here’s how it’s done.
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The Results Driven Approach to Blogging from Brian
Honigman
Understand Your Blog’s Purpose
So, you want to start a blog? Now the important question to
answer is why are you going through the effort.
Oftentimes companies will start a blog just because they feel
that they have to. In mylast article, I quoted a statistic from
IBM, and I’ll quote it here again because I feel it speaks so
much truth about the dismal state of corporate blogging.
Nearly 80% of corporate blogs have five
posts or less.
This is a staggering figure, but it’s actually pretty easy to
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believe. Many companies start blogs and quickly lose steam in
large part because they never define success.
When I say you need to define your blog’s purpose there are
really two elements to doing so.
The first step is to define the general purpose of your blog. A
blog can be a pretty versatile marketing tool that achieves a
wide variety of goals, but the majority of them fall along a
spectrum that extends from branding to purely sales.
A blog like IBM’s or GE’s will never really be considered a
direct sales tool. IBM in particular deals with far too large of
clients to ever have someone read their blog and decide then
and there to become a customer. Rather, IBM uses their blog
as a purely branding tool, and they do this very well.
On the other end of the spectrum is a company like HubSpot
whose primary sales tool is there blog. At nearly every turn
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their readers are presented with a call to action of some sort
that directly relates to the blog article a potential customer is
reading. These frequent calls to action would be out of place
on IBM’s blog, in much the same way that IBM’s lack of CTAs
would not do well for the HubSpot blog.
Understanding your blog’s general goal is the first step
towards building a results driven approach to blogging.
Establish KPIs and Attribution Models
The next step (which directly follows from the first) is to take
these qualitative goals and attach them to quantitative
metrics. Put plainly, you need to see what numbers you can
look at to tell how well your blog is doing at driving your
broader goals.
Depending on your blog’s general purpose, these KPIs will
likely vary. In fact, most really good KPIs are actually
combinations of more elemental metrics.
Instead of looking at a simple number like page-views or
social-shares, it makes a lot more sense use a blended metric
(for example) like social-shares and page-views. This is just an
example, but using these kinds of blended metrics gives you a
more nuanced understanding of your blog.
Whereas measuring either of these metrics individually might
give you an understanding of how good your blog content is
at attracting attention in a silo, but the numbers combined tell
a more robust story that gives you more information about
your content’s ability to engage your audience as a whole.
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In addition to focusing on a few blended metrics, another
important consideration when building metrics is to
understand attribution and the customer journey.
In an excellent addition of Moz’s Whiteboard Friday Series,
CEO Rand Fishkin discusses what he considers the number
one misconception surrounding content marketing.
This misconception is that content will lead directly to the
desired outcome. Whether your blog is focused on building
your brand, driving sales or a combination of the two, it is
exceedingly unlikely that the first touch you have with your
customer will be the one that converts.
Related: Why Most Startups Fail
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Something tells me that this misconception lies at the heart of
the reason that 80% of blogs don’t make it past five posts.
Even if they do know what they want their blog to do and have
devised KPIs to measure these goals, you will likely give up if
you expect results to register immediately.
In the video Rand admits that even Moz (who has one of the
best marketing blogs out there) will have a customer interact
with their content an average of seven timesbefore they
convert.
This points to two key takeaways. First of all, blog content
requires multiple touches to convert customers. The second
conclusion that follows is that in order for your measurements
to be useful, they need to account for the fact that results
come from long-term customer interactions.
Rand tells us that Moz measures their interactions using
specialized paid tools like KISSmetrics, and while this is a very
valid way to go about modeling attribution, it is not the only
way.
There are many ways to build out an attribution model. One
way is to tag your links shared on social media with UTM
parameters for more precise tracking in Google Analytics
with Google’s URL builder.
Unique parameters are sent to your Google Analytics account
each time a person clicks on these tagged links shared on
social media and elsewhere, so you can identify the URLs that
are most effective in attracting users to your content.
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Businesses often shorten these tagged links when sharing
them on social media to make them more aesthetically
appealing and to hide all the UTM parameters that make the
URL quite long as seen above in this Facebook post shared
by women’s apparel brand, Nasty Gal.
Once you can pinpoint the specific source of your traffic and
engagement with your blog, then you can start to combine
this information with your KPIs and set up tests to better
understand your blogging efforts moving forward.
Collecting accurate and relevant information, is only one half
of being results-driven with blogging. The logical next step is
to have your information actually drive the way that you
produce, promote and display your blog content.
Measure, Change and Repeat
All the data collection and analysis in the world is a
monumental waste of time if it doesn’t change the way that
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you do things. Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing
the same thing over and over again and expecting different
results.”
How much more insane is it then to know (or at least have a
good idea) of what works and what doesn’t and still do the
same thing.
The true definition of a results-driven approach is to have the
process systematically change to reflect the data on a
consistent basis. Regular tests are the hallmark of the
scientific method and should serve as the engine that runs a
results-driven blog.
A fantastic example of a real results-driven organization are
the mad, viral scientists over at BuzzFeed. Since their primary
goal is to drive social sharing, BuzzFeed’s key concerns are
over the efficacy of their headlines and feature images. As
such, they test dozens of different permutations in real time
and kill off all but the best.
Not only do they run this rigorous testing for every single story
that they put out, but they systematically incorporate the
results into their future iterations meaning that their headlines
and images are constantly getting better. After all, evolution
has produced the best real-life viruses, so replicating this
“survival of the fittest” testing strategy naturally leads to the
most viral content.
Another example on a more modest scale comes out of
Refinery29’s insightful R29 Intelligence blog. Their blogging
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team decided to test the changes of something as small as a
reconfiguration of their mobile, social sharing button. The
change is hardly recognizable, but the results are staggering.
A slight change in the size and selection of buttons led to a
20% boost in overall social sharing on their publication via
mobile. Being the data-driven company they are, this change
was soon implemented site-wide.
Being results-driven is not something you just become, it is a
process and state of mind. It means constantly questioning
assumptions and re-evaluating what you think you know.
Related: Content Marketing on a Budget
Don’t Disregard Intuition
While data often leads to better decision-making, relying too
much on data can sometime lead you astray.
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Keeping your head down and blindly following the data can
be just as dangerous as ignoring it. In this helpful article,
Google’s Digital Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik talks about the
dangers of choosing the wrong KPIs and following them
without having a larger idea of the bigger picture in mind.
As you move towards implementing a results-driven approach,
always keep in mind that data is meant to check your intuition
– not to replace it.
In this short, but sweet post from Gary Vaynerchuck, he
acknowledges that, while data is important, trusting his
intuition has certainly helped him choose an overall direction
when the data may have been scarce or non-existent.
Once you’ve chosen a general direction for your blog, there is
no better way to achieve your goals than embracing the right
balance between data and intuition.
For more insights on how to be a better marketer, sign up for
Brian Honigman's weekly newsletter.
More from BrianHonigman.com
5 Ways to Use Data to Inform Your Social Media Marketing
Strategy
The Results-Driven Approach To Blogging
Tackling Content Marketing on a Budget
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