Category Archives: marketing strategy

Any articles which talk about basic marketing processes. If you’re telling people anything about how to get and keep customers, how or why to do something related to the marketing process which includes product, pricing, promotion or distribution – it gets this tagt.

10 Creative Ways to Build Customer Loyalty

Posted on November 25, 2011 by | 1 Comment

There are so many product and service choices out there that your customers really are looking for a great reason to be loyal to you.  Here are 10 creative ways that you can build loyalty and profitability for your business.

  1. Use QR codes to drive customers to coupons.  Research shows that customers love grabbing coupons from their mobile devices.  Use QR codes to reward them for buying.
  2.  Create a video couponing page. Groupon has gotten mixed reviews for small business – but Video Coupons are a whole new ball game.  Customers love video and remember twice as much as ads they see on TV and Video coupons are inexpensive and easy to do.
  3. Offer financing or multiple payment plan.   QVC already knows that customers will buy more and spend more if you offer a payment plan.  Remember customers love to buy in increments of $20. So make your monthly prices $19.99, $39.99, etc.
  4. Volume discounts or bundle discounts.  Reward your customers for buying more items more frequently.
  5. Establish a customer club.  Even restaurants can have a customer club.  Charge a monthly fee to receive coupons, free gifts and invites to special events.
  6. Develop a contest to build leads, communities and excitement.  Contests build community and customers.  Use powerful social media tools to manage yours.  There’s even an online app to help you create and manage contests – Wildfire.
  7. Build a customer/user community.  Don’t forget the power of social media.  Create a customer community using a Facebook page or Twitter, these tools aren’t just for big companies or consumer groups.  If social media isn’t your thing – create a customer community using the SurveySwipe mobile survey platform and ask your community questions.
  8. Institute a referral program. Word of mouth is powerful, so create a referral system that rewards fans of your company or product.
  9. Provide home delivery or offer monthly delivery.  Combine a distribution strategy with a subscription model to create repeat sales.
  10. Provide free troubleshooting. Don’t sell and run, help your customers over buyer’s remorse by providing them help in using and loving your product or service.

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6 Save-Your-Marketing Butt Strategies

Posted on November 23, 2011 by | 1 Comment

The best laid plans often end up failing.  But failing is a great thing.  When something isn’t working, you jump into action and often come up with terrific ways to improve the process or the system.

Rather than pout or rage about what isn’t working, take a look at this menu of six marketing strategies and see which ones will save your butt. 

  1. Drop Unprofitable products.  Profitability is more important than sales.  Evaluate your product lines and drop products that aren’t passing profit muster.  Another option is to raise prices on products that are unprofitable.
  2. Try new sales incentives and commission structures.  Sales people spend effort where they will make the most money.  Take a close look at your commission structure and make sure that you are rewarding sales people for profitable sales.
  3. Change how you sell.  Don’t just assume your current sales strategy is optimal. Consider using affiliates, partners, home parties, catalogs, internet, etc.
  4. Change or adjust your sales process or system.  Your sales process might be out-dated.  Take the time to explore new strategies such as Craig Elias’, Trigger Events or Jill Konrath’s  SNAP Selling.
  5. Develop or focus on lead generation program.  Where are your leads coming from and are they good leads.  Take a good hard look at your conversions from trade shows, web sites, etc and start optimizing all of them to attract your ideal customer.  For help, check out HubSpot – they are masters of inbound marketing.
  6. Develop a personal follow-up program.  Most sales are lost because our follow-up systems stink.  Map out your sales process and develop a follow-up system that touches your customer at least 7 – 10 times.  For help, visit Constant Contact, aWeber and InfusionSoft  and the new Nimble.

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Who Says You Can’t ‘Tinker’ With Your Products?

Posted on November 14, 2011 by | Leave a comment

A new year is coming up and the really terrific thing about that is that marketers the world over have opportunities to turn something old and stale into something new and exciting.

I get that generating new products is really exciting — and it can get expensive too.  So here are some ideas on how you can create something new  from something old.  Think of it as recycling.

  1. Test higher and lower prices in different markets. You don’t have to charge the same price in the same market. Different markets have different needs, charge accordingly.
  2. Offer different sizes at different prices.  Pricing expert and author of 1% Windfall, Rafi Mohamed says that people will buy at price points that are appealing to them (assuming they have a need or interest in your product).  Give your customers the opportunity to try and buy.
  3. Change the name to reflect new market. If you’re launching into a new market, change the name of your product to better reflect the benefits your product provides.
  4. Develop new, more varied uses for your product.  We wouldn’t know that there were millions of uses for baking soda if Arm and Hammer didn’t pull them together and advertise them.
  5. Bundle products.  McDonald’s is king of the bundle.  Create a value offer that moves product at good margins and gives customers great value.
There is nothing like taking a whole new look at your products and services and making some basic tweaks and adjustments.  You’ll find that these recommendations actually cost very little and only take time in doing a little research and implementing the results.

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Measuring Customer Engagement as a Predictor of Profitability

Posted on October 26, 2011 by | Leave a comment

How are you currently measuring your marketing effectiveness?  If you’re like most people, you might measure your marketing effectiveness by looking at your sales and profit numbers.  And that isn’t wrong.  It’s also not the only way to measure the long-term success of your marketing program.

Steve Jobs and his biography have been the topic in the news this week and one of the conversations inside of these interviews has been his decision to keep Apple a closed platform.  There was a time when just looking at Apple’s sales and profits numbers would have made him wrong.  Yet, in the long term, his marketing strategy of having a closed platform allowed for a smooth, effortless and seamless connection across multiple devices.   Jobs took a stand and focused his efforts on building an engaged and loyal customer following.  Without his dedication to his customer evangelists, his strategy would have failed miserably.

This is a great example that while dollars are one way to measure success – there are other ways and this is where measuring feedback either in the form of a survey or crowd sourcing project will give you some of that additional marketing contexts within which you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

You can measure customer engagement or loyalty as recommended by Gallup and Reicheld’s net promoter score.   Customer engagement and loyalty are infinitely more powerful predictors of profitability than what we’ve been used to. It’s easy to poo poo questions that measure a customer’s emotional attachment because they aren’t perceived as hard data.

But now that we know from all the extensive brain science research that every purchasing decision is, in fact, emotional — then shouldn’t we be measuring emotional attachment to our brand?

Customer engagement is also a wonderful tool for developing long-term brand strategies because it will show you where and how to differentiate your offer to your most profitable customers, inspire your target customers and connect in a way that builds relationships with them.

Here are the 11 Questions Outlined by the Gallup Customer Engagement Survey

  1. Overall, how satisfied are you with [Brand]?
  2. How likely are you to continue to choose/repurchase/repeat (if needed) [Brand]?
  3. How likely are you to recommend [Brand] to a friend/associate?
  4. [Brand] is a name I can always trust.
  5. [Brand] always delivers on what they promise.
  6. [Brand] always treats me fairly.
  7. If a problem arises, I can always count on [Brand] to reach a fair and satisfactory resolution.
  8. I feel proud to be a [Brand] [customer/shopper/user/owner].
  9. [Brand] always treats me with respect.
  10. [Brand] is the perfect [company/product/brand/store] for people like me.
  11. I can’t imagine a world without [Brand].

Ideas on How to Apply Customer Engagement to Your Feedback

There are obvious benefits to following the Gallup methods and licensing their process.  But if you don’t have the dollars for that, look at ways that you can apply the principles behind customer engagement to your own process.

One option is to create a basic matrix question using these 11 attributes.  It’s easy enough to insert into an existing survey or to simply run on its own.  For more detailed information on how to use customer engagement, you can read this article from Gallup that discusses the intricacies of measuring customer engagement.

What other ways are you measuring your marketing success?  Share your strategies in the comments below.

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Stay Needed—Marketing Market Research

Posted on October 19, 2011 by | 1 Comment

How do Honomichl top-50 companies attract their customers?

How do top marketing research companies market themselves?

In the age of free survey sites that let companies do their own traditional data gathering, the demands of specialization and of message cohesion have never been stronger.

Brand positioning is everything. When we change technology around the time we change our shoes, the question is not how well your research lines up with certain predetermined criteria of successful research but how your company defines that success, where your resources are focused, and why those dimensions are what make your market model the strongest. To put it bluntly, how do we justify our own value and stop that perception of ourselves as ‘middle men.’

Tom H.C. Anderson, founder and partner over at Anderson Analytics, is one of the many people pioneering what is called ‘text analytics’. One of the interesting things he’s said (and there are many) is that it seems more and more like specifying the domain of such analysis—this in contrast with the broader, large-data applications the techniques have been tending toward. Text analytics, a tool with some serious potential for revolutionizing (or at least proprietizing) market research, is important here precisely of its innovation. It cannot be done on a site like SurveyMonkey; it is, at least right now, disintermediation-proof. And that’s exactly what we need.

It should be no surprise, then, to see Anderson Analytics in a study by Leonard Murphy surveying the ten MR brands perceived to be the most innovative. There’s another lesson to be learned in this research, however. Anderson, a newer company, finds itself in the company of the likes of Nielsen, TNS, GfK, traditionally stellar firms with established methods. According to the study, Anderson’s text analysis methods might signal to consumers a commitment to values over and above baseline data-collection. It’s not just text analysis, but analysis itself, and the commitment to development of technological tools, that accounts for bridging the gap between traditional and risk-averse respondents.

But consider the other side, the customer. Consider what Jason Anderson over at Blizzard Inc. has to say in his 8 Things I Would Do if I Were a Market Researcher. His high-level advice concerns justifying our addition to his overhead (and, no, we need more than project management). He mentions bringing out really unique, interesting data streams, if that’s what we want to focus on, and especially something that takes account of the disparity between what those surveyed say and do. He mentions point-of-sale and multimodality as research he’s interested in hiring someone to bring to him. And yet he also mentions investments in technology, as well as technologists, people on staff to find new ways of understanding, modeling, and interpreting the initial customer’s world. These point to the same sort of things as Murphy’s survey, and yet, instead of a rousing acclaim of Anderson Analytics here, this Anderson reminds us about impact, about how the fanciest, most cutting-edge, laser-cool techniques mean nothing if they can’t get results. Specifically, he says that MR firms should market those results, working out the methods among themselves.

Where does this leave us? Promote someone to manage a new text analysis project? Not quite. The thing to take away is this—Stay Needed. It’s an old rule of business, but once freesourced sites make you obsolete (and yes, they will, even text analytics) there better be something waiting in the wings, something that works, something that’s yours, and something that’ll have companies drooling.

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How to Use Surveys to Generate Leads and Customers at Trade Shows

Posted on August 5, 2011 by | 2 Comments

So, you’re going to a trade show.  That usually involves sitting down and brainstorming ways to bring qualified leads to your booth and converting them into profitable customers.

Here is a quick check list that you can use to make sure that you’re covering all your bases to get the most customer conversations out of your trade show events.

One of the most obvious materials you will need for everything on this list is the trade show web site and list of attendees.  You’ll also want to be sure that you can get either a mailing list of the attendees or that you will be able to reach the attendees via email – either the show gives you this list or you give them the information that you’d like to send.

Focus on your sales and marketing goals.  The very first thing is to define what goals you’re after.  It doesn’t always have to be about gathering leads.   Here are a few sample objectives:

  • Get face to face time with the following clients that we only know via email.  You will need that attendee list or list of companies so that you can see if any of your customers will be there.  If you’re not sure, reach out to the ones that you know from the list.
  • Generate “x” number of qualified leads per day.  For this objective, you will need a clearly defined list of what a qualified customer is. Use your Survey Analytics platform to create a qualifying or profiling survey.  You can also use SurveySwipe to do this and funnel all your visitors into a research panel.
  • Schedule or deliver “x” number of demonstrations.
  • Find out what our biggest competitor will launch next year
Set a theme for the year.  One of my favorite strategies is to set a theme for a series of trade shows.  Find a theme that features what you are selling and combines it with something that’s important to your customers.  If you make your theme unexpected or extreme, people will stop to your booth just to SEE what’s going in.  One company that was in the medical industry chose a 100-yard dash as a theme.  Their trade show booth features HUGE pictures of runners crossing a finish line, their promotional items were running hats and water bottles and their sales message was around a new product that allowed doctors to cross the finish line and meet a medical records deadline for converting to software.  It was a HUGE hit because they were the only exhibitor that didn’t feature pictures of doctors and nurses and hospitals.

Reach out to as many customers before the show.  If you have the time, definitely send out a direct mail piece or invitation to customers or prospects that you want to meet.  Instead of sending thousands of mailings – target just those companies that will help you achieve your marketing goals.

This is a great opportunity to use a survey!  You can create a qualifying survey that gets attendees engaged by asking them qualifying questions that focus on the 5-7 key frustrations that they may have that your product or service can solve.  Think about working the survey questions like a quiz — people LOVE that.

Then, when they answer the last question of the survey and click “Finish” or “Submit” you send them to a customized landing page for the trade show that provides a mini report based on the responses that they might have given to the survey.  This would look like the Quiz answer page in a magazine and say things like “If you answered “c” to question #1 that means that you have the most common issue, be sure to stop at booth #123 and try our wonderful product created just for that problem.

Use Survey Analytics to deliver the survey.  When they complete the survey, use the “Finish Options” to send them to a landing page that goes directly to a special page that you created for that show.

Another idea is to have them PRINT the landing page and bring it to your booth for a prize.

Use the same survey at the booth and profile people who stop in.  After they complete the survey, give them one of your promotional items.  Keep those promotional items hidden and only give them to people who complete your survey.

Use the survey to drive your selling process.  This is ideal for companies who have new or inexperienced people working the booth.  All they have to do is follow the survey and use the survey results as talking points to guide the customer to the call to action — either sale or sale appointment.

Follow up with survey results from the show.  Take the results from the survey and write them up into a report and then share that report with everyone who came to your booth.

Make sure to write that report in a way that takes that prospect or customer through the areas that are important and how your product or service solves the problems that people in the survey had.

Bet you’ve never looked at surveys as a lead generation tool?!  But they really are so effective, so subtle and focused purely on what the customer needs.  Not only that, but the very act of taking customers through surveys at a trade show gives you the opportunity to engage them and gather important data that you can use later.

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Market Research About Tablets, iPads and Smart Phones Shows High Adoption Rates

Posted on June 29, 2011 by | 2 Comments

In my search for giving you something useful and worthwhile to read, I discovered some very interesting research stats on tablets and iPads.

It’s no surprise that these new devices have changed how we communicate – but they’ve also created a new experience for users; one that has actually changed their behavior, made them more open to advertising and resaerch as well as purchasing.

Check out some of these stats and see how you can take advantage of some of this revealing information.

The Power of the Tablet

  • A recent online survey found that 12% of today’s US online population currently owns or uses a tablet device and an incremental 11% intend to purchase a tablet device in the next 12 months. 
  • Currently only 4% of US households have a tablet.
  • Juniper research states that tablet sales will soar to 80 million units in 5 years.
  • The number of tablet users is projected to grow to 23% by early 2012-a group that represents an estimated 54 million people 87% of tablet users are accessing content and information.
  • 79% of app downloaders have paid for apps in the last 12 months; 26% of all apps downloaded are paid.
  • On average, those who have downloaded apps on tablets have spent $53 on apps in the past 12 months. In addition to iTunes, Amazon and Google, 29% of tablet users would prefer to buy apps from their cable company or internet provider and 25% would prefer to buy their apps directly from publishers.
  • 60% of tablet users are males; 48% are 18-34 years old 43% of tablet users have incomes in excess of $50,000 56% of tablet users who watch video watch full-length TV and 55% watch full-length movies.
  • More than 50% of tablet users say that tablets are ideal for researching products and making purchases.
  • Pew Research says that tablets are most popular for consumers aged 56 and younger.
  • Tablet users have most likely made multiple purchases: Tablet users are more likely than smartphone users to say they have made three to five, six to 10, and more than 10 online purchases in the last six months.


 

iPad Users

  • Sixty-five percent of them are male and 63% of them are younger than the age of 35.
  • iPad owners have positive response rates roughly double those of iPhone and overall connected device owners
  • iPad owners are more likely to make a purchase based on an ad
  • Nielsen research shows that 50% of both iPad and iPhone users earn $75,000 or more annually.  In contrast, about 30% of all mobile subscribers earn more than $75,000 annually.
  • 63% iPad users have paid to download an app. In addition, only 5% say they only download free apps, suggesting a high willingness in this group to pay for applications.
  • Apple’s iOS platform has nearly 38 million users, outreaching the Android platform by 59%

Smart phones and shopping experiences

  • According to a comScore study in March of 2011, 16.7 million U.S. mobile subscribers used location-based “check-in” services on their phones in March 2011, representing 7.1 percent of the entire mobile population. 12.7 million check-in users did so on a smartphone
  • 31% US smart phone owners who use their device for shopping frequently/often access promotional coupons in-store for in-store redemption.
  • Nearly 50% of respondents stated “awkward shopping experience” as the barrier that kept them from making purchases via smart phone device
  • Smart phone users haven’t downloaded any shopping apps in the last year.

What interestin stats have you seen about tablets, iPads and smart phones?  Share your resources with us!

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Hey Old Guys — Your Customers Expect Mobile Marketing

Posted on June 27, 2011 by | 7 Comments

push pull two men at opposite sides of doorSurvey Analytics’ Executive VP (and self-proclaimed old guy) has a fantastic article on Research Access that talks about mobile devices and how they are used by people over 40 and under 40.   At a recent client meeting, he asked the old guy how many apps they had and the young guys.  As it turns out the young folks had lots — like 50 or so and the old guys not nearly as many.  The old guys were using their smart phones more like phones and less like computers.

Do you want to be in business 20 years from now?

I’m not trying to be flip with this question.  It’s a valid question.  If you intend to be in busainess twenty years from now, then you have to be keeping pace with how the twenty-year-olds are making buying decisions.  Right now, the average 11 year old has at phone with a texting keyboard at the very least.  As they get older and become active on Facebook, they don’t even get an email – they just use their Facebook app.  This isn’t a trend — this is reality.

These kids will be your customers in a few years, and if you don’t have a way to interact with them via mobile device, you will not exist for them.  This isn’t conjecture — it’s demographics.  Unless of course, we experience an EM Pulse that wipes computers off the grid and then we’ll be back to sidewalk signs.  But until then, you will need to find ways of interacting with your customers using a mobile device.

How to use mobile apps and tools to engage your customers

If you have the kind of business that hasn’t attracted your customers to social media sites for business – you are not immune to the need for participating in mobile marketing.  Just for fun, I’ve decided to breakdown the traditional markting process and show you how you can use mobile marketing strategies and tools to grab those customers.

Market Research

Survey Analytics has a fantastic system that no one has been able to beat for mobile market research.  It starts with their powerful MicroPanel module (this isn’t mobile or required, but believe me – it will put your marketing on turbo).  Use MicroPanel to create a customer panel or community of customers and/or prospects.  Giving your customers the opportunity to participate in an advisory panel not only makes research easy – but engages your customers in a way that makes them more loyal and more profitable.

Now you are ready to introduce your customers to the SurveySwipe mobile app.  SurveySwipe is the ONLY market research mobile app that runs on EVERY mobile device platrorm.  SurveySwipe runs on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Microsoft!  You know what this means — no one is left out.  That’s a good thing.

Your customers will love SurveySwipe because they will earn points and rewards.  Anything from apps to Amazon points.  If you like — YOU can earn money by giving your customers the opportunity to participate in other surveys for which they are a good fit.

When you run mobile surveys with customers that are part of a panel — you can ask them one question or three questions at a time.  You can ask more if you like — but why would you — all of their answers are saved as part of their profile.  This means that the data is ALIVE!

Living data means that you can get into the database, ask it questions and it gives you the answers.  You save money and time because you may not have to run a survey – run a query instead.  As your customer panel answers more and more questions, you may run fewer surveys to get answers.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning

Do I even need to get into how powerful a tool mobile surveys can be in profiling, grouping and targeting customers?  Using the Survey Analytics platform to analyze your mobile data can uncover opportunities within segments that you may not have considered.  Whenever someone downloads the app to take your survey, they become part of your panel.  Not only that, but because they are participating from a mobile device, you KNOW that they are who they say they are — your panel has integrity and you know that you can trust the responses.

Taking quick surveys on mobile devices almost creates a conversation that encourages respondents to share psychographic information more readily.  The SurveySwipe app also allows respondents to upload pictures of products that they are using so that it’s almost like running a virtual focus group (ok – maybe a slight exaggeration on that one) but the idea of having relatively real time picture uploads of what your respondents are doing and the brands they are interacting with tells you something

Offering Development – Building the Marketing Mix

The four P’s have never been so powerful as when you are using mobile devices to develop your product, price, promotion and distribution using mobile apps.  Mobile apps and surveys can integrate with Facebook and that means that your customers can pass the survey on to their friends, who pass it on to their friends — yes viral surveys.  This not only builds your panel, but it gives you more data about the things that your customers want to see in your product or service.

This won’t make conjoint or TURF analysis go away, but it will allow you more on-demnd kinds of interactions with your customers.  The more you engage them and make your customers feel like they make a differene – the more they will value your company.

SurveySwipe can give you results in an hour or less — it’s not statistically valid right away — but it gives you research, data and a solid foundation upon which to build real resaerch to help you make better decisions.

If you haven’t considered using mobile apps as part of your market resaerch plan, then you really need to take a deeper look.  Head over to the SurveySwipe page and see what this app can do for you.

Does this sound like a hard sales pitch — don’t take it that way — I’ve been a Survey Analytics customer for over 6 years and have use this app for myself.  I’m blown away by the function, the customer experience and the response rate.  And this is why this article sounds the way it does.

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Researching Multimedia Content Using Online Surveys

Posted on February 7, 2011 by | 3 Comments

Multimedia has become a huge force in business culture, industry and education and therefore can play a critical part in online market research.  Practically any type of information we receive can be categorized as multimedia, from television, to magazines, to web pages, to movies, multimedia is a tremendous force in both informing and entertaining a global audience.

Use Online Research to Gather Feedback

Online research has an advantage over other methodologies in that it allows marketers to gather feedback on visual content, both static pictures and streaming video, typically at lower costs than alternative methodologies such as in-person interviews or focus groups.  In addition, the growth of high speed Internet access means more people can view visual content in a survey without the frustration of slow downloading times that could lead to higher incomplete rates.  Online surveys also allow for the volume of response needed to make statistical projections to a target audience, a benefit that is generally too costly to do with other methodologies.

Online surveys can be used to evaluate visual content for any of the following business situation:

 

  • Advertising testing
  • Package design
  • Logo recognition
  • Programming content evaluation
  • Measurement of brand variants
  • Product placement/retail display
  • Concept testing

Consider Security

When you’re measuring response to creative or copyrighted content, security and intellectual property is often an issue.  While there are many security features that can be used to safeguard highly sensitive company material.  There is nothing that can prevent respondents from taking a picture or video of what they see on screen and distributing it more broadly.  That said, security breaches don’t happen often and are typically associated with companies or products that get a lot of buzz.  Security is something to keep in mind particularly with new concept or advertising testing and balanced against the cost savings from an online methodology versus the impact of a potential security breach.

For static images, pictures can be encrypted so respondents cannot use a snag function or program to capture the picture.  To add another layer of security, the picture can be broken into pieces, much like a puzzle, and each piece encoded.  Video can be secured by allowing respondents to view only once and then have the video disabled.  Another alternative is to have respondents click on a link within the survey that serves up the video only once per respondent identification code.

Using Video in Your Online Survey

When it comes to image and video formats there are a variety of different methods to display images and videos in an online survey.  File formats most commonly used are ones that have the lightest footprint (small memory size) such as .avi , .mov, .mp4,. .mpg, .swf and .wmv.    Specific tools are able to handle specific file formats.  For example, Windows Media Player (.wmv) does not play an Apple file (.mov)   Image and video formats can be resource-intense and require the assistance of an IT professional.

Web-based studies offer researchers a wide variety of tools to improve research capabilities.  These improvements lead to more effective implementations of the research.

Advertising

Advertising and concept testing, and tracking are a few ways in which technology enables more effective online research.  In advertising testing respondents can be shown storyboards, rough cut ads, or fully finished ads depending on the business issue.  If an advertising or PR group within an organization has completed the boards and stored them on a digital format, then the research tool should be able to easily implement them.

To determine which advertising concept is the best alternative to take the full production (concept testing), respondents can be shown a series of still shots, usually six to ten images, with commentary on the ad provider either as captions beneath the pictures or as an audio overlay.  Respondents are asked basic questions to rate the appeal of the ad, their interest in the product or service as a result of the ad, and likelihood to purchase.  Respondents can also be asked to rank order the concepts.

Once an ad has aired on television, it can be tracked to assess how it is performing in market.  Respondents are shown either a series of stills that represent the ad or the ad itself and asked whether they recall seeing the ad and its impact on likelihood to purchase.  Most companies use a series of stills pulled from the finished ad with the brand name of the product or service masked to assess whether respondents link the advertising with the brand.

Package Design

Online surveys can be used to evaluate package design as well.  Respondents can be shown variations of package designs and asked to rank order their preferences. Images or videos must be stored in a digital format.  The digital format can be inserted into the research tool.

Programming and Presentations

Respondents can also evaluate short programming content through online research, i.e. news clips or show segments.  The respondents are first shown a video of the content and then asked a series of questions about various elements of the program.

The advantage that multimedia gives to online research is indescribable, as is the advantage it has given to our American culture, industry and education.

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Creative Customer Profiling Ideas for 2011

Posted on January 14, 2011 by | 1 Comment

There are really only two questions that every small business owner needs to answer:

1) Who is my ideal customer?

2) What’s important to them?

Once you’ve answered these — marketing should not only be easier, I promise it will be more fun and WAY cheaper than you think.

Creative Tips to Profile Your Ideal Customer

  1. Profile a real person. Find a customer you love working with and start your profile there.  Find out what magazines they read, what their hobbies are, the kind of music they like, etc.  It helps to start with a real person and work your way outward toward larger populations.
  2. Create a magazine cover for your ideal customer.  Go and get yourself a sketchbook or poster board.  Then go through magazines that your ideal customers read and pull out pictures, ads, bits of copy that resonate with what you’re offering.
  3. Pile of Files: Another of my favorite methods to profile customers is to literally walk over to a file cabinet and pull a customer file.  Look at it and put it on a pile.  Then pull another file and take a look at it.  Would you put it on the same pile as the first or a new pile.  Don’t think too much about it – just decide quickly – immediately.  Now go on to the next file and follow the same process.  You’ll find that you have intuitively created piles of customers that you feel belong together.  All you have to do is connect the dots as to why they are all together.
  4. Draw your customer’s experience. You don’t have to be an artist to do a great job of this.  Simply put yourself in your customer’s shoes and draw out how they might experience your product.  For a great example, take a look at the web site for one of my favorite books, Back of the Napkin. Draw out what their problems look like and then draw out your solution and the benefits.

I’ve decided to pull the last step out of the list and describe it separately.  Once you’ve profiled your customer, you’ll be ready to map out what they want, what you offer, the benefit and then ask yourself the most important question — What if we…. or what else can we….

I’ve pulled together an “Ideal Customer Worksheet” that you can use to start the profile process for yourself.

You can do this profiling process on your own or you can include your whole team.  The benefit to including your team will be that everyone in your organization will have input into the process and will be on the same page when it comes to creating new product or service offers for your customers.

Give this process a shot and let us know how it worked for you.

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