Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

5 Steps to Making Market Research Part of Your Product Offering

Posted on August 18, 2011 by | 1 Comment

I recently ran into a terrific article by Christine Brown from Branding Marketing about Marketing your Market Research.  Her main observation is that companies cut market research budgets because they see it as a luxury.  But if they were able to use that research in a variety of ways —  call it recycling or re-purposing — they might be able to justify those projects.

She goes on to give several examples that inlcude:

 Other Ways to Use Market Research as Part of Your Offering
Christine’s article got me thinking that many businesses see market research as an expense rather than a revenue generator,  There is an opportunity to “spin” your research projects or design them in such a way that they provide industry insights and information that your customers may want to gain access to.
If you participate in industrial markets that include highly engineered technical products or instruments, you will find profound gaps in information about what customers value.
  1. Create a separate brand and URL for the information and research service that you will provide — literally treat it as a separate product line.
  2. Start a subscription section of your web site.  You can use WordPress  and their Wishlist membership plugin to create a subscription function that allows you to take payments and distribute information based on membership or subscription level.
  3. Run YOUR research and use some of your data for your own decision making and the other data for re-sale to the industry.
  4. Offer to run surveys for customers or competitors in your industry. This might freak out your management, but it’s simply called “contract manufacturing”  it happens in manufacturing all the time — companies who have tools and capabilities built into their infrastructure will make another company’s product just to keep the equipment running — it’s selling unused time and space.
  5. Run regular tracking surveys and sell the reports and data.  Simply include general market and industry question in your surveys and run them regularly and then sell the results.  One area of research that is always difficult to get for specific industrial segments is market share information.  By simply asking a few questions, you can generate this valuable data and sell it.
Don’t let budget cuts eat away at the information that your company and industry need.  Try these ways of engaging your management team in the research and creating products and services around research to get it to pay for itself.

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Market Research Around the Web

Posted on August 15, 2011 by | 1 Comment

There have been a number of exciting developments around the web that I thought I’d share with you this week:

Market Research University Recordings are Available

Over at Research Access, they held an all day program called  Market Research University – an all-day, online market research training session run by Kathryn Korostoff of Research Rockstar. The event took place entirely on Twitter; you may have followed along with the hashtag #MRXU.

In case you weren’t able to attend, though, Kathryn and the participating “professors” were gracious enough to have posted some additional resources from the training session:

  • Diane Hagglund, of Dimensional Research, has shared fantastic B2B project management insights here: LINK.
  • Michaela Mora, of Relevant Insights, has shared a generous post on her market research project management tips: LINK
  • Greg Timpany has provided a script of his tweets, here: LINK.
Be sure to avail yourselves of their expertise! This is terrific material, and could be of use to any market research professional.
While you’re at it, you may also want to take a look at another recent post from MRXU contributor Michaela Mora, entitled, “Survey Tools Race to Improve User Experience.” It offers a great look at how online research tools are making major enhancements to leverage developments in new technology (including text selection, heat maps, etc.).
GameAccess.com Gamification Blog Launched
There is a new blog in town that is part of the Survey Analytics family called “Game Access” edited by Betty Adamou.
If you’ve heard the word “Gameification” and wondered what it’s all about, then you’ll want to become a regular reader.  The idea is that people are enthralled and engaged by video games primarily because they challenge us, provide immediate feedback and are something WE CHOOSE rather than some task that is thrust upon us.
There is a trend and a movement toward incorporating elements of game play into our real lives that both engage us and make us more productive.
In the latest article, Andrew Jeavons , the executive VP of Survey Analytics discusses the power of game play.

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The 5 Myths of Selling to Small Business

Posted on July 19, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Instead of telling you HOW to do research, today, I’m going to give you the results from some research.

Ivy Worldwide conducted a survey of small- and medium-sized business owners/operators this year through a network of independent bloggers to determine what factors influence their purchasing decisions.

The survey has identified five misconceptions that most marketers have when selling their product or services to SMBs.  The goal is to help marketers make their messages more effective so they can tap the viable market that is SMB.

Ivy worldwide ~ SMB purchasing decisions survey

Myth 1: Communication on the C-Level is effective.

Though positioning, sales relationships and ROI is important, most SMBs still give more importance on reviews from trusted sources, quality promises and enhanced features.

Based on the survey, businesses said a detailed review from a trusted source that illustrated the pros and cons of the product/service is they highest factor they consider before getting on board.

Marketers should, therefore, make use of the correct channels that SMBs find to be a reliable source of information.  Reliable sources can be third party organizations, news source or key opinion leaders in the industry.

Myth 2: It’s always good to go green.

The truth is environmentally friendly messages is not really that important for SMBs.  In fact, they ranked being green second to the last among factors that will affect their purchase of a product/service.

Unless your product has specific and discrete environmental benefits, don’t jump on this trend green trend.  Since being green is not top-of-mind for SMB purchasers, there is really no point to put too much effort in the trend.

Myth 3: Tried and tested marketing efforts should be employed.

The survey showed that advertising and other traditional media sources ranked far below web forums and independent bloggers as key sources of product and service information.

The trick here is to ensure that you’re engaging your audiences via the communications channels that they actually use.   New marketing can be coursed through niche blogs or social networking sites.  Not only are they popular these generation, but they are also more cost-effective the traditional advertising.

Myth 4: All sales should be treated the same.

For smaller purchase amounts, less effort is required from the seller as they are generally made on a need basis and are rather immediate.  Large purchases, on the other hand, require more research (i.e. comparing prices, test -driving the product, reading reviews and asking for recommendations)

Also, for small purchases, SMBs prefer that products that they can be picked up from a nearby location to allow person-to-person support on the product.

The key is that marketers know how your customers are buying and which channels they prefer.

Myth 5: Transactions are done after payments are received.

For SMB purchasers, service and support terms are more important than payment terms. In fact, service and support are key to the final decision and should be marketed as assertively as product benefits themselves.

SMBs would like to be assured that they can rely on someone in case there is product/service defect.  Be a smart marketer and don’t miss the opportunity to tout service and support terms to your customers.

The Real Deal

It’s always easy to get complacent and put undue confidence in trends, buzzwords and mass-marketing techniques.  Marketers should fight complacency and instead strive for a true understanding of what compels SMB owner/operators to purchase their product.

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How to Use Market Research for SEO Strategy

Posted on April 13, 2011 by | 7 Comments

I ran across this question today — “Is market research important to SEO strategy?”

I’m familiar with the idea of doing RESEARCH – keyword research, industry research, even customer research, in order to come up with SEO insights.  But I really didn’t feel like I understood the role of market research within SEO strategy.

As it turns out a series of Focus.com experts had this one covered. Here are some of their responses:

Stan Sweeney: Qualitative researchers gathers the emotional behavior of a brand. Qualitative is more leading than large research samples. But, it takes a brand pro to listen to emotional responses.

Larry MacDonald: Market research is critical in SEO. Given that Google wants to present the most appropriate site in response to a search query, how can you optimize a site if you don’t know what people value find useful? Once you have gathered primary research, you can make content changes to reflect the preferences you have discovered

Marce Colucci: Market research as it pertains to SEO, is the step you must take BEFORE you establish your website and start doing SEO. It will determine what services/products you offer and how you will promote those services/products to the market. SEO is a methodical way of then getting those products and services known by your target market. SEO is very much about choosing the right keywords that your market will be searching for, and hence get your site in front of them more often than your competitors’ sites. The research required for a successul SEO strategy, involves researching what words and phrases most link your products and services to the searches that your target market will be conducting using Google, Yahoo and all the other search engines.

Any SEO experts out there?  What role does market research play in putting together a killer SEO strategy?

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