Market Research – The Lucrative Crystal Ball of Small Business Internet Marketing

If you are marketing your small business online, it is essential that you understand how to efficiently find customers who buy what you sell. Otherwise you will end up wasting a lot of time, money and effort on costly web design and web advertising and Internet Marketing that brings no results. You can do this with market research.

This intelligence about your customers will come in handy when creating a sales funnel or marketing campaign and will increase your results dramatically. So what exactly do you to learn about your customers?

You Learn Who your Customers Are

Once you research your market, you should start to understand demographics about the type of person who is most likely to buy your product. This is great information you can use when targeting your market.

You Learn What Your Customers Want

Market research allows you to understand what your customers want out of your products and services. This way you always maximize your revenue by coming up with products and services that that keep you connected with the desires, passions and needs and customers and clients.

You Learn How Customers are Finding You

When selling online, it is important to learn how customers are finding you so you can concentrate your promotional efforts on the marketing that produces the best results.

This includes researching keywords your customers use and researching the places your customers are most likely to hang out online and offline. Once you learn these things, you can use this information to advertise at the places your customer are hanging out.

Market research saves you an immeasurable amount of time and money because it allows you see what works in the first place. Once you understand more about your customers and your audience, you don’t have to spend hundred to thousands of dollars testing since you know what is effective.

Entire multi-million dollar businesses have been built on the concept of market research. This research helps you predict your customer’s future buying habits and this is why market research is the crystal ball of your small business.

In the news today all you hear about are people loosing their jobs, stock market and real estate crashes and now….you want to start your own business?  Well, at least you’re not just waiting around for something to happen. 

Being proactive in times like this is probably a testament of the natural innate human will to survive. There is nothing like some pressure and stress to see what you’re really made of.  Being proactive in and of itself is not going to get you extremely far.  You also have to plan. See lack of planning is what got most of us into this mess in the first place.

What is being said here is not meant to diminish the overall importance of action. Action is probably valued to account for around 70% of the success equation. The part that a lot of people fail to take into account, however, is the importance of the remaining 30%. This 30% can be the most crucial in terms of success or failure.

This is true in the “natural world” as well. If a predator fails to plan his attack, including focusing in on a select prey, knowing his/her own strengths, elemental or environmental advantages like blending in with the surroundings or being down wind, and then attacking at-just-the-right moment then this could mean the difference between feasting for the group for days or …starvation because of missed opportunity. No matter what amount of effort goes into something, if the end result is futile then wasn’t all that action….wasted? 

Planning helps us to deal with this change and to effectively work within this dynamic.  Basically, the message that’s trying to be conveyed here is…Do you have a plan. If not then let’s at least create a simple one here that can be used as a guideline. This can be modified and built upon as one sees necessary.

Step 1 – Summarize your core advantages over your competitors. What products or services do you offer and why should people buy them from you? Do you have a business plan?  Do you know what you’re going to be doing?  You should have this blueprinted and written down somewhere. 

Step 2 – Consider your target market and how you will reach them.  Are you going to advertise on the web, radio, tv or in print? Are you going door to door? Are you advertising at all?  What are your competitors doing?  Are they successful?  What does it cost to get started?  What’s your back up plan if it fails? You have to get the word out. Without a customer base you don’t have a business.

Step 3 – Make some specific realistic goals and include yearly monetary objectives that can be broken down further (monthly, etc). You should also consider how much you need to sell in order to meet these goals. 

Step 4 – Think about and plan your daily activities – make certain that these daily activities are all income producing and are inline with your goal objectives. Follow this daily activity plan. This is so that when you actually start doing the work you will know that what you are working towards will most likely happen. You can then feel confident that you WILL ultimately reach your goals. This minimizes the “let’s see what happens” type of thinking. 

Step 5 – Practice your pitch, learn to overcome common objections, and once you gain a customer make a follow up plan.

Step 6 – Customer Follow up – think about maintaining a customer list that you can market to again for more and easier profits. A customer that has bought from you is more likely to buy from you again if they know you and like you. 

These are just 6 steps that you can expound on and implement to make certain that you start off on the right path. There is so much more that you can do but this should give you enough to get the brain juices flowing and get you off on the right path. Planning is simply laying down the foundation for doing something efficiently and effectively.  To properly affect your foray into the entrepreneurial world, similar thinking should be taking place. Don’t just run, run, run. Not until you have a game plan…then by all means, go for it. 

It has been said that every journey starts with the first step, but don’t take the first step unless you know that you’re headed in the right direction. The plan is the pre-step. Plan your attack…then attack.