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Understanding Why Market Research is Important

Brian — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:21:07 +0000

For any organization that wants to offer products or services that are highly focused and well targeted market research is important. Business decisions based on good market research can minimise risk and pay dividends. By making market research part and parcel of the business process and conducting market research throughout the life cycle of a product or service market research will bring the following benefits:-

Market research will help you better communicate – Your current customers experiences are a valuable information source, not only will they allow you to gauge how well you currently meet their expectations they can also tell you where you are getting things right and more importantly where you are getting things wrong. By consulting with the customer you not only show them that you care but the guesswork is taken out of customer services.
Market research helps you identify opportunities – If a new service is planned and you want to know the attitudes people have then market research can help, not only by evaluating the potential for the new idea, but also by identify the areas where a marketing message needs to be fine tuned.
Market research will minimise risk – Market research can identifying what is needed for a new service and product and ensure that the development of a product matches demand.
Market research creates benchmarks and helps you measure your progress – Unless you measure you will not be able to properly gauge how well your business is performing. Preliminary research may be able to identify problems in the service you intend to offer or in your product, regular market research will show if progress is being made and, if positive, will help motivate a team.

Market research brings considerable benefits and it is perhaps surprising how few businesses invest sufficient resources to gather good intelligence that will help them improve business. Many may think that market research takes too much time and effort but that is just not the case anymore as through the power of the Internet online survey software is readily available and vital market research data can now be gathered in a quick, simple and cost effective manner.

Simple Tips On Inexpensive Web Design And Marketing

Brian — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:43:10 +0000

The following are some suggestions for those researching efficient web design and marketing:

- Selling Something Direct? Use A Simple Means Of Purchase. An intermediary service like PayPal is perfectly good to begin with. If you have just a few products, their HTML buttons are a good way to test demand. When you make over $1000 a month, acquire your own merchant account.

– Beware The Latest $49/$97/$149 Software. There are a lot of internet marketers who’ve realised that a good way of making cash on the web is to hustle other web entrepreneurs, as there are thousands of them. This usually takes the form of packaging up, in a service or software, a wheeze that was novel six months ago. By the time Joe WebMaestro gets wind of it, it’s on the way out. Study it carefully before plonking down money for it. Look for independent reviews.

– Be First With A New, Popular Good (or a smarter second). MySpace wasn’t the first social networking site, but they did it better. They designed it to be viral. Members could compete to get ‘friends’, and everyone wants new friends, right? Users could put anything they wanted online, even if it looked cr*ppy. Censorship was minimal. Result: Huge popularity, without needing the search engines.

– Beware Of The Guru! There are hordes of semi-famous marketers and their fans out there selling videos, books and courses on how to earn lolly in internet marketing. They are marketing advice on how to do marketing! Nice work if you can get it. The best advice you can get about web marketing is on webmaster discussion boards. Even then, you need to use your own personal noise filter to winnow out the gems from the dross.

– Use A Popular, Inexpensive Web Host. Here are a few filtering criteria: Google PageRank of at least 5. Send them an email or two. See how long it takes to receive a response. They should have a forum (another indication of popularity and customer support). Umpteen features offered (MySQL databases, Cpanel, Fantastico). Recent positive reviews in webmaster message boards. Offers Linux servers (Windows costs more, and offers less). Fee per month can be as little as $10, and still have all the features above.

– Webhost Features. Most geeks prefer Unix. It’s been around longer, and is more stable. Web hosts offering Unix variants like Linux have always been less expensive. They also seem to offer a good deal more of toys. I need SSI (Server Side Includes), SSH (secure Telnet), 10 MySQL databases, Cpanel, PHPMyAdmin and a UK IP number. And you can get this for $15 a month. Things like MySQL databases, Cpanel and SSH access are real stumbling points for many web hosts. If they’re generous with these, you’ve found a rare jewel.

– Submit To The Top Web Directories, like Yahoo and DMOZ, but don’t spend much time or money. Only half a dozen are worth a damn for SEO purposes. You will only get an occasional visitor from these.

– Use Freelances For Jobs You Lack The Skills For. Is your budget tight? Try scriptlance.com or rentacoder.com. The key to acquiring the best work is to a) be as specific as possible as to what you want and b) write your specification in simple, concise terms. Your project will likely be done by somebody who’s native language is not English. Most clients give an inexact specification and receive work they’re displeased with. Pick somebody who’s had a lot of favourable reviews recently. Pay in stages. Use the freelance site’s escrow facility. Don’t expect to acquire more than you coughed up for, and don’t be a cheapskate; if somebody does an effective job, they deserve a bonus, not carping.

I hope these few handy tips will help you in getting handy web design and marketing done simply.

About the author: N. Svengali is an author for web site design consultant UK and UK consolidation loans internet sites in London.

How Businesses Market Themselves

Brian — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:35:27 +0000

Companies need to get their names out there. You can have a well marketed, high quality product, but if people don’t trust your company then it will be much harder to sell them your products. This is why companies like Nike or Worden Telechart work so hard to protect their brands. Business like these can put millions of dollars towards making themselves notable by a small graphic or symbol. That image tells people that the product they are purchasing is of a great quality and it can be trusted to do what it says it does. It is rational that a company doesn’t want manufacturers getting in the way of their strong brand because then people might see the product as less valuable.

That leads to the question about why all companies don’t establish a brand. Well there are a few reasons for this. To begin, creating a brand can be prohibitively costly. It can cost millions of dollars of investment to establish even a modestly recognizable brand. That brand is fragile and can be destroyed by a few stupid mistakes or poor products. Also, not every business wants a brand attached to their products. For example if a company makes a low-quality product they don’t want people to think they are going to buy another junk product from that company. Why would you want to build a brand in that case? Simply you wouldn’t.

Another great type of companies that like to build their brands are market investing companies. That type of company usually has a strong brand for the reason that that is how they make money, through their reputation. People allow investing companies to handle their money because they have had strong returns in the past. If companies didn’t have this type of reputation they could just do it alone with some simple stock trading software.

Anyway you slice it, branding is important to many companies. It is the main way a company can market the brand they control, and thus sell the products to make their revenues. That is why the law protects company brands so strongly.

SEO – Most powerful marketing tool?

Doug — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 22:19:08 +0000

Results of a new poll have suggested that search engine optimization (seo) will take first place in the ever-growing industry of marketing. The survey was conducted among 400 marketers and about a third of the people said that search engine optimization would be their preferred mode of marketing business online. Pay per click advertising was not that far behind as 26% of the people doing the survey voted for it.

The research carried out elaborates on these findings and displays that marketers realize the strength and potential of online Internet optimization. The pure financial potential of business through the internet cannot be measured.

Advertising online has never been so valued and search engine optimization can change a businesses performance. SEO is surely set to be one of the most influential forms of advertising and marketing.