The Power of Marketing Research
By Ron Abbott
It’s a big, bad market out there. There are hundreds and thousands
of forces at work, good and bad, affecting the success of your
business. If you aren’t aware and understand these forces success
will be more difficult.
It is crucial to research and analyze your market before you waste
money on advertising. Many business owners jump right into a new
market with a new product without having done the most basic
marketing research. This lack of preparation leads to bad decisions
and great personal distress.
Essentially, conducting marketing research is about gathering as
much information as you need to make good decisions for your
business. It’s the systematic accumulation, recording, and analysis
of data relevant to marketing your product or service.
Performing your own market research is not difficult and does not
need to be costly. You can find a great deal of valuable research
just by keeping your eyes and ears open. When you talk with a client
or supplier you conducting marketing research. Likewise, when you
are browsing the internet, a newspaper, or watching TV you can be
doing marketing research.
Research should be something you do every day to move your marketing
strategy forward. Good marketing research relies on these three
areas: the customer, the competition, and the market environment.
These three are inseparable when you make marketing decisions.
Collect data on all three constantly and analyze their influences on
your strategy through your tactics.
Conducting interviews and surveys to see how your target market
thinks and feels is an excellent way to gain marketing intelligence.
A single piece of marketing research can make a world of difference.
A healthy, well maintained database is a valuable asset to any
business. Collecting the names and information of your customers and
prospects is a worthwhile use of your time and energy.
Without a solid database marketing plan in place you will always
struggle for sale and profits. It’s that simple.
The lifeblood of your operations are your clients and prospects.
If you don’t use your database to keep in touch with them, how are
they going to know how you can benefit their lives?
Database Marketing is a popular way to gather and store specific
information about your visitors, clients or prospects. Stored in a
database software program, the useful information is then used in
advertising and marketing efforts, mainly to save time and money by
targeting your promotional efforts to your best prospects or
customers.
The type of information you collect for your database depends upon
the products and services you offer. Generally, the higher the
selling price, the more information you would gather and use. A
solid foundation generally begins with contact and purchase
information and birth date. Once harvested, it’s time to put the
information into action. And here are some of the top database
marketing techniques that do just that.
1. Appended Data - More in-depth data may be desired for
one-on-one relationships with clients, people can append data to
name and address files, seeking out income, age, home value, length
of residence, number of children and over 30 other bits of info. The
resulting data is then used in all types of well targeted marketing
campaigns. Appended data can be done in-house or outsourced with
larger companies that have more complete databases.
2. Website Data – Some websites offer a means to gather their own
data, too, through the use of cookies that gather information from
website visitors. This marketing method is popular for allowing
Internet marketers a means to learn more about who visited their
sites, which pages they searched and for how long, and many other
site statistics. These are then used for their product and service
creation, packaging and pricing.
3. Email Communications & Tracking – Email surveys, customer reply
forms and shipping documents that use tracking numbers and share
them with the clients are excellent examples of database marketers
in action. By using this type of tracking, companies can improve
their customer-client relationships,
resulting in increased sales and customer retention, and earn more
about their clients in the process for future sales and retention
efforts.
In summary, by using Database Marketing and techniques tailored to
fit your own products and services, you can gather and store
targeted information about your visitors, clients or prospects. And
you can save time and money by targeting your promotional efforts to
your best prospects or customers with the information.
